#Neo colonialism free#

The continent was the recipient of a substantial injection of foreign capital and new technology, as well as a considerable influx of European immigrants. The consolidation of the world economy between circa 1870 and the global depression (1929–1933) brought considerable growth to Latin America, associated with the export of foodstuffs, minerals, and later oil. Latin American authors, in particular, contend that deep-seated rigidities, notably the interaction of latifundios (vast landed estates) geared more to prestige than to profit, and minifundios (small, nonviable plots), aborted possibilities of significant growth in agriculture, and precluded the emergence of both a surplus for reinvestment in factory manufacturing and significant rural markets for industrial products. Indeed, factory industrialization was barely an option for Latin America, owing to shallow markets, an absence of cheap, accessible coal deposits, and costly internal communications. The region was a marginal component in the international economy of little sustained interest to the British. Some argue that Latin America enjoyed no opportunities for industrialization and development in this period. This argument is rejected by liberal authors. A system of international trade, reinforced by commercial treaties that were a precondition of diplomatic recognition of independent nations, was geared to British needs. There was, in practice, no such equality, because Britain enjoyed the advantages of greater experience in international business, control of shipping lines, and a flourishing shipbuilding industry, and could threaten to use the Royal Navy when challenged.

#Neo colonialism free#

In other words, Latin American elites, who embraced fashionable ideas of free trade that were rooted in prevailing assumptions that both partners in an international trading relationship benefited equally, were deceived. They argue further that Latin American governments opened up markets to an influx of British manufactured imports, which served only to sabotage nascent cottage and artisan industries that could otherwise have served as stimuli to a transition to factory industrialization. The dependency analysts stress, with varying degrees of subtlety and insistence, that British 'informal imperialism' replaced Iberian formal empire.

In the half-century after independence, the dominant international power, the United Kingdom, played a controversial role in the continent.

These authors, often referred to as the dependency analysts, stress a continuum whereby Latin America was kept in a condition of economic and, often, political subordination, and its resources were-or so it is claimed-organized in such a way as to promote the interests of developed countries rather than to assure the development of poor ones. The term neocolonialism is used by some authors to describe the relationship of nominally independent countries in Latin America with metropolitan or developed countries from independence in the 1820s to the present.