RECENT MA TERIALS AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH IN LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY: NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES* William Paul McGreevey, The Smithsonian Institution IN 1968, I WAS OFFERED THE OPPORTUNITY TO PREPARE A BRIEF SURVEy OF RE- sources and prospects for quantitative research in Latin American History by the ad hoc Committee on Quantitative Data of the American Historical Association. I was at first charged with treatment of the whole period 1500-1960, but the willingness of John TePaske to undertake a lion's share of the task ended in limiting my responsi- bility to Conly' the 19th and 20th centuries. The results of that survey, as indeed those of Professor TePaske's work, are available in the collection of papers edited by Val R. Lorwin and Jacob Price, The Dimensions of the Past» In the notes which follow I will try to avoid repeating any of the presentation in that work and will instead try to build a bridge between that effort of five years ago and developments in this field of research in the past few years. A sampling of publications and preliminary papers prepared over the past quin- quennium indicates that a good deal of quantitative research has been underway on Latin American historical topics. A list derived from reprints, manuscripts, and books I have received over the past two years includes over eighty separate books and papers which contain quantitative material treating nearly as many topics and prob- lems. Here I will review and analyze some of the new methods used in the prepara- tion of these research reports with a view to determining approaches to research problems which have demonstrated the highest potential for yielding improved understanding of the past two centuries of Latin American history. The accompanying table presents the topical distribution of 82 studies in the field of Latin American history prepared in recent years. The distribution of studies by topic would seem to indicate some trend toward greater concern with the domestic economy, society,and polity than was characteristic of studies carried out between 1945 and 1967. 2 This trend was already underway in the late 1960s and has been in- * This article was originally presented in a session on quantification in Latin American his- tory, held at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association at San Francisco in December 1973. Another paper on quantification, dealing mainly with the colonial period, was read by Dr. John J. TePaske, Duke University. Brief comments on the two papers were made by Professors Charles Berry, Wright University, H. Bradley Benedict, Paul E. Hoffman, Louisi- ana State University (Baton Rouge), and James W. Wilkie, UCLA. The session was chaired by the Editor of LARR. Professor TePaske plans to publish an article on quantification in Latin American history in a subsequent issue of LARR. Ed. 73 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100026212 Published online by Cambridge University Press