The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century

by E. Bradford Burns

Book Overview

From the Preface by Bradford Burns: If this essay succeeds, it will open an interpretive window providing a different perspective of Latin America's recent past. At first glance, the view might seem to be of the conventional landscape of modernization, but I hope a steady gaze will reveal it to be far vaster and more complex. For one thing, rather than enumerating the benefits accruing to Latin America as modernization became a dominant feature of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520050789
• ISBN13: 9780520050785
• Release Date: December 1983
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

The Pitfalls of Modernization According to E. Bradford Burns

E. Bradford Burns' The Poverty of Progress is a complex analysis of the degree of beneficence that modernization had upon nineteenth-century Latin America. Burns attempts to provide a novel perspective that will spark a reassessment of the common view that Latin America flourished with the implementation of the European ideals of progress, urbanization, and industrialization. With his claim that not all parts of Latin American society were in favor of the changes induced by modernization, Burns asserts his view that because progress benefited the elite minority while crippling the folk majority, modernization was ultimately a pitfall for Latin America. Due to the intricacy of Burns' argument and the informative information he provides, his Poverty of Progress successfully justifies a mandate for a reinterpretation and questioning of the traditional association of modernization with better living standards. Burns presents his argument in an organized fashion that builds the scenario of the cultural conflict. One should note that early in the first chapter, Burns shows his belief that the problems associated with modernization were due to a cultural conflict rather than a class struggle. With this in mind, Burns begins by discussing the rift between the modernizing elites, who associated progress with capitalism, and the folk, who felt threatened by the capitalist system as it opposed their old, entrenched traditions of harmony and cooperation. The capitalist ideals of individuality and competition clashed with the folk ideals causing the cultural conflict that Burns so articulately explains. He covers the goals of the elite minority which were routed in Spencerian and Darwinian evolution, Positivism, and the Enlightenment, and with these ideologies, the elites pushed for aspects of modernization such as industrialization which came at the expense of the folk majority. With his explanation of the cultural conflict and the aims of the elites, Burns then explores the majority's opposition to modernization with a discussion of the intellectuals, patriarchs, and folk. Here, one begins to understand why modernization was not entirely a beneficial development for Latin America. Burns mentions that intellectual elites began to notice the problems of modernization such as the growing dependence upon foreign investors who took control of Latin America's infrastructure. Intellectuals also pointed to the burdens of agrarian mismanagement that plagued economic conditions for the masses. Large land plots were increasingly controlled by a limited number of landlords who used the land inefficiently to produce export commodities, and economic conditions worsened for the masses as Indian, peasant, and church lands were confiscated. The masses also suffered since food was produced for export rather than for the nourishment of the country. Patriarchs hesitated to modernize as well because the new capitalist incentives for expanded agrarian production threate