The Latin American economies, once among the most productive in the world, were already falling behind the advancing economies of the North Atlantic by 1800. A century later, nearly all were "underdeveloped." In the twentieth century, most grew respectably but none managed to catch up. What explains these trends? How important were Latin America's changing relations with the evolving global economy? What hypotheses should be rejected or modified? The fifteen essays in this volume apply the methods of the New Economic History to the history of the Latin American economies since 1800. The authors combine the historian's sensitivity to context and contingency with modern or "neoclassical" economic theory and quantitative methods.