One of a flood of publications inspired by the approach of the five-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, this book seeks to provide a “manageable, sufficient, and authoritative” account of the history of the community formed since the end of the fifteenth century by the interaction of Spain and Portugal, on the one hand , and Spanish America and Brazil, on the other. Leaving aside the question whether this book can in fact satisfy the varying needs of “the scholar, the student, and the common man” (p. 23) for whom it is apparently intended, it represents a commendable collaborative effort to provide a succinct yet wide-ranging synthesis of the political, economic, social, and cultural history of this vast “community.”
Inevitably, however, the making of a work of this kind is attended by certain problems, among them space limitations that sometimes result in superficial treatments. A closely related problem is the uneven quality of the essays; some manage to compress valuable information and stimulating ideas in an interesting way; others are little more than brief, uninspiring recitals of facts. The criteria for topic selection and for depth of coverage raise another question. In the volume on the colonial period I was struck, for example, by the contrast between the relative neglect of the dynamics of Ibero-Indian relations, the evolution of labor and land tenure systems, Indian and black slave resistance and the like—subjects on which a large literature has arisen in recent decades—and the considerable attention given to such theoretical and juridical issues as “just titles” and “just war” (presented primarily from the accommodationist viewpoint of Francisco de Vitoria, with little effort to present the very different viewpoint of Bartolomé de las Casas). Readers may also wonder why, in the twentieth-century section of the second volume, only Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba are singled out for separate coverage among Latin American countries (evidently to insure balance, Cuba is the subject of two essays, a warmly supportive account of the Cuban Revolution by a Cuban historian and a more critical survey by a French scholar).
This book was published under the auspices of the Spanish Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana. Not unexpectedly, a number of the essays have a distinct hispanista tinge, beginning with the lively introduction by Arturo Uslar Pietri. This Venezuelan writer stresses the “sincere anguish” with which the Spanish monarchs struggled to ascertain what were their “just titles” to the Indies and what were the rights of the Indians and attacks “the ominous Black Legend which has endured down to our own days” (pp. 31-32). Uslar Pietri cautions Latin America against adhering to an exclusive “Third Worldism” or “Pan Americanism,” urges its integration with the European part of the Iberian world, and calls attention to the economic, political, and cultural potential for such integration. Similar warnings and calls for forging Iberoamerican unity are sounded in other parts of the book by José Manuel Pérez Prendes (Spain), Joaquim Verissimo Serrão (Brazil), and Silvio Zavala (Mexico).
