David Bushnell and Neill Macaulay have written a masterful synthesis on nineteenth-century Latin America. It is provocative, lucid, and well organized. Undergraduates will appreciate the authors’ ironic humor and efforts to connect the nineteenth century with the present. Graduate students will use it as a beacon to guide them through the maze of this confusing era.
The text has two major strengths. The authors deftly attain the always difficult balance between narrative and analysis by alternating synthetic overviews with studies of individual nations or groups of nations (such as Andean and Platine): the overview of politics in chapter 2 is a model essay. In addition, they employ a comparative approach to better elucidate the histories of individual countries. The comparison of the Liberal era in Mexico and Colombia, and then Argentina and Chile, provides the clearest interpretation of this period to date.
To their credit, Bushnell and Macaulay are not afraid to stir up controversy. They discount the power of informal imperialism and reject dependency as a framework (pp. 43-45), point out the difficulties of “class analysis” (pp. 51-54), and assert that “even boredom at times can be revolutionary” (p. 188).
The discussion of Latin American economies is strongest when it explains the obstacles to development in the first half of the century. The analysis is muddied somewhat when it deals with the transition period after 1850 when exporting to the world market emerged preeminent. The authors sharply contest the validity of dependency for “most of the nineteenth century, when the terms of trade favored producers of primary materials” (p. 292). The book, of course, ends in 1880 (at the end of the Liberal era), before the world market made its deepest inroads into Latin America.
The book has two weaknesses. The sections on Brazil are not as well integrated into the whole as those on Spanish America, and they are too detailed, especially the chapter on “The Rise of the Brazilian Monarchy.” More importantly—though, in fairness, properly placed under the heading of “the book I would have written” —while there is much interpretation to mine and contemplate, the authors do not set out an explicit, overall, interpretive theme or themes. These criticisms aside, Bushnell and Macaulay have written the standard work for the half century after independence.
