As the greatest historian in our language discovered, when the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of his masterpiece appeared in 1776, the undermining of a widely held prejudice is an operation fraught with risks. Unlike Edward Gibbon, William Safer does not deliberately set out to demolish myths—in this case, the tenacious Chilean myths surrounding the War of the Pacific, so often recalled as the singleminded effort of a united, organized nation winning justified success on the battlefield—but his exercise in what Gibbon once called “the candid severity of history” is unlikely to be read with much pleasure by Chilean nationalists. This assumption is perhaps enhanced by Sater’s occasionally somewhat trenchant style. His book, however, is an important contribution to our knowledge of Chilean history, and I recommend it very warmly to anybody interested in that subject. It is a study based on impressive research; the mass of detail, indeed, is almost intimidating at times. The author has made very thorough use, in particular, of the national and local press, which helps him to present a varied and often colorful panorama of Chile’s national life during the War of the Pacific.
Sater’s book deserves a much longer review than I can give it here. He has no difficulty in establishing that (contrary to what has always been believed in Peru and Bolivia) Chile entered the war hesitantly and reluctantly, that the country muddled through rather than mobilized systematically, and that life behind the lines (in this case far removed from the country’s heartland) went on pretty much as usual. One of Safer’s best chapters is on the short-term economic consequences of the war. (The book has a valuable statistical appendix.) On the often debated question of the war’s impact on industrial growth, he finds that it was less the military demand (much materiel was bought from abroad) than the conquest of the northern deserts and the new markets this implied that fueled the undoubted expansion of industry in these years. (Research by Luis Ortega and others, of course, has long since demolished the old view that industry in Chile began with the war.) There are many other themes—fiscal policy, politics, the government’s mean attitude to returning veterans—explored in this rich, multifaceted book. Sater concludes that the war did a disservice to Chile, in that the conquest of the nitrate zone (and the economic windfall that followed) allowed the country to avoid having to make radical changes in its fiscal system or social structure. Here, of course, he is on common ground with several Chilean writers of the early twentieth century.
A word to the University of Nebraska Press. When notes are gathered together at the end of a book, it helps to have some sort of page referencing at the top of each page of notes. Otherwise, as here, it becomes tediously time consuming to locate a particular reference. The editing could have been tougher: there is no good reason why Los Anjeles and Eulojio Altamirano should be spelled thus nowadays, even if that is how they were spelled then. Finally, a very mild reproof to Sater: I think he should have indicated that the verse epigraphs he uses for chapter 10 and the epilogue come from popular songs of the 1960s rather than from the time of the war itself.
