It is good news that this staple item is made available in a new, revised edition for another generation of students and scholars. Seldom is the essential spirit of an era so effectively caught as has been done in the subtitle of this volume, “America’s advantage from Europe’s Distress, 1783-1800.” The analysis of these years in American foreign policy which is presented here has not been superceded; indeed, subsequent scholarship has tended essentially to fill out this framework.
The pertinence of this work to students of Latin American history and culture should be obvious. An understanding of the general political and diplomatic situation in Europe in these years must precede a competent grasp not only of the alternatives before the rising young nation north of the Floridas, but also of subsequent developments in Latin America vis-à-vis Europe and the United States. The spectacle of a mother country retreating from pillar to post, taking mock-heroic satisfaction out of a deeply humiliating set-back, could hardly avoid lessening respect and stirring ambition in the provinces.
Professor Bemis’ art lies in putting the reader back with considerable exactitude into the pattern of relationships then prevailing among nations, avoiding awareness of outcomes, and preserving the freshness of the drama. He guides our hand as we put each piece of the diplomatic mosaic in its place and then leads us far enough away to see the whole design. The language of the book forms an appropriately simple and uncluttered vehicle for the scholarship and judgment which have given the book its place in American historiography.
A case could be made that America’s advantage sprang not from Europe’s distress but from Spain’s, and that this in turn sprang from Washington’s (and Hamilton’s) painful but astute gesture in making the Jay treaty. It is perhaps regrettable that James Wilkinson is described in colors so strictly black and white. Bemis seems to postulate an orthodox nationalism in the American west, where it could not yet possibly have emerged, and then castigates Wilkinson for not conforming to it. It is gratifying that thirty-four years after the original publication, this now appears as a paperback to assure much wider distribution and use.
