Stanley J. Stein was born in June 1920. He died 99 years later in December 2019, just months from his 100th birthday. At the time of his death, Stein was emeritus at Princeton University, where he had been the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture since joining the Princeton faculty in 1953.Stein was born in New York to eastern European immigrants who arrived at the United States shortly after the twentieth century's turn. He grew up on the Lower East Side, where Italians, Irish, and Jews lived alongside one another but did not mingle, as he later recalled.1 After graduating from the City College of New York in 1941, he went to Harvard to begin Spanish- and French-language studies. A course in Brazilian literature piqued an interest in nineteenth-century indianismo, and he set off to Rio in early 1942. There he met Barbara Hadley, a University of California, Berkeley, student studying Brazilian abolition. In late 1942, Stein cut short his time in Brazil to enlist in the United States Navy because, “as an American, I felt I should return and serve.”2 He and Barbara married just before Stan left for his wartime posting in the Mediterranean.After the war, Stan returned to Harvard, now with an interest in Latin American history. Under Clarence Haring, who had also mentored Lewis Hanke, Stan focused on the nineteenth-century coffee plantation as a key to Brazil's economic history. While at Harvard, he met historian Howard Cline, one of a then small number of US-based Latin Americanists. Cline was interested in the novel fields of interdisciplinary history and ethnohistory. Stan had come to the plantation topic out of a concern for Brazil's macroeconomic cycles dating to the sixteenth century. Cline suggested that he learn how to approach historical actors from multiple perspectives and across cultural difference.Not long after, Stan met anthropologist Melville Herskovits at an American Historical Association meeting in Boston. Barbara had met Herskovits in the Brazilian Northeast during the early 1940s. Herskovits invited Stan to visit Northwestern University in early 1948. They discussed the African diaspora and the relationship between anthropology and history. Herskovits also introduced Stan to Richard Waterman's ethnomusicology lab, which had been recording Afro-Caribbean music. Anthropologist Frances Herskovits gave Stan a crash course in ethnographic method.Backed by a Social Science Research Council grant, Stan and Barbara, with their first daughter, arrived in Rio in June 1948. They spent three months at the Biblioteca Nacional and decided to focus on Vassouras, an old coffee town in Rio state's Paraíba Valley. The family moved there shortly after. Stan found the town archives in the room where municipal paints were stored.3 Although Barbara spent much time raising their daughter, she and Stan organized the documents that became the empirical foundation of Stan's dissertation. During this year and a half, Stan also put his ethnographic skills to work. Returning from Saturday market one morning, Barbara noted that there was an old couple, apparently ex-enslaved people, who still retained memories of Vassouras before abolition in 1888. Stan interviewed them in hopes of offering a fuller picture of fazenda life from the point of view of enslaved persons. It was during these conversations that Stan learned of the jongos (work songs) once sung by slaves. Although he had not planned to do recordings for the dissertation, he went to Rio to borrow a wire recording machine from the US consulate. He ended up capturing the only known recordings of these songs at the time. He discovered in them not only rhythms that enabled people to work together effectively but also songs of protest woven of opaque riddles and African linguistic expressions whose meanings were lost on masters.Back at Harvard in 1950, Stan wrote up his dissertation on Vassouras and earned his PhD in 1951. Without immediate job prospects, he agreed to write a study of entrepreneurship in Brazil for the Baker Library. Guided by Caroline Ware's The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings (1931), he undertook the research that became his later book on Brazilian manufacturing, the first known study of its type in Latin America. In 1953, he joined the Princeton history faculty.In 1957, he published two monographs: Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900, and The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture: Textile Enterprise in an Underdeveloped Area, 1850–1950. Their simultaneous appearance established Stan as a rising social and economic historian of his generation.Vassouras was widely acknowledged as a tour de force. It combined a sweeping account of coffee in Brazilian agrarian history, a vigorous narrative of capitalism as a locally inflected process built on centuries of African enslavement, and a fine-grain story of the interactions and mental worlds of planters and slaves. The book demonstrated the archival potential of notarial records and pioneered ethnohistorical methods as a way of giving human shape to economic processes. Reviewers lauded its depth and the deftness with which Stan wove together the large and the small. Stan was especially pleased by anthropologist Charles Wagley's review, which noted that Stan had used local documents “almost as the anthropologist would use local informants.”4The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture showed that industrialization in Brazil was not best understood as a delayed or derivative version of what had happened elsewhere first. Stan proved the crucial role that plantations had played in industry's emergence and how mercantile entrepreneurs dominated manufacture after 1890 and manipulated the state to advance their interests. Reviewers praised the book as “an outstanding contribution to Brazilian economic history,” citing it for the “wealth of data and depth of insight” it brought to a complex topic.5One of the ironies of Stan's pioneering interventions in Latin American economic history is that so many who followed him turned away from his social and cultural approach, instead emphasizing statistics and models, to the detriment of all that gave economy political, intellectual, and moral meaning. Unimpressed, Stan decided to stick with his view regarding economy's broad role in human life. With time granted by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1958, he reoriented his thinking to take up the line of inquiry that would occupy him and Barbara for the remainder of their careers—how to understand Latin America's broad relationship to the global capitalist economy.Together, Stan and Barbara joined the intellectual debate that was raising new questions