The question that still engages the attention of Latin American historians is the amount of real change that occurred with the achievement of political independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century. In this collection, historians examine the social, political, and economic history of Argentina from the onset of the Bourbon Imperial reforms of 1776 through formal independence, social disorder, and dictatorship until the foundation of the modern bourgeois democratic state in 1860. Argentina in this period was particularly influential in shaping broader Latin American political and intellectual currents, so that an examination of Argentina's situation has important implications for the Latin American republics.