ABSTRACT
According to the dependency theory, the assumption by Latin America of its role as raw material producer within the nineteenth-century international division of labour implied a reinforcement of the 'outward-oriented model of growth' inherited from colonial times. More dramatically than in US history, civilization and barbarism were a contradiction that spanned Latin America's nineteenth century, and continued into the early twentieth; it intertwined the conflicts of unionism and federalism, conservatism and liberalism, along with tensions between the capital cities and provinces of the fledgling nations. Latin America's bonds with that progressive Europe dated back to 1739 at least, when Britain had declared war on Spain over the latter's monopoly beyond the Atlantic. The republican programme drafted in the Young Argentine Generation's Dogma made explicit that progress relied on political and cultural independence from Spain and rapprochement with non-Iberian Europe. Even though France played a part in Latin American economies during the eighteenth century, her predominant role was social and cultural.
