The Age of Odious Debt: Money, Constitutions, and the Making of Latin America. A Research Note

Abstract

This paper is a summary of a section of my forthcoming book, The Age of Odious Debt: Money, Constitutions, and the Making of Latin America, under contract with Oxford University Press. The origins of the idea of odious debt, this book argues, can be traced to the Latin American pursuit of independence. The book reconsiders Alexander Sack’s timeline of the concept and shows that Latin American revolutionaries drew on international law and studied the works of Hugo Grotius, Emer de Vattel, and Jeremy Bentham to formulate consistent constitutional responses to the accumulation of colonial and foreign loans. This paper focuses on the political, legal, and economic thought of the Mexican revolutionary Lorenzo de Zavala, and shows how he tried to resolve the complex relationship between international finance, Mexico’s pursuit of a robust constitutional framework, and the price of independence.

Keywords: odious debt, Latin America, international law, constitutionalism, Spanish Empire