Britta H. Crandall, Russell C. Crandall. "Our Hemisphere"?: The United States in Latin America, from 1776 to the Twenty-First Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. xiv + 485 pp. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-300-24810-4.
Reviewed by Mark Petersen (University of Dallas)
Published on H-LatAm (December, 2022)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
“Our Hemisphere”? is a single-volume narrative history of US-Latin American relations since 1776. Its authors, Britta H. Crandall and Russell C. Crandall, have decades of experience in both advising US foreign policymakers and teaching this particular subject, and they seem to be writing with their students in mind. The Crandalls’ prose is clear and free of jargon. The authors streamline the text by eschewing in-text citations; instead, they name relevant scholars in the text and provide a list of sources for each chapter at the end. They organize the text into forty-two short historical vignettes, each contained in a short chapter, and emphasize the drama and colorful characters involved. All of this combined makes the book easy to read, navigate, and incorporate into course syllabi.
Overall, the authors succeed in presenting an engaging and well-balanced depiction of the unfolding relations between the United States and Latin America. In a brief introductory chapter, they outline the general ideas guiding their presentation of the material. The first is that relations with Latin America have been a significant—and sometimes defining—part of US foreign policy despite US policymakers’ occasional dismissive remarks about and periodic neglect of the region. The second is that there has never been “a monolithic US agenda toward Latin America” (p. 2). Instead, US-Latin American relations have included both conflict and cooperation and have involved varied interests, agendas, and voices within and without policymaking structures. This emphasis on “multivocality” (p. 21) puts the Crandalls firmly in line with new histories of both US foreign policy and inter-American affairs. Some of the best moments in the book come when the authors explore the multiple groups trying to shape US policy, often in conflict with one another. Finally, the history this book covers has been interpreted in a variety of ways, and the authors prefer the readers to judge for themselves. The authors take care to introduce historical debates throughout the text and weigh in from time to time. Their interventions are mainly to discourage what they view as overgeneralized conclusions about US policy.
The Crandalls organize the forty-two vignettes into four parts grouped chronologically. The first part covers over a century of history, from US independence in 1776 to US intervention in the Cuban War of Independence in 1898. The second part covers years of accelerating US imperialism and the shift to the Good Neighbor Policy, 1898-1940s. Parts 3 and 4 cover the Cold War, 1950-1991, and the “Post-Cold War,” 1989 to today, respectively. As that outline indicates, the vast majority of the book—nearly two-thirds—is about the last seventy years.
There is an obvious reason for this lopsidedness: US relations with Latin America intensified in the post-World War II period. Including a section on more recent events is especially useful for helping students trace persistent patterns in US policy up to today. Yet the authors’ choice also means that discussion of earlier periods is sometimes superficial and too narrowly focused on US relations with Mexico. In fact, the book neglects the significant engagements between Washington and South American nations in the decades following the independence era (1810s-20s). US participation in the slave trade to Brazil, the fateful US expedition to Paraguay in the 1850s, the war scare between the United States and Chile in 1891-92—these were not as clearly important as, say, the Mexican-American War, but they are worthy of note. Such episodes colored relations between Washington and South American governments well into the twentieth century. Moreover, they provide an opportunity to consider more fully the nature of and limitations to US power in the hemisphere overall.
Indeed, the book does not deliver a clear, overarching argument about US power and hegemony in the hemisphere. In part, this is a consequence of the book’s structure. The episodic organization hinders such a coherent analysis and diminishes the importance of some continuities in US policy and policymaking. One example is the intentional ways that Latin Americans sought to negotiate, resist, and sometimes harness US power in the hemisphere for their own agendas. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, some Latin American governments pursued decades-long strategies of managing US hegemonic aspirations with significant results.[1] Another continuity not fully explored is the role of policymaking bureaucracies and private think tanks on sustaining certain attitudes toward Latin America in Washington.[2] The occasional lack of attention to continuities comes through in the decision to label the current era “post-hegemonic,” a term that can be misleading without sufficient qualifications.[3]
In terms of sources, the Crandalls admirably draw on a mixture of both classic treatments on the subject and recent research. In parts 2 through 4, the text includes quotations from a variety of primary sources. In the introduction, the Crandalls preemptively address a potential line of criticism: they have largely left out sources from Latin America because they are “simply beyond the scope of an already sweeping topic” (p. 5). While that sentiment is understandable—authors of such an ambitious work must draw the line somewhere—it is also unfortunate. Engaging literature from Latin American scholars would have helped the authors think through how Latin Americans’ experience of the US presence “in” their region led them to push for certain policies from Washington.
In sum, this book is a valuable contribution to an already expansive field of literature. Despite its downsides, the book’s structure makes it a unique and engaging approach to US-Latin American relations. “Our Hemisphere?” does not break new ground in analysis, but is well worth reading and serves as a solid introduction to the complexities of US-Latin American relations.
Notes
[1]. See, for example, Max Paul Friedman and Tom Long, “Soft Balancing in the Americas: Latin American Opposition to U.S. Intervention, 1898–1936,” International Security 40, no. 1 (Summer 2015): 120–56; Juan Pablo Scarfi, “In the Name of the Americas: The Pan-American Redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine and the Emerging Language of American International Law in the Western Hemisphere, 1898–1933,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 2 (2016): 189–218; Veremundo Carrillo Reveles, “México en la Unión de las Repúblicas Americanas: El panamericanismo y la política exterior mexicana, 1889–1942” (PhD diss., El Colegio de México, 2018); and David Sheinin, Searching for Authority: Pan Americanism, Diplomacy and Politics in US-Argentine Relations (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1998).
[2]. One recent work that emphasizes this continuity is Lars Schoultz, In Their Own Best Interest: A History of the U.S. Effort to Improve Latin Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
[3]. Mark Petersen and Carsten-Andreas Schulz, “Setting the Regional Agenda: A Critique of Post-Hegemonic Regionalism,” Latin American Politics and Society 60, no. 1 (January 2018): 102–27.
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Citation:
Mark Petersen. Review of Crandall, Britta H.; Crandall, Russell C., "Our Hemisphere"?: The United States in Latin America, from 1776 to the Twenty-First Century.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58185
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