Recent scholarship claims that extractive colonial institutions explain the lackluster performance of Latin American economies today. We examine forced labor in colonial Peru. We find that while coercive labor institutions led to a drop in the indigenous population until the seventeenth century,...

On August 15, 1914, the Panama Canal officially opened for business, forever changing the face of global trade and military power, as well as the role of the United States on the world stage. The Canal's creation is often seen as an example of U.S. triumphalism, but Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu...

The Mexican expropriation of 1938 was the first large-scale non-Communist expropriation of foreign-owned natural resource assets. The literature generally makes three assertions: the U.S. government did not fully back the companies, Mexico did not fully compensate them for the value of their...