A major contribution to the history of international relations, this book covers an enormous area in which the monographic literature is encyclopedic, but good surveys almost nonexistent. Like Herbert Feis’ Europe, the World’s Banker, 1870-1914, of which it is perhaps the most obvious successor, it is organized by topics and areas rather than by periods of time. Unlike Feis’ work—and perhaps because it leaves out France, Germany, and Russia as major subjects—it treats comprehensively non-European sectors such as Africa, the Far East, and Latin America.

While Latin America is allotted only one chapter of 44 pages near the end, specialists in Latin American foreign affairs should not miss this chapter. To be sure, Platt suffers from the scarcity of good monographs on British relations with individual Latin American countries, for only Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico have received detailed attention. Also his chapter is basically tendentious and a little defensive, for he has set out to prove that Britain did not follow an interventionist policy in Latin America and that international bankers did not dominate the Foreign Office. But if he is arguing most of the time, he does it vigorously and uses British government documents effectively to establish his points.

“Fair and equal treatment, not favoured treatment, was what British diplomacy aimed to achieve for British trade in Latin America” (p. 316). Platt concedes that the blockades of the Plata during the 1840s may not have conformed to this pattern. He maintains most emphatically that British intervention in Mexican polities, 1913-1914, under the influence of Cowdray oil interests was only “a legend” (p. 325). Perhaps so, but one would like to see a little more scrutiny directed toward the activities of Sir Lionel Carden, British minister to Mexico in 1914, during his earlier days beginning in the 1880s, when he fought a running guerrilla campaign against American capital in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba. As Carden used the terms, “fair and equal” might be open to some semantic sleight-of-hand.

Concerning financial interference, Platt declares categorically: “Bondholder grievances, whatever the provocation, never became a determining factor in British policy in Latin America” (p. 346). This statement occurs in the course of short but pithy surveys of bond eases involving Mexico in the 1860s, Peru in the 1880s, and Venezuela after 1900. The last named is a useful addition to the literature on the Venezuelan Crisis of 1902.

At the end Platt concludes that “trade, in fact, was the beginning and end of British diplomacy in Latin America” (p. 352). Clearly he is a scholar who knows his own mind. Those who disagree with him had better be well acquainted with the output of H. M. Stationery Office.