America, América: A New History of the New World. By GregGrandin, London: Torva, 2025. xxiii +745 pp. £30.00 (hardcover), £22.58 (paperback), ISBN: 978‐1‐911709‐90‐9

In his 1840 masterwork, Democracy in America, Alexander de Tocqueville considered why the Spanish colonies of the New World had failed to follow the trajectory of egalitarian democracy that he perceived in the United States. It was, he concluded, a matter of ‘manners’ (or what we would probably call ‘culture’) and laws. Anglos had good ones; the Spanish did not. (His thoughts on the ‘manners’ of the 80% of the continent that was indigenous… he failed to mention.) It's not a great section of Democracy and was based on precisely no time in Latin America. But it is an assertion that has had considerable legs. In fact, it shapes contemporary hemispheric politics. Though the United States and Latin America share a similar geography and initial history, their fates have diverged. Why? Because there is something deep set in Anglo culture, which makes its holders more adept at establishing an egalitarian, democratic and wealthy state. It is an assertion that underpins the tables and graphs of development economists, predetermines the regression analyses of Nobel Prize winners, and provides a basis for the racist rhetoric and mass deportations of Trump-era America. It is also, according to Greg Grandin's provocative and superbly-written new book, wrong. Latin Americans were the first imperialists to view the conquered as human beings just like them; they were the frock-coated 19th-century lawyers that attempted to implement a legal system to minimise inter-state violence; and they were the modern-day socialists that attempted to build nations that balanced democracy with social redistribution. The Americans? In popular parlance, they were the baddies. They were the savages. That is except during a brief period under Franklin D. Roosevelt, where certain well-meaning US bureaucrats ‘got’ Latin Americans and used many of their ideas to weld together a coalition of social democracies in opposition to the fascists. Grandin starts his tale at the beginning of Spanish colonialism. After the horrors of the conquest, Bartolome de las Casas, law professors like Francisco de Vitoria and his student, the archbishop of Lima, Jerónimo de Loayza y González, were the first imperialists to publicise imperial atrocities; they were the first to argue reason, not divine right, were the foundation of the laws of nations (pagans and Protestants could be sovereign); and they tried to do something about it, in the courts of Imperial Spain, and in the mines, plantations and churches of colonial Latin America. In Grandin's poignant words, De las Casas's works ‘pointed towards a modern ethics of equality. In this, he was a kind of Adam’ (p. 52). In the century after Independence, Latin American jurists like Carlos Calvo and Juan Bautista Alberdi pushed for an international order comprised of free, sovereign nations. Invasion of any nation was not a natural right; it was crime. During the twentieth century Mexico's revolutionary leaders provided a roadmap for social democratic change, standing up to US capitalists, nationalising the oil companies and divvying up land among the people. And they did so without sacrificing (much) democracy. It was a roadmap, which was not only taken up by other Latin American countries, but also by Roosevelt's gang of depression-struck capitalists and policy-minded academics. And it was a roadmap that later meshed with the ideas of progressive Catholics. Moreover, in Grandin's hands it is a riot. Few history books contain so many well-drawn biographical sketches, pointed but entertaining anecdotes, and (an underestimated historian's skill) well-chosen quotations. There are the beatas revelanderas or blessed prophets, like María Pizarro, who gathered a following of ‘erotic mystics… who used sex, or had sex forced on them, as a way of reaching the divine’ (p. 58). There is another man-out-of-time, the Chilean Francisco Bilbao, a proto-feminist and atheist, who saw patriarchal family authority as the basis for colonialism and authoritarianism. And there is Camilo Torres, the Colombian poster boy for a liberation theology, which Grandin provocatively describes as possessing ‘an intellectual vitality that should be considered equal to Europe's Enlightenment’ (p. 589). Some of his turns of phrase are outstanding. They possess a stripped-down elegance and should be endlessly requoted. America's divergent histories of colonialism and disease, for example, are summed up as follows. ‘When the Spanish came, and death followed. When the English came, death took point’ (p. 69). Finally, the writing is layered with an affecting and world-weary irony which offers some respite after pages and pages of colonial or neo-colonial crimes. Grandin then manages to tick the first three boxes of popular history. The book is provocative; it is somewhat