about how to understand Latin America's economic trajectory compared to Britain's and the United States'. Against prevailing opinion, Raúl Prebisch had argued in 1950 that Latin America had entered the international division of labor in the world economic system as a periphery that served the great industrial cores in Europe and the United States. The idea was not entirely new to Stan. He had seen elements of it in Alan K. Manchester's British Preëminence in Brazil, Its Rise and Decline: A Study in European Expansion (1933), which argued that Portugal had been dependent on England through much of the colonial period and even after 1822. Stan and Barbara began to think about the larger implications of Prebisch's thesis and its limitations. This resulted in The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (1970), widely read in English and Spanish.The book was deliberately provocative. Against culturalists who argued that Catholic Latin America lacked the special Protestant sauce that had made capitalism possible, and against stages-of-growth theorists who insisted that all countries could achieve universal takeoff if only they could get their acts together, The Colonial Heritage claimed that the key to Latin America's economic history lay in colonization and neocolonialism. Chapter 1’s opening sentence summed up the thesis: “In 1492, Spain and Portugal were economic dependencies of Europe and, despite their creation of overseas empires in the sixteenth century and their control of such areas until about 1824, they remained dependencies.”6 Stan and Barbara dug beneath broad statements of dependence—such as those by Andre Gunder Frank—by looking to the “institutions and concepts of man, of race and religion, of status and privilege, and of right and might” that had organized the colonial order and set the horizons of possibility for all actors in Latin America, “from omnipotent to powerless.”7 In this way, they sought to unseat an “evolutionary formula” embodying “false concepts of universality.”8Reviewers praised the “finely wrought collection of essays” and applauded their clarity.9 A few took the book to task. One Latin American labor economist charged it with overarguing the “modernizing” changes taking place in England, Holland, and France and understating Iberia's contributions to commercial capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.10 Regardless, the book became a Latin American best seller and provoked vigorous debate for decades.After Stan completed with Roberto Cortés Conde the bibliographical project Latin America: A Guide to Economic History, 1830–1930 (1977), he and Barbara turned back to Latin American dependency. The project focused on the moment between 1808 and 1810 when colonial Spanish America began to break apart to form the nations of modern Latin America. Rather than begin with the maneuverings of those two crucial years, the idea was to understand the long trajectory that produced independence movements when Napoleon's 1808 invasion broke Spain's imperial model.To accomplish this, Stan and Barbara had to reframe Spain's role in the Atlantic system in relation to early modern Europe's economic emergence. Across four volumes that appeared between 2000 and 2014, they established Spain as a rentier state living off the silver flows emanating from Peru and then Mexico.11 They recounted France's and Britain's sustained assault on Spanish imperial power in the mid- and late eighteenth century. By that time, New Spain had become a submetropolis exploited by Spain though able to exploit the Spanish Caribbean in turn, a subtle inflection of the dependency and world-systems approaches that had been mooted during previous decades. Against this background, they were able to show how “countervailing elements” among bureaucrats, royal appointees, and local juntas shattered what remained of the empire, the shards of which became the disjointed nations of modern Latin America.12 One reviewer referred to the final volume as the capstone of “a monumental project first conceived over a half a century ago.”13 It was more remarkable in that Stan completed it after Barbara's passing in 2005. Another characterized the argument as a “late grand stance” of colonial dependency, the marshaling of a “remarkable body of primary research” that strained somewhat against its interpretive framework.14Shortly before the fourth volume appeared, Stan noted that the big question animating the project had been to think about how empires end. He and Barbara had watched the wars in Algeria (1954–62) and then Vietnam (1955–75) in all their horrific unfolding.15 Something about empires needed understanding. In an epigraph to volume 3, they quoted J. M. Coetzee: “One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire. How not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.” They had pursued this insight across four volumes of dense historical work. Their conclusion went against the grain of how empires have been talked about: “Empires, our data indicate, do not collapse; they crack, crumble at the edges, and erode as they fade away.”16A late chapter of Stan's work appeared as it had begun—unexpectedly. The recordings he had made of jongos in Vassouras during the late 1940s had found their way to the back of a drawer and sat for years untouched. Around 2002 Stan shared them with Pedro Meira Monteiro, a colleague at Princeton. A team of US- and Brazil-based scholars studied them, belatedly revealing a musicological aspect of Stan's work in Vassouras.17Scholarly careers are more than lists of publications. They are perhaps best understood in terms of broad arcs and the questions they bring to the collective enterprise of scholarship. In his early work, Stan became one of the first economic historians of Latin America, though one who saw economic life broadly. In this context, it could be said that he stole a march on one of the major trends of twentieth-century historiography. As Stan's close friend Arno Mayer put it at Stan's retirement party in Princeton, Stan had been doing anthropologically inflected cultural history long before it had become fashionable. With Barbara, he animated the dependency debate that shaped historical inquiry in Latin America during the late twentieth century. The ethnohistorical sensibility of his early work is now being rediscovered by a new generation of young scholars interested in “diasporic method.”18 A consummate and committed Latin Americanist during the rise of area studies, Stan was also among those driven by the idea that Latin America's specificities should and could be part of the broader human story. The mischievous twinkle of his eye when about to ask an especially challenging question will be sorely missed.