El balance de la independencia latinoamericana

This study is a historiographical overview of the literature of the Latin American wars of independence. It analyses the gains and losses, and poses the question: „has the world advanced" in the 200 years of independence? The first part of the article concentrates on the events of the wars of independence and the developments in the 19th century focusing on the works of Francisco Morales Padrón, Luis Navarro Garcia, Jose' Carlos Maridtegui, and the approach of the German historian Manfred Kossok. In the secondpart the author presents the question of subdesarrollo and dependencia. He discusses the different interpretations for insufficient progress from the positivist viewpoints to the assessment of the economists of the CEPAL. The novelty of this part is that it presents the results of the comparative analyses (Wittman, Pack, Zimdnyi) published in Hungarian historiography in the 1960s-1970s that revealed the similarities between the progress in Central-Eastern Europe and Latin America