Economic Factors and Stratification in Colonial Spanish America with Special Regard to Elites
Year: 1983
Type: article
Abstract: D URING the past fifteen years, research in colonial Latin American social history has increased dramatically. Since this author's 1967 publication of a short, impressionistic survey of race mixture and acculturation in Latin America, the increase in the use of empirical data to study the evolution of Spanish American social history in particular has been impressive.' Still, historical areas and eras, and a good deal of relevant data, remain untapped. Analytical and theoretical studies have advanced much more slowly than have those employing quantitative data. Marxist and non-Marxist students who have tried to apply crude feudal, semifeudal, and capitalist models to complex social realities have obstructed rather than facilitated analysis.2 My own study, which said that the regimen de castas resulted from the transfer and imposition of the hierarchic, estate-based, corporative society of medieval Castile ... upon a multiracial, colonial situation, was criticized by anthropologist John K. Chance and historian William B. Taylor for being simplistic and for underrating the importance of economic factors. In their case study of Oaxaca in 1792, they advocated
Author: Magnus Mörner
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2322699969