This book brings together world-renowned experts and rising scholars to provide a collection of chapters examining the long-term impact of historical events on modern-day economic and political developments in Latin America. It uses a novel approach, stressing empirical contributions and state-of-the-art empirical methods for causal identification. Contributing authors apply these cutting-edge tools to their topics of expertise, giving readers a compendium of frontier research in the region. Important questions of colonialism, migration, elites, land tenure, corruption, and conflict are examined and discussed in an approachable style. The book features a conclusion from Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University. 

This book is critical reader for scholars and students of economic history, political science, political economy, development studies, and Latin American, and Caribbean studies.

Felipe Valencia Caicedo is Assistant Professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and a Research Affiliate of CEPR. His primary research interests are in economic history, development economics, and economic growth, with an emphasis on Latin America.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Latin American economic history in the light of the recent economic cycles.- Chapter 3: The Making of Mexico: The Political Economy of Conquest and Independence.- Chapter 4: Checks and Balances in the Colonial Government of Peru: Evidence from Office Prices.- Chapter 5: Attached once, attached forever: The persistent effects of concertaje in Ecuador.- Chapter 6: Public Education and Indigenous People in Bolivia, 1880s-1950s.- Chapter 7: The Age of Mass Migration in Argentina: Social Mobility, Effects on Growth and Selection Patterns.- Chapter 8: European Immigration and Agricultural Productivity in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1898-1920.- Chapter 9: Modernizing Elites in Latin America: Social-network Evidence from the Emergence of Banking in Antioquia.- Chapter 10: Colombia: Democratic but Violent?.- Chapter 11: Political Conflict and Economic Growth in Post-Independence Venezuela.- Chapter 12: The Plantation Economy of Surinam in the 18th Century.- Chapter13: The Legacy of the Pinochet Regime.- Chapter 14: Missionaries and Soldiers in the Forging of Modern Paraguay.- Chapter 15: Uruguay: the Rise of a Monocentric Economy.- Chapter 16: The Lasting Development Impacts of El Salvadors 1980 Land Reform.- Chapter 17: Global Firms and Local Development.- Chapter 18: Protestant Doctrinal Heterodoxy and Heterogeneity in Guatemala.- Chapter 19: The Expansion of Public Education in Puerto Rico after 1900.- Chapter 20: Conclusion: Historical Persistence, Possibilism and Utopias in Latin America and the Caribbean.