The formation of modern nations in the Americas (1860–1929)

Railroad construction — it connected interior farms, mines and ranches to ports for export, triggering industrial growth and urbanization.

Foreign economic control over a country that is politically independent — the country rules itself, but outsiders own its key industries.

Relying on other countries for capital, markets and manufactured goods, often locking an economy into supplying cheap raw materials.

Over 33,000 km — mostly built and owned by British companies.

Porfirio Diaz — he welcomed huge foreign investment in railroads and mining, producing export growth alongside deep rural poverty and elite wealth concentration.

Italians/Spaniards (Argentina, Brazil, USA), Eastern European Jews (USA), Chinese labourers (USA railroads/mines, Peru, Cuba), Japanese migrants (Brazil, Peru, US West Coast).

It banned nearly all Chinese immigration to the USA; it reveals that migration policy reflected racial hierarchies, not just labour demand.

A military campaign that used force to clear Mapuche and other Indigenous peoples from Pampas land wanted for European settlement and export farming.

Land declared "empty" -> Indigenous peoples forced out (often by military campaigns) -> communal land fenced into private export farms -> Indigenous communities marginalized onto poorer land.

Modernization view: foreign capital built real infrastructure and raised national income. Dependency view: profits left the country, economies stayed narrow, and local elites/foreign investors captured the wealth while the majority saw little benefit.

Most American countries produced similar raw materials (grain, beef, minerals) rather than the manufactured goods each other needed, so they traded more with industrialized Europe and the USA.

Take a clear position, support it with specific evidence for and against, and reach a substantiated (even partial) judgement — e.g. 'genuine growth, but structured dependently.'

A movement that romanticised and claimed to value Indigenous heritage in national identity and art, while in practice rarely giving Indigenous peoples real political power or land rights.

The (mis)application of 'survival of the fittest' to nations and races, used to justify elite rule and claim that European-descended populations were naturally superior.

A law introducing compulsory, secret, universal male suffrage, ending fraud-based oligarchic elections and opening politics to the middle class.

Hipolito Yrigoyen of the Radical Civic Union (UCR), the first president elected under mass male suffrage.

General Julio Roca's military campaign that seized Patagonia from Indigenous peoples, opening the land to European settlement and export agriculture.

Elites used Social Darwinist language ('civilisation vs barbarism') to justify displacing or killing Indigenous peoples as the 'natural' cost of national progress.

Argentina's ruling elite party (1880-1916) that controlled politics through patronage and electoral fraud rather than genuine competition.

Liberalism prioritised free trade, private property and limited state economic role; progressivism (from the early 1900s) pushed the state to regulate labour, health and education to manage the costs of rapid growth.

Women (no vote until 1947) and, in practice, Indigenous and many rural poor citizens — showing the reform's limits, key for a balanced judgement.

The tango in Argentina moved from disreputable slum entertainment to a symbol of national identity performed in elite Paris and Buenos Aires salons by the 1910s-20s.

Some see it as a genuine (if flawed) belief system driving policy; others argue it was mainly a convenient after-the-fact justification for elite economic and land interests.

It ended fraud and enfranchised most adult men, a real continuity-and-change moment — but it left the oligarchy's economic power, land distribution and women's exclusion largely intact.

Porfirio Díaz's 34-year rule of Mexico, 1876-1911, ended by the Mexican Revolution.

Díaz's technocratic advisors who followed Positivism, believing in "order and progress" through scientific, expert-led government.

Positivism — the belief that strict social order and scientific, rational planning would produce national progress.

Díaz's científico finance minister; balanced Mexico's federal budget and attracted foreign investment from 1893.

"Bread or the stick" — reward loyal allies with jobs, land and contracts; punish opponents with prison or exile.

Regional political bosses appointed by Díaz to enforce loyalty locally, bypassing elected local government.

From about 640 km in 1876 to roughly 19,000 km by 1910, funded mainly by US and British investment.

They were dispossessed of land in Sonora and deported to forced labour on Yucatán plantations, justified by científico racial theory.

Cananea (1906, copper mine, Sonora): miners struck over unequal pay with Americans, crushed with US volunteer help. Río Blanco (1907, textile mill, Veracruz): workers struck over conditions, army killed dozens.

Workers had no legal right to unionize or strike, so protest was automatically illegal and met by the rurales or army.

Francisco Madero's 1910 call to arms after Díaz jailed him in a rigged election — it directly triggered the Mexican Revolution.

Through patronage networks with regional caciques and propaganda events like the 1910 independence centennial, which masked repression as unity.