In 1861 José María Samper wrote that “the European world has made more effort to study our volcanoes than our societies; it knows our insects better than our literature, the crocodile of our rivers better than the acts of our statesmen. . . .” Malcolm Deas comments that “the protest is still a valid one” (pp. 537-538). Not, however, if enough people will read the massive tomes in this comprehensive history of Latin America. Then the Cambridge University Press could congratulate itself that Latin America’s human society is at least as well understood as its hexapoda and crocodilia.
Readers will get their library’s money’s worth even if they read only selectively. The editor, the contributors, reviewers, and panicked graduate students may be the only ones to read entire volumes. This is a pity because Volume III (of eight) is a superbly integrated collection of 18 essays by some of the very best historians of Latin America.
This volume attacks the problem which plagues all teachers of nineteenth-century Latin American history: how to make sense out of disparate societies in diverse regions moving at unequal rates of political and economic change. Leslie Bethell, both general editor and editor of each volume, wisely commissioned a mixture of country-by-country histories and thematic essays to provide linkages. The result is a finely honed collection in which chapters by John Lynch on the origins of independence and by D. A. G. Waddell on international politics bracket part one’s regional histories of the break with Spain. Postindependence Spanish America to 1870 is introduced by two linkage essays, one by Tulio Halperín Donghi on economics and society and the other by Frank Safford on politics and ideology. Country-by-country histories follow evenly against this backdrop. The volume concludes with two chapters on Brazil and Gerald Martin’s overview of cultural history.
Within this broad design there is much subtle interaction among the contributors. Lynch, for example, sets the scene for Timothy Anna’s piece on Mexico and Central America. Anna then provides sufficient detail about 1808 to make clear its importance for the whole empire. David Bushnell, who grapples with all of Spanish South American independence, has no need to recapitulate the events of 1808 in Spain.
The bibliographic essays which comprise the last 78 pages of the volume deserve mention in midreview and not as an afterthought. They help fill the historiographic void left since Howard Cline’s two edited volumes of Latin American History (1967) and Charles Griffin’s Guide . . . (1971). Monographic literature and unpublished dissertations are well served. Even though periodical listings are slighted, these pages will soon become dog-eared.
Individual chapters can be characterized only briefly. Lynch catches the temper of the late Bourbon years. For him consolidation was a “careless and ignorant measure” and a “supreme example of bad government” (p. 15). Anna’s lucid treatment of Mexican and Central American independence reflects his research on the Mexico City cabildo and viceroys, and the ways that the Cortes and the king alternately found to help lose the empire. Bushnell’s tour de force overcomes the tendency to treat the independence of each part of Spanish South America separately. Instead, he stresses the interaction among regions. As news spread from Spain to Venezuela in early 1810, events there prompted power sharing and new juntas in Cartagena, Bogota, and Quito. Bethell’s engaging history of Brazil’s independence takes pains to explain Portugal’s role. The move of the Braganzas to Rio de Janeiro was not merely a desperate response to French invasion, but a long-considered geopolitical option. Waddell explores the thickets of diplomacy until 1850. British neutrality during independence emerges as a thankless task given patriot pressures and Spain’s expectations of its ally.
Puerto Rico is curiously omitted from part two on the Caribbean. Frank Moya Pons, in his admirable if depressing history of Hispaniola, provides a detailed account of the Haitian Revolution, an event echoed repeatedly in other chapters. Hugh Thomas on Cuba, for instance, is unequivocal that Haiti’s example was responsible for Cuba’s rejection of a route to independence. Someone should have tested this thesis for Puerto Rico, at the very least.
The eight chapters on postindependence Spanish America are richly detailed. Halperin Donghi includes a four-page treatise on the failure of mining to recover adequately from the wars. Safford’s memorable essay explores the many facets of lost political legitimacy, the roots of caudillismo, and the nature of generational change by midcentury. Jan Bazant’s magisterial history of Mexico includes a fascinating insight, derived from Lorenzo Zavala, on Vicente Guerrero’s execution in 1831. Guerrero, a mestizo, was too closely associated with independence and its implicit “threat of social and racial subversion.” His death was “perhaps a warning to men considered as socially and ethnically inferior not to dare to dream of becoming president” (p. 434). Ralph Woodward deals adroitly with Central American demographics, Carrera’s power base, British interests, and William Walker’s filibuster. Deas, who covers the countries of Gran Colombia, incisively attacks the superficial observations of foreign visitors and shows that it is “easy to exaggerate the intensity and extent of disorder” (p. 528). Heraclio Bonilla’s chapter is valuable for its attention to the implications of the ill-fated Peru-Bolivia Confederation (1836-39), and leads smoothly into Simon Collier’s deftly handled piece on Chile. Lynch, in his second contribution, makes “What was rosismo?” the pivotal question for the River Plate (p. 636). He demonstrates that “cruelty had its chronology,” with terrorism most intense in 1839-42 when Rosas was under greatest pressure (p. 643).
In the first essay of part four on Brazil, Bethell and José Murilo de Carvalho tell an intricate tale of regional rebellion, slavery, and British intervention. Richard Graham, writing on Brazil from 1850 to 1870, includes an excellent account of the origins of the Paraguayan War.
The volume concludes with Martin’s stricture that “if critics or historians are ‘disappointed’ by what they find in the art and literature of Latin America of this period, it behooves them to explain what they were expecting to find” (p. 839). The insects and the crocodiles ask the same of political and socioeconomic scholars. Happily, the ones in this volume respond.
