Anthony Pagden at Literary Review:
South America’, declared the North American Review in the early 19th century, ‘will be to North America what Asia and Africa are to Europe.’ ‘Not quite,’ says Greg Grandin. But also not for want of trying. America, América is the by turns woeful, despairing and ironic tale of the USA’s sustained attempts to turn its southern neighbours into clients or dependencies, if not colonies. But it is also a passionate plea for a re-evaluation of the place of Spanish America, so often shunted off into the ‘Global South’, in the evolution of the modern global order. As with Grandin’s previous books – one of which, Empire’s Workshop, covers some of the same ground – it is written with great flair and imagination, scattered with scintillating turns of phrase and pervaded with a sense of barely suppressed indignation.
This is the story of how the ‘Western Hemisphere idea’ – the notion that the world is divided into two hemispheres, and that the peoples of the Western Hemisphere stand in a special relationship to one another – has evolved from the earliest encounters between Jefferson and Francisco de Miranda, companion in arms of Simón Bolívar, up to the present. It is also, however, the story of how the USA has consistently exploited the disunited states to its south. Some of the events Grandin describes are familiar: the seizure of the Panamanian president Manuel Noriega in 1989; the more hands-off meddling in the political affairs of Chile in the 1970s.
more here.
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