Few developing countries can claim the twentieth-century accomplishments achieved by Venezuela. From a backward caudillesque country at the end of the nineteenth century, the land of Bolívar has become a modern industrializing nation complete with a functioning two-party democratic system. Ewell’s Venezuela: A Century of Change offers a full and careful analysis of the country’s political, social, economic, and cultural changes.
The first two chapters focus on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Venezuela, primarily to set the stage for the analysis and description of the changes to come. Based on a structure defined by political chronology, Ewell weaves political, economic, social, and cultural analysis into a dense but clearly presented narrative that gives the reader an excellent sense of the interrelated nature of the process she describes.
Following these introductory chapters, which bring us to the beginning of the petroleum boom in 1923, the book divides the rest of the century through 1983 into five chapters, each designed around one of the main political eras in Venezuela’s recent past. This chronology, more or less standard among Venezuelanists, centers on the dominant personality of each period: Juan Vicente Gómez, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Rómulo Betancourt, Raúl Leoni and Rafael Caldera, Carlos Andrés Pérez and Luis Herrera Campins. Notwithstanding the strong emphasis on the flow of political events, so important for understanding the Venezuelan past, Ewell includes a remarkable amount of economic and social analysis that takes the book well beyond a political history.
Among general histories of Venezuela, Ewell’s book provides the best and most thorough treatment of the country’s twentieth-century development. The book is especially strong because of its consistent effort to relate cultural developments to contemporaneous political and economic processes. If it has a flaw it may be that the heroic effort to integrate economics, politics, society, and culture sometimes overwhelms the narratives with names, dates, numbers, and other data, obscuring for a time the book’s analytical thrust and thematic structure.
Ewell has, nonetheless, provided an outstanding interpretation of twentieth- century Venezuela. Solidly prepared, amply documented, and carefully written, this integrated analysis of society, politics, culture, and economics is a must for anyone interested in understanding Venezuela’s recent past.
