critique of "dependency" theory, which has shaped much of the re-
cent discourse on Latin America, and to search for a more realistic
link between social structure, mentalité, and social theory.

These suggestive differences in perspective do not hide, however,
the striking similarity of our preoccupations. All the authors felt the
need to move away from the study of individual segments and ad-
vance toward a greater fusion between the parts and whole. The five
of us emphasize the critical connection between state and society.
For Europe, Tilly tells us, state formation--"the exceptional power
of the distinctive organizations we call national states"--and the
development of capitalism--especially "the prevalence of work for
wages under conditions of expropriation"--are the two large-scale
phenomena which most affected the lives of ordinary people and
are, therefore, the master problems of European social history since
the sixteenth century. He argues that practically every other change
in modern European history is secondary to these two broad pro-
cesses, because only they made a difference in the life of every inhab-
itant in the land. His claim should stir controversy; yet the ties be-
tween people's daily routines and the all-encompassing framework of
their lives cannot be made more clearly. The other contributors em-
phasize problems of domination in history as well as the questions of
linkages between parts of societies. Taylor suggests that the expan-
sion of the Spanish State affected the core areas of early Latin Ameri-
can society more profoundly than the change in mode of produc-
tion, which remained "basically tributary both before and after the
conquest." Having made this point, Taylor sees social history as mov-
ing the history of Latin America beyond the assumption of internal
consent and the ideas of coercion and manipulation that have charac-
terized dependency theories. He concentrates instead on linkages
among members of society, and he searches for the activities of the
many "power brokers" who served simultaneously as embodiments
of obedience to domination and of choice. In his Latin America,
"most people are in some sense both rulers and ruled," and "power
relationships . . . involve many conflicting obligations and loyalties."
In his turn, Cohen explains how "the varied and multiple efforts to
comprehend the [African] region--using the evaluations of shared or
continuous culture, market networks, cult distributions, arenas of so-
cial movements, growth processes, migration tracks . . . have taken us
far from the view of state and society as congruent." Tilly has criti-

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