persuasive; and it is entertaining. And yet, for a 750-page tome it is also profoundly unsatisfying. And at its heart it contains the same cultural determinism (this time reversed) as De Tocqueville's Democracy. In the brief window between the publication of America, América and this review, there have already been some less-than-positive responses to the book. They have ranged from borderline deranged misreadings (Felipe Fernandez-Armesto in the Times Literary Supplement) to precise and intelligent critiques (Patrick Iber in the New Republic and Nicolás Medina Mora in Dissent). Grandin has publicly responded to these rather ungraciously. As a result, I shall try to make my own criticisms with care and the hope that reviews in academic journals slip beneath Grandin's gaze. The book tries to capture a new history of 500 years in just 750 pages. As a result, there are plenty of grand assertions and simplifications, which experts will quibble over. His reading, for example, of the Mexican Revolution as a nationalist insurrection against US capitalists is one-dimensional to say the least. It is based on controversial evidence compiled by John Mason Hart, a handful of good quotes, and a refusal to engage with the piles of scholarship which argues that anti-American nationalism had nothing to do with it. (In 10 years of civil war revolutionaries only killed a few dozen of the alleged 70,000 Americans in the country; although they were far fewer, they killed hundreds, perhaps even thousands of Chinese). But, with such a popular history, such critiques—I think—are less important. There's an element of truth to the argument; it ties in with the general vibe; and most readers don't care. Instead, I want to concentrate on what I believe are the four biggest weaknesses of the book. First, the text is a stylistic hodgepodge. It is not a history of Latin America or the Americas (despite the title and the urging of his editor to explore the colonial period). Important swathes of history are pared down or ignored because they are well-trod (the Cuban Revolution and the Guatemalan coup), irrelevant (there is nothing on the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries), or rather undermine the central argument (Brazil, with its 7 million slaves and brutal racial hierarchy, gets barely a mention, nor does the heavy indigenous involvement in the Spanish conquest, nor does the apocalyptically brutal War of the Triple Alliance). It is probably closest to a historical essay—a revisionist take on a subject until now thought well understood. Yet the form undermines this. Anecdotes are entertaining but do not make good argument. And Grandin refuses to engage point-blank with any of the obvious counterarguments to his thesis. Finally, despite the ripping style, nor is it a light, breezy intro to Latin American politics. 750 pages will do that. Now I am all for stylistic innovation, academic mestizaje. But Grandin's particular choice,—what I henceforth dub AHR-meets-the-New-Yorker or the anecdoticle—is too thin to be history, too full of holes to be argument and too damn long to be the thing you read on the beach in Cancun. Second, the book suffers from a profound misunderstanding of the mechanics of international relations. Grandin relies heavily on speeches and letters from diplomats, especially in the second half of the book. They buttress the idea that Latin American jurists pushed for state sovereignty, non-intervention, and even a kind of proto charter of human rights during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet he rarely, if at all, asks who these jurists were or why they were speaking at these long-forgotten conferences. In general, Latin American diplomats have fallen into two categories. There are the potential malcontents, like Octavio Paz who was sent as ambassador to India just as the Cold War hotted up. These were often allowed to make high-minded speeches at international conferences, not because they possessed some essential national id, but because it made Latin American countries look good on the international stage and because they were not doing so in front of an audience of the ravenous poor back home. They were, in short, not taken seriously. During the 1889–1890 Pan American Conference, for example, well-meaning Latin Americans had pushed for arbitration between nations, due process and equal protection in international law in the face of US opposition. When the conference ended, no Latin American country presented any of their proposals to their legislatures. Why? According to Grandin, they didn't think it worth it without US ratification. Or perhaps, more hardnosed Latin American politicians thought their diplomats pious and irrelevant windbags? The other model of Latin American diplomat was the aggressive capitalist, who wanted to keep the United States out of their countries to prevent economic competition. Carlos Calvo, for example, was a 19th-century Argentine jurist. He