Latin American Labour History in Comparative Perspective: Notes on the Insidiousness of Cultural Imperialism

Abstract

This essay explores three broad issues involved in viewing Latin American labour history in comparative perspective (that is, in the context of world labour historiography, especially that of Western developed societies). The first issue is the appropriateness to Latin American labour history of conceptual paradigms, particularly liberal and Marxist, constructed in Western Europe in the course of that region's 19th-century industrialization. The second is the application to Latin American studies of the so-called new labour history, which has flowered in the historiography of North Atlantic developed capitalist societies, especially in the Anglo-American context, during the last 25 years. The third issue concerns the comparative advantages of First and Third World labour history in the context of the logic, as well as the special strengths and weaknesses, of the discipline of history itself. Each of these themes, I believe, illustrates an aspect of comparative labour history seldom appreciated or addressed by students of labour in Latin America and abroad: the pervasive, distorting influence of cultural forms emanating from the First (and later Second) World on the scholarship of the Third. I consider this influence an insidious form of cultural imperialism because I believe it is fun damentally negative, and because it is generally unacknowledged and thus unex amined.