At the end of the seventh decade of the nineteenth century two generations had passed since the continental American colonies of Spain and Portugal had won their independence. During these years these new states had maintained their independence, expanded their commercial and cultural relations with Europe and progressed toward political stability. The half-dozen larger Spanish American units, roughly coincident with the colonial viceroyalties and captaincies-general which had emerged from the struggle against the mother-country, had split into sixteen separate republics, and within each of these national feeling had grown and increasingly justified a political map which at the outset had not set off really separate peoples from each other. Portuguese America, in contrast, had successfully weathered centrifugal tendencies, and in 1870 the empire of Brazil was the largest, the most powerful, and the most stable state in Latin America. In the West Indies, the political pattern remained colonial: Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish control; the lesser Antilles were subject to their various European metropolises; and isolated Haiti and the precariously sovereign Dominican Republic alone represented the republican principle in the Caribbean.

After 1870 the chief source of changes in this area was the unprecedented development of its connections with the outside world. Expanding industry in Europe and in the United States required ever larger amounts of raw materials such as hides, cotton, and wool; the new chemical and electrical industries required more and more rubber, copper, zinc, lead, and other metals. New concentrations of urban population also needed increasing amounts of imported food: sugar, wheat, meat, coffee, and cacao.