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Given the historic role of cities in Latin America as an instrument for appropriating territory and for ordering society, one may wonder why more attention is not paid to the Latin Americans' own vision of the city. We are sometimes asked to believe that only in the 1940s did the urban phenomenon loom in their world and that our knowledge of it comes from foreign demographers and anthropologists. Colonial sources like Solórzano and theRecopilación, however, demonstrate that the IberoCatholic political tradition gives central importance to the organizational and paradigmatic functions of the urban unit. After independence, to be sure, this tradition was eclipsed by the 'ruralization' of Latin American societies as urban, bureaucratic structures decayed and power flowed to the agrarian domain. At this time also, intellectual horizons opened to offer release from scholastic constraints, encouraging the intelligentsia to make eclectic, sometimes euphoric assessments of their new nations' future potential. Of thesepensadoresSarmiento almost alone dealt directly with the city's role in nation building. Yet his very plea that the city — whether Buenos Aires or a new 'Argirópolis' — assume 'modernizing' or 'developmental'functions reverts to the old Mediterranean notion that the city (civitas) is one with 'civilization'. For this Alberdi attacked him, reminding Sarmiento that in Argentina town and country, civilization and barbarism, were not disjoined but fused in a single society and polity.

Developing a line of thought from an earlier essay (Morse, 1973: II, 11-55), this paper examines some points of departure for a comparative analysis of urbanization in Latin America and the United States during the nineteenth century. Two assumptions guide the inquiry: first, that the "external dependency" thesis so frequently invoked to explain Latin American urban development easily leads to dogmatism; second, that geoeconomic factors must be perceived as interacting with those of the sociopolitical order.To set broad guidelines for our effort we might construe the economic and institutional development of the United States and Latin America along the lines of two tensions or counterpoints.United States.Here the North and West with their commercial agriculture, trading energies, and industrialization faced the commercially and financially dependent South, its socioeconomic organization conditioned by the plantation system, slavery, and export agriculture.

This paper finds its point of departure in population figures for 8 Latin American countries and 61 cities during the period 1750 to 1920 (Tables 2–9, pp. 435–43). This span is a convenient one for the study of Latin American urban development. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, population statistics, at least those available from printed sources, become sparse and unreliable, and one begins to get totals of householders rather than head counts. Moreover, the wide swings in current estimates of regional populations for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries make relative urbanization rates problematical even when one has good data for towns. For the time being, the functional scale for urban places proposed by Hardoy and Aranovich (1969; 1970) seems a more appropriate index for the Hapsburg and early Bourbon periods than a purely quantitative one. After 1920, when more frequent and modern national censuses facilitate data collection, a new era in Latin American urban development commences, marked by economic nationalism, broadened political participation, centralized economic planning, import substitution, the politicoeconomic ascendancy of the United States, and massive internal migrations.