Herbert S. Klein

About

Herbert S. Klein is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and curator of the Latin America collection in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. He had been a professor of history and the director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University.

Klein received his BA in 1957 and his PhD in 1963, both from the University of Chicago. Before his appointment at Stanford, he taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia University and is the Gouverneur Morris Emeritus Professor of History at Columbia University.

He is the author or coauthor (in several languages) of more than thirty books and 195 articles on Latin America and on comparative themes in social and economic history. The Brazilian Academy of Letters awarded its 2010 Literary Prize for History and Social Science to him for Escravismo em São Paulo e Minas Gerais (coauthored) (2010). He received the Alfonso Reyes Prize, of the Colegio de México in 2019, and an honorary doctorate from the Universidad de Santiago, Chile also in 2019.  He has spent the last several years writing on Brazilian history, with his co-author Francisco Vidal Luna of the Universidade de São Paulo.  Among their books are Brazil Since 1980 (2006);  Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750–1850 (2003), Slavery in Brazil ((2011); The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889 (2014) Brazil, 1964-1985, The Military Regimes of Latin America in the Cold War (2017); An Economic and Demographic  History of São Paulo 1850-1950 (2018); Feeding the World: Brazil’s Transformation into a Modern Agricultural Economy (2019); Modern Brazil: A Social History (2020); Social Change, Industrialization and the Service Economy in São Paulo, 1950-2020 (2022); Brazil: An Economic and Social History from Early Man to the twenty First Century (forthcoming 2024); and Brazilian Crops in the Global Market: The Emergence of Brazil as a World Agribusiness Exporter Since 1950 (forthcoming 2023)

Among his other books are four comparative studies of slavery, the most recent of which are African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (1986, 2nd revised edition, 2007), The Atlantic Slave Trade (1999, 2nd revised edition, 2010), Klein also wrote four books on Bolivian history, the latest of which is A Concise History of Bolivia (2003, 2nd edition revised 2011). He has also published The American Finances of the Spanish Empire, 1680–1809 (1998), A Population History of the United States (2004, 2nd revised edition, 2012), and Hispanics in the United States, 1980–2005 (coauthored) (2010).  Several of his books have appeared in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese.