Herbert Klein: uma carreira exemplar de historiador econômico
I was born in New York City in the borough of the Bronx on January 6, 1936. I attended public schools in Far Rockaway Queens. After graduating Far Rockaway High School I first attended Syracuse University from 1953 to 1955 and then transferred to the University of Chicago, where I obtained my BA in History in 1957, my MA in 1959 and my PhD in 1963 with a major in history and a minor in Anthropology. I taught Latin American History at the University of Chicago from 1962 to 1969 rising from Lecturer to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. I then taught at Columbia University from 1969 to 2005, being named the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History in 2003. I retired from Columbia in 2005 and was named Professor of History and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University from 2005-2011. After my retirement as Director of the Center I was named Research Fellow and Curator of Latin American Collection, of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University in 2011. Also since 2009 I have been a Visiting Scholar at the California Center for Population Research, UCLA. My main areas of interests are in comparative social history, quantitative methods in historical research and demographic history. I have published extensively on the history of slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, colonial fiscal history, and demographic history. I have also concentrated most of my research and publications on the histories of Bolivia, Brazil and the United States. I have been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Banco de España fellow, a Catedra Patrimonial" of (CONACYT) the Consejo Nacional para Ciencia y Tecnología of Mexico, , a Directeur d'études associé in 1987 and a Professeur Invité in 2002 at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and Fulbright Lecturer in numerous Latin American and European universities. I received grants from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Tinker Foundation. My honors include the 1967 "Conference Prize" of the Conference of Latin American Historians (CLAH) for my article "Peasant Communities in Revolt, " the “Primer Premio” of the Municipality of La Paz Bolivia in 1968 for my book Orígenes de la Revolución Nacional Boliviana, the "Socio-Psychological Prize" of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) joint with Jonathan Kelley in 1977; the 2010 “Premio em Historia e Ciencias Sociais “of the Academia Brasileira de Letras, for my book Escravismo em São Paulo e Minas Gerais (joint with Iraci Costa and Francisco Vidal Luna) , I received the Distinguished Service Award from the CLAH (Conference on Latin American History) in 2015 and in 2019 a Doctor de Honoris Causa from the University of Santiago (Usach) in Chile.. From 2003-2015, I was editor of the Cambridge University Press Series of Latin American Monographs and I am on the board of editors of several Latin American and Spanish Historical Journals.
See his most recent paper:
Herbert S KleinReflections on fifty years of studying international immigration in the Atlantic World. Paper prepared for the World Economic History Conference, Paris July 2022
Studying International Migrations in a Comparative Perspective
Herbert S. Klein
Paper Given at the World Economic History Conference, Paris July, 2022
For almost fifty years, one of the major areas of my research has been on international migrations in the Atlantic World. As a part of my early interest in Afro-American slavery in the Americas I began to explore the Atlantic slave trade and the way Africans were moved across the Atlantic. The shipping patterns, the provisioning, the purchase and sale of the Africans and finally their mortality were among the themes I explored. As an extension of this research I also explored how the slave systems were developed in the Americas. Most of my research on African slavery has concentrated on the Brazilian experience.
It was this research on the Afro-Brazilian experience that eventually led me to study the major European groups which replaced the Afro-Brazilians on the coffee plantations of São Paulo after emancipation. I then undertook a series of studies European migration to Brazil in the period from the 1880s to the 1930s, concentrating mostly on the three largest groups: the Portuguese, the Italians, and the Spaniards. My primary concern in these studies, and in later publications on the Mexican migration to the United States, has been on the question of the relative social mobility and social integration of immigrants over generations. After completing several of these individual studies of the origin, volume and subsequent social mobility of these immigrant groups, I turned to a relatively new question, that of the comparative difference of the history of Italian mobility in three different countries, the United States, Brazil and Argentina – the three most important destinations of Italian emigrants to the Americas in this period. It is this comparative social mobility question that I want to explore in my talk today.
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