Herbert S. Klein
Senior Fellow

Expertise: Comparative economic and social history and change in Latin America and the United States

Herbert S. Klein is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a professor of history and the director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University.

Klein received his B.A. in 1957 and his Ph.D. in 1963, both from the University of Chicago. Prior to his appointment at Stanford, he was the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia University.

He is the author or co-author (in several languages) of more than 20 books and 150 articles on Latin America and on comparative themes in social and economic history. Among these 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), and Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750–1850 (coauthored) (2003), as well as four books on Bolivian history, the latest of which is Haciendas and Ayllus: Rural Society in the Bolivian Andes in the 18th and 19th Centuries (1993) and A Concise History of Bolivia (2003). He has also published The American Finances of the Spanish Empire, 1680–1809 (1998), A Population History of the United States (2004) and Brazil since 1980 (coauthored) (2006).

His long-term interests are in comparative economic and social history. He is currently working on twentieth-century social change in Latin America and the United States.

He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Fulbright lecturer (several times), and a postdoctoral fellow at Yale and Oxford.