Stanley Stein, the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor in Spanish Civilization and Culture, Emeritus, and professor of history, emeritus, died Dec. 19, 2019, at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center following a brief illness. He was 99.
A scholar of Brazilian and Mexican history and 18th-century Spain, Stein served as the inaugural director of Princeton’s Program in Latin American Studies.
He wrote extensively on Latin American and Spanish economic and social history, and the legacies of colonialism and slavery. His book “Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County 1850-1890, The Roles of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society” (1957) is a social and economic study of the origins, apogee and decline of coffee production in Brazil.
Stein published a series of monographs jointly with his wife, Barbara Hadley Stein, also a distinguished historian and Princeton University Library’s first bibliographer for Latin America, Spain and Portugal. Their collaborative work included “The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective” (1970); “Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe” (2000); “Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759-1789” (2003); “Edge of Crisis: War and Trade in the Spanish Atlantic, 1789-1808” (2009); and “Crisis in the Atlantic Empire: Spain and New Spain 1808-1810” (2014).
Stein also is co-author with Roberto Cortés Conde of “Latin America, a Guide to Economic History, 1830-1930.”
“He was the first real Latin American historian and the first real Latin American scholar at Princeton,” said Jeremy Adelman, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History. “He had a long and remarkable life, and he was intellectually engaged to the end.”
Read more at News at Princeton.
A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. on April 18, 2020, at the Princeton University Chapel.
Donations in Stein’s memory can be made to Princeton University Library.
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