Friedrich Katz Prize Recipients
The Friedrich Katz Prize is awarded annually to the best book published in English focusing on Latin America, including the Caribbean. Awarded for the first time in 2014, the prize honors honors Friedrich Katz, an Austrian-born specialist in Latin American history, whose nearly 50-year career inspired dozens of students and colleagues in the field.
2016 Katz Prize
Edward Beatty, Univ. of Notre Dame
Technology and the Search for Progress in Modern Mexico (Univ. of California Press)
This book is innovative and brings fresh, new understandings of the role of technology in social change and economic development. At the same time, it returns readers to classical themes of Latin American historiography, of global and national inequalities, frustration with modernization, and uneven progress. He demonstrates how industrial technology transfers to Mexico yielded basic changes in production without necessarily altering habits of innovation, learning, and adaptation. Along the way, Beatty provides us with a combination of rigorous analysis and narrative case studies, weaving micro and macro levels into one vitally important book.