Initialed notices were written by Frank T. Bachmura, Wesley Hurt, Richard Kagan, David M. Pletcher, and Bobert E. Quirk, all of Indiana University.
Robin A. Humphreys, the dean of British historians in the Latin American field, has gathered together for this volume a collection of lectures, addresses, and articles, all of them published before, but almost none in the United States. The book is thus a welcome convenience for American scholars. One may well hope that Humphreys will yet give us a grand synthesis on his specialty, the Independence period. Nevertheless, several of these essays afford us a farsighted view over more limited subjects.
The title of the book is deceptive, for the initial essay, to which it refers, is the only one to develop the dilemma of old and new at any length, and it does not penetrate into the matter very far. The real theme of the book is the relationship between Britain and the nascent republics of Latin America, as well as the triangle which appeared when the United States began to play an influential part in the area.
Thus Humphreys examines the role of British merchants and of Anglo-American rivalries in the Independence movements and goes on into the nineteenth century to deal in some detail with Anglo-American rivalries in Central America and Venezuela, the latter as background to the crisis of 1895. In neither of the last two cases does he radically change existing interpretations, but the essays are—like all the others—scholarly, informative, compact, and gracefully written.
While Humphreys acknowledges the importance of economic, social, and cultural forces, he is primarily concerned with politics and diplomacy in most of the essays. To vary the pace, he devotes three to historiography—a catalogue of works on the revolutions for Independence and two sparkling little biographical epitomes of William Robertson and William H. Prescott, symbols of the Anglo-American interest in Latin America. These two essays are among the best in the book.
As Humphreys points out to us again, the British had a stake in Latin America both before and after the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine. The mixture of cooperation and rivalry which followed needs to be compared and integrated with Anglo-American relations in the Far East and other parts of the world. Perhaps such an enterprise will help to illuminate the origins of the more recent struggles between ex-colonial powers and their onetime wards—a dichotomy of tradition and revolt which Humphreys may have had in the back of his mind when he chose his title essay.
