At the beginning of this ambitious and thought-provoking monograph, René Reeves asks the reader to reflect on a nagging question: if the Liberal reform of 1871 were such a political, economic, and social watershed in the modern history of Guatemala, why did it not engender the level of popular opposition that proved fatal to the first Liberal state in the 1830s? The answer, in Reeves’s view, is not just a minor historiographic concern but actually undermines most of the scholarship on Guatemala’s nineteenth-century national development. For more than a century, Reeves argues, historians have generally accepted a standard, Liberal-influenced outline of that period. Independence in 1821 led to the establishment of an idealistic, Western-oriented government whose progressive reforms alienated the tradition-bound masses and sparked a popular rebellion in 1837. This Conservative backlash brought to power Rafael Carrera, a populist caudillo who held the modernizing forces at bay until his death...
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