In the opening pages, and again in the introduction to the bibliography, Marcello Carmagnani underscores that this is not a book for specialists, but au essay to explain why the oligarchic state project failed to fulfill the political dreams and aims of the dominant upper class in Latin America. In the Italian original, he still speaks of the “great illusion” of the oligarchy, a whole scheme of domination and power. With a quite evident Marxian methodology, he poses the structural problems, the underlying contradictions he discovers, and the alternative solutions which could have been followed to avoid the crisis.
Although he never individualizes other authors and ideas he disclaims, Carmagnani carries forward several interesting and challenging new theories to explain the general development experienced by Latin America since the 1850s, when the Emopeanizcd elite took power to exploit the considerable economic resources for their own benefit, inserting their countries into the same context with the European industrialized nations, as suppliers of strategic raw materials.
After an argumentative introduction, three well-structured chapters describe the consolidation of the oligarchy, the golden age of supremacy, and the crisis which led to the decline of the ruling class, replaced by new democratic or populist mass movements. In short, like most of Carmagnani’s work, be provides an all-embracing and comprehensible image of the model he wants to demonstrate, including important variables like the relation with British capital, the interaction with the land, and the relations with the other social strata. In the last chapter, he expounds about the effects of the 1929 crisis on the oligarchy, but unfortunately goes on to blame U.S. capital investments and “imperialism” (pp. 193-232) for most of the negative backlash of the crisis.
No historical work is absolutely flawless, and more allowances must be made for a book with such a wide-ranging scope, but some errors cannot be ignored: making Sarmiento a native from Mendoza (p. 75) and not from San Juan; denying the existence of caudillo-type revolts in early nineteenth-century Brazil; calling Concepción a “new” Chilean province in the 1880s (p. 149); or declaring that the War of the Pacific saw the first U.S. intervention in international affairs in South America’s southern cone (p. 154). But these minor specks do not affect the historiographical value of the book.
