Volume 35, Number 3 · March 3, 1988
The Invention of Latin America
By Raymond Carr
The Cambridge History of Latin America: Vol. I, Colonial Latin America
edited by Leslie Bethell
Cambridge University Press, 645 pp., $75.00
The Cambridge History of Latin America: Vol. II, Colonial Latin America
edited by Leslie Bethell
Cambridge University Press, 912 pp., $80.00
The Cambridge History of Latin America: Vol. III, From Independence to c. 1870
edited by Leslie Bethell
Cambridge University Press, 945 pp., $85.00
The Cambridge History of Latin America: Vol. IV, c. 1870 to 1930
edited by Leslie Bethell
Cambridge University Press, 676 pp., $69.50
The Cambridge History of Latin America: Vol. V, c. 1870 to 1930
edited by Leslie Bethell
Cambridge University Press, 951 pp., $79.50
Upon her husband's becoming prime minister in 1886 Lady Salisbury was advised to pay no visits. 'So I never pay any,' she later told her friends, 'except to foreign ambassadresses. Of course I don't include those of the South American republics or any others of the people who live up trees.' 'The European world,' the Colombian Jose Maria Samper had complained in 1861, '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, and it has much more learning about how quinine bark is cut, or how hides are salted in Buenos Aires, than about the vitality of our infant democracy!' The protest, Malcolm Deas concludes in his survey of Venezuelan, Colombian, and Ecuadorian history after independence, is valid today. In the 1930s a Latin American posting was still regarded by British diplomats as a kind of exile. 'Not such as he,' the novelist Ann Bridge wrote of a rising diplomat, 'are sent to Bogotá.'[1] As late as the 1970s I asked Harold Macmillan how often Latin America cropped up in the Cabinet during his time in office. 'We once had a few discussions on Argentinian beef' was his reply. He professed—indubitably with characteristic exaggeration—never to have remembered reading a dispatch from a Latin American embassy.
Review, 5530 words
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