Population

The quality of population census data in nineteenth-century Latin America leaves much to be desired. Enumeration was often incomplete, the Indian population was occasionally ignored, and the margin of error was substantial. All estimates of total population must therefore be regarded with caution. However, twentieth-century scholarship has done much to remedy the deficiencies of nineteenth-century statistics. As a result figures exist for Latin American countries from the mid-nineteenth century onward, which can be combined to give estimates for all of Latin America at various intervals. For present purposes I chose the years 1850, 1870, 1890, and 1912.

For most of the period before the First World War, Puerto Rico was part of the Latin American community, and Panama did not exist as an independent country. In the interests of consistency, I therefore included figures for Puerto Rico after 1898 (following its annexation by the United States), and I continued to include Panama in the Colombian figures after 1903 (following its declaration of independence from Colombia).

Table A.1.1 gives the population figures for the relevant years. The 1850 data are from Sánchez-Albórnoz (1986), p. 122, with the exception of the five Central American republics, for which the data were taken from Woodward (1985), p. 478, and reflect more recent scholarship on Central American population figures. For later years the main source is Mitchell (1993), with intercensal years interpolated using the implied geometric annual rate of growth.