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While censorship in Brazil has been relaxed, there remains uncertainty as to the exact limits of what is permissible. The condition of the press is assessed in light of the country's social & economic history over the past fifteen years, which is a record of labor exploitation, extreme concentration of wealth, pervasive illiteracy, & a multiplicity of political parties which generally lack both a program & a social base. The real purpose of Brazil's military 'revolution' in 1964 was to demobilize the masses & consolidate the positions of the old elite. Within that framework, controls over cultural life became an adjunct of the government's reactionary policy. The principal issues today appear to be the future of the regime & the human & social costs of its development model. These topics are now being discussed, but not in an atmosphere of complete freedom. S. Karganovic.

For 300 years, from the beginning of the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade—the forced migration of Africans to work as slaves on the plantations and in the mines of British, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean—was carried on legally, and on an everincreasing scale, by the merchants of most Western European countries and their colonial counterparts, aided and abetted by African middlemen. On. 25 March 1807, however, after a lengthy struggle, inside and outside Parliament, it was declared illegal for British subjects (and at this point during the Napoleonic Wars at least half the trade was in British hands) to trade in slaves after 1 May 1808. During the previous twenty years there had been a marked growth of intellectual and moral revulsion against the trade (and, in particular, the horrors of the 'middle passage') and changing economic conditions, which to some extent reduced the importance to the British economy of the West Indian colonies for whom the trade was a major lifeline and created new interest groups unconnected with and even hostile to them, facilitated its abolition.

The importance of the years of political and social upheaval immediately following the end of the Second World War and coinciding with the beginnings of the Cold War, that is to say, the period from 1944 or 1945 to 1948 or 1949, for the history of Europe (East and West), the Near and Middle East, Asia (Japan, China, South and East Asia), even Africa (certainly South Africa) in the second half of the twentieth century has long been generally recognised. In recent years historians of the United States, which had not, of course, been a theatre of war and which alone among the major belligerents emerged from the Second World War stronger and more prosperous, have begun to focus attention on the political, social and ideological conflict there in the postwar period – and the long term significance for the United States of the basis on which it was resolved. In contrast, except for Argentina, where Perón's rise to power has always attracted the interest of historians, the immediate postwar years in Latin America, which had been relatively untouched by, and had played a relatively minor role in, the Second World War, remain to a large extent neglected. It is our view that these years constituted a critical conjuncture in the political and social history of Latin America just as they did for much of the rest of the world. In a forthcoming collection of case studies, which we are currently editing, the main features of the immediate postwar period in Latin America, and especially the role played by labour and the Left, will be explored in some detail, country by country.1In this article, somewhat speculative and intentionally polemical, we present the broad outlines of our thesis.