An updated edition of the definitive, highly regarded history of Chile in the English language.

Over the past two centuries, industrial societies hungry for copper – essential for light, power, and communication – have demanded ever-increasing quantities of the metal. Born with a Copper Spoon examines how the metal has been produced, distributed, controlled, and sold on a global scale. However, this is not simply a narrative of ever-increasing and deepening global connections. It is also about periods of deglobalization, fragmentation, and attempts to sever connections. Throughout history, copper production has spawned its own practices, technologies, and a constantly changing political economy. Large-scale production has affected ecologies, states, and companies, while creating and even destroying local communities dependent on volatile commodity markets. Former president of Zambia Kenneth Kaunda once remarked that Zambians were “born with a copper spoon in our mouths,” but few societies managed to profit from copper’s abundance. From copper cartels and the futures market to the consequences of resource nationalism, Born with a Copper Spoon delivers a global perspective on one of the world’s most important metals.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Democracy is often described in two opposite ways, as either wonderfully resilient or dangerously fragile. Both characterizations can be correct, depending on the context. When Democracy Breaks aims to deepen our understanding of what separates democratic resilience from democratic fragility by focusing on the latter. The volume's collaborators--experts in the history and politics of the societies covered in their chapters--explore eleven episodes of democratic breakdown, from ancient Athens to Weimar Germany to present-day Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Strikingly, in every case, various forms of democratic erosion long preceded the final democratic breakdown. Although no single causal factor emerges as decisive, linking together all of the episodes, some important commonalities--including extreme political polarization, explicitly anti-democratic political actors, and significant political violence--stand out across the cases. Moreover, the notion of democratic culture, while admittedly difficult to define and even more difficult to measure, may play a role in all of them. Throughout the volume, the contributors show again and again that the written rules of democracy are insufficient to protect against tyranny. While each case of democratic decay is unique, the patterns that emerge shed much light on the continuing struggle to sustain modern democracies and to assess and respond to the threats they face.

“The editors have assembled an outstanding group of scholars in this very welcome addition to our understanding of Latin American external relations and British foreign policy towards the region in the 20th century.”— Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Honorary Professor, Institute of the Americas, University College London & Former Director, Chatham House “This is an important and timely book, reappraising the UK’s role in Latin America in the 20th century. What emerges is far more interesting than the usual narrative of linear UK decline in the face of growing US predominance.”— Peter Collecott, CMG, UK Ambassador to Brazil, 2004–2008 This book explores the role of Great Britain in twentieth-century Latin America, a period dominated by the growing political and economic influence of the United States. Focusing on three broad themes—war and conflict; commercial and business rivalries; and responses to economic nationalism, revolution, and political change—the individual chapters cover a number of countries and issues from 1914 to 1970, stressing the reluctance with which Britain ceded hegemony in the region. An epilogue focuses on Anglo-American relations and concerns in Latin America in the more recent past. The chapters, all written by leading scholars on their particular subjects, are based on original research in a wide variety of archives, going beyond the standard Foreign Office and State Department sources to which most earlier scholars were confined.

In the Shadow of War and Empire offers a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialisation through the lens of a mid-nineteenth-century cotton factory in the “Turkish Manchester,” the name chosen by the Ottomans for the industrial complex they built in the 1840s in Istanbul, which, in the contemporary words of one of the country’s most prominent contemporary Marxist theorists, became “the secret to and the basis of Turkish capitalism" in the 1930s.

Since the 1960s, many influential Latin Americans, such as the leaders of student movements and unions, and political authorities, participated in exchange programs with the United States to learn about the American way of life. In Brazil, during the international context of the Cold War, when Brazil was governed by a military dictatorship ruled by generals who alternated in power, hundreds of union members were sent to the United States to take union education courses. Did they come back “Americanized” and able to introduce American trade unionism in Brazil? That is the question this book seeks to answer. It is a subject that is as yet little explored in the history of Latin American labor and international relations: the influence of foreign union organizations on national union politics and movements. Despite the US’s investment in advertising, courses, films and trips offered to Brazilian union members, most of them were not convinced by the American ideas on how to organize an “authentic” union movement – or, at least, not committed to applying what they learned in the States.

From 1967 to 1973, a period that culminated in the socialist project of Salvador Allende, nearly 400,000 low-income Chileans illegally seized parcels of land on the outskirts of Santiago. Remarkably, today almost all of these individuals live in homes with property titles. As Edward Murphy shows, this transformation came at a steep price, through an often-violent political and social struggle that continues to this day. In analyzing the causes and consequences of this struggle, Murphy reveals a crucial connection between homeownership and understandings of proper behavior and governance. This link between property and propriety has been at the root of a powerful, contested urban politics central to both social activism and urban development projects. Through projects of reform, revolution, and reaction, a right to housing and homeownership has been a significant symbol of governmental benevolence and poverty reduction. Under Pinochet's neoliberalism, subsidized housing and slum eradication programs displaced many squatters, while awarding them homes of their own. This process, in addition to ongoing forms of activism, has permitted the vast majority of squatters to live in homes with property titles, a momentous change of the past half-century. This triumph is tempered by the fact that today the urban poor struggle with high levels of unemployment and underemployment, significant debt, and a profoundly segregated and hostile urban landscape. They also find it more difficult to mobilize than in the past, and as homeowners they can no longer rally around the cause of housing rights. Citing cultural theorists from Marx to Foucault, Murphy directly links the importance of home ownership and property rights among Santiago's urban poor to definitions of Chilean citizenship and propriety. He explores how the deeply embedded liberal belief system of individual property ownership has shaped political, social, and physical landscapes in the city. His approach sheds light on the role that social movements and the gendered contours of home life have played in the making of citizenship. It also illuminates processes through which squatters have received legally sanctioned homes of their own, a phenomenon of critical importance in cities throughout much of Latin America and the Global South.

After World War II, the AFL-CIO pursued an ambitious agenda of containing global communism and helping to throw off the shackles of colonialism. This sweeping collection brings together contributions from leading historians to explore its successes, challenges, and inevitable compromises as it pursued these initiatives during the Cold War.

In 1946 Juan Perón launched a populist challenge to the United States, recruiting an army of labor activists to serve as worker attachés at every Argentine embassy. By 1955, over five hundred would serve, representing the largest presence of blue-collar workers in the foreign service of any country in history. A meatpacking union leader taught striking workers in Chicago about rising salaries under Perón. A railroad motorist joined the revolution in Bolivia. A baker showed Soviet workers the daily caloric intake of their Argentine counterparts. As Ambassadors of the Working Class shows, the attachés' struggle against US diplomats in Latin America turned the region into a Cold War battlefield for the hearts of the working classes. In this context, Ernesto Semán reveals, for example, how the attachés' brand of transnational populism offered Fidel Castro and Che Guevara their last chance at mass politics before their embrace of revolutionary violence. Fiercely opposed by Washington, the attachés’ project foundered, but not before US policymakers used their opposition to Peronism to rehearse arguments against the New Deal's legacies.