argued that America's nations were free, foreign nations, that this precluded foreign intervention, and that foreigners in these sovereign nations were protected by national law rather than the (potentially military) intervention of their home nation. He is one of Grandin's frock-coated utopians. Yet the reason Calvo argued thus was not some deep reading of De las Casas; it was the desire to annihilate the indigenous Argentines, run railways into their homeland, and set up mines and plantations without paying the Americans. Third, the book lacks any causal explanations whatsoever. Readers might ask why Latin Americans came up with some ideas and Americans others. Or at least why these ideas stuck in one place rather than the other? These are important; some might even say, the key questions. But despite the length of the book, they are flatly ignored. For example, was it geography? Did Latin America's steep mountains and impenetrable jungles mitigate against the kind of rapacious imperialism of the north. Did they shape polities where a degree of anarcho-communitarianism was built in? Was it death? Did the annihilation of Latin America's indigenous populations force the Spanish empire to listen to its critics and shape a new, protective shell of quasi-egalitarian legalism and village-focused worship? Was it economics? Was it differing appreciations of risk and profit which drove Latin Americans to seek universalism and peace, and Americans to devote themselves to sustaining racial hierarchies and war? Maybe it was just plain old contingency? In brief forays into causal arguments, Grandin claims it was a Europe's fire-sale of weapons post-World War I that upped Latin American interstate conflict during the 1920s. And it was the Nazis that forced Roosevelt into adopting a more ‘Latin American’ approach to politics. Most probably—as none of these causal factors are really given a look in—Grandin, like De Tocqueville, thinks it was culture. Yet, he offers little insight into what culture. Was it Catholicism, with stress on the cult of poverty, its universal aspirations, and its political might? Was it the culture of the Latin American and Spanish elites—who are really the only voices we hear during the book? (It is spectacularly old fashioned in this way). Or was it actually the Latin American peasants, slaves, and Indians, who forced these ideas onto their elites by refusing, reformulating, resisting and running away? Fourth, the last third of the book fails to engage in any meaningful way with the tension between political democracy and social redistribution. For Grandin, the right, both in the US and Latin America, hated both. So, it created dictatorships and allied with capitalists. But what about Mexico, or Cuba, or Venezuela, or Nicaragua, or Bolivia, or Uruguay, or Costa Rica? These all embraced at one time or another democracy, the distribution of land, and the rapid expansion of social services. Yet—often at a quite alarming rate—they morphed into authoritarian regimes, or at least what political scientists deemed to be so. Why? American pressure? Homegrown elite pressure? Homegrown petit bourgeois pressure? Was there a sector of most Latin American countries that didn't read De las Casas and developed their own appreciations of private property and racial hierarchy independent of the United States? Or are these accusations of authoritarianism overstated? Did high-level authoritarianism actually mask ongoing grassroots democracy—like some argue for contemporary China? Who knows what Grandin thinks? Socialist countries are dropped from the narrative as soon as a president gains a second term. These are historical inconveniences, as irrelevant to Grandin's text as Tlaxcaltecan imperialists, murderous Latin American jurists, dead Paraguayans or Brazilian slavery. In conclusion, Grandin's book had the potential to be the revisionist text on Latin America. It could have been a readable and powerful amalgamation of understanding from a generation that has crossed from righteous anger at the US-driven dirty wars of the 1980s to the intellectually fertile wilds of cultural and subaltern history. It could have gone further. It could have argued that Latin America was not only a font of ideas, but also a relatively successful laboratory for these ideas. This is the real radical position. As long as Latin Americans could avoid a mine, a railway or an American, for the last two centuries life in the world's first multicultural experiment has been good, at least in relative terms. No big wars; no mass pogroms; leaps in continental life expectancy that were only outstripped by North America. Grandin could have really turned De Tocqueville on his head. Sadly, it is not that book. It is a well-meaning, often disarmingly eloquent, but oddly rather thin and top-down collection of three provocative arguments and a host of wildly entertaining anecdotes. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.