The fourth volume of the Cambridge History of Latin America explores in a topical way the subcontinent’s history during the heyday of desarrollo hacia afuera. The powerful opening essay, “Latin America and the International Economy (1870-1914)” by William Glade, is a dazzling tour de force that successfully lays the ground for the composite image of the socioeconomic history of the 60 years preceding the 1929 depression, built up in the following chapters. Supported by a total mastery of the uneven but overwhelmingly abundant economic information available on those decisive decades, and of the conflicting interpretations that have fed many heated debates in recent years, Glade is able to reach a conclusion that is not only sensible and balanced, but more challenging than his low-key language would suggest. He tells his readers that by 1914, while “precapitalist forms of economic organization remained … in many areas of Latin America … the mode and relations of production characteristic of modern capitalism … subsumed all the other sectors to its logic” (p. 56). Thus, he not only achieves an easy transition from the language preferred by U.S. historians/economists to that of the discussions on “modos de producción” that influenced Latin American historiography in recent years, but also provides an authoritative answer to the core questions on which both ideological traditions are, as he rightly argues, closer than it would appear at first glance.
The other socioeconomic chapters do not repeat this tour de force. They do not have to, since they focus on some specific features in the landscape powerfully sketched in the first chapter. Not that they avoid addressing issues of their own. Rosemary Thorp examines the economy in 1914-30 and successfully challenges the view that sees 1929 as a total break with the past, brought about by an exogenous cause, by describing the progressive exhaustion of desarrollo hacia afuera during the period she studies. Colin Lewis offers his views on the elusive industrialization that did or did not occur before the depression. In his chapter on the rural sector, Arnold Bauer presents a thoughtful descriptive and analytical (but almost casuistic) overview of rural Latin America, rather than the challenging general interpretations of his previous writings on the subject. As could be expected, Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, the late James Scobie, and Manuel Moreno Fraginals offer short, masterly pieces on population, the cities, and the plantation economies, and Michael Hall and Hobart Spalding trace a competent, but necessarily sketchy, overview of the labor movement.
Among the nonsocioeconomic chapters, the one on political and social ideas, by Charles Hale, rivals the opening chapter in scope and analytical soundness. Supported by an unsurpassed mastery of the vast ideological production of nineteenth-century Latin America, Hale does justice both to the strong continuities that underlay the dramatic ideological reorientations from liberalism to positivism and beyond, and to the more gradual but incremental shifts in direction nevertheless achieved during the period.
John Lynch’s chapter on the Catholic church is, as could be expected, full of solid and astute insights, even if at times it reads more like a contribution to the current discussions among Catholics on the proper role of the church than like a straightforward exploration of its history during a crucial transition. Similarly, Robert F. Smith’s chapter on Latin America, the United States, and the European powers offers both more and less than it promises. Its author’s close identification with the second actor in this drama is reflected, if not in an apologetic tendency he has learned to keep under tight control, then in an approach that places it in a U.S., rather than in a Latin American, context. Gerald Martin, writing on letters and arts, strives to avoid the eclectic character to which such overviews are so prone by projecting their development on a firm sociohistorical canvas, and manages to offer a coherent and lively general presentation with only occasional lapses into arbitrary judgment.
Even the less successfully integrated sections of this book are contributions of scholarly merit and intellectual distinction, which add to a very impressive collection.
