Latin American and World Histories: Old and New Approaches to the Pluribus and the Unum

Abstract

The rise of world history courses in American universities appears to pose important challenges to Latin American history. Some say that globalization dissolves cultural differences into a sort of transnational convergence. The end of the cold war, others claim, demotes the role of ideology in favor of pragmatic applications of international market verities. The assault on area studies in favor of a universal social science has heightened anxiety among historians and social scientists who labored away in their bounded national or regional modes. As if the pressure on Latin American historians to connect their stories to developments outside the region and to play down idiosyncratic features of the region’s past were not enough, “world” history has become a something of a rage. It is not a fleeting one, and it will have both salutary and possibly unfortunate effects on teaching and research agendas, especially as Americans come to terms (if fitfully) with the imperial dimensions of their “homeland.” If my own department is any gauge (local quirks aside), Latin Americanists (as well as Africanists and Asianists) are asked to be part of “world” groupings, while European and American history remain relatively immune from the pressures to integrate. To recast the dilemma in particular United Statesean terms, some feel that it is time for Latin American historians (and the subjects they study) to join the unum from their pluribus.Appearances can deceive. For one, this picture is overly stark. European and North American historians have been thinking about their subjects trans-nationally for some time. Nor are most world historians as counterposed to local history, especially of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, as might seem at first blush. Even the advocates of “big” history acknowledge that the past had to have a place in which to unfold and that all places are relatively bounded units. Though we might live in a global age, world history as a genre is almost as old as (albeit overshadowed by) national or regional history. While the two strains have been more estranged than engaged, there have been previous conjunctures through which they have affected each other’s developments.1There is, however, a special relationship between Latin American and world history that has a longstanding history of its own. It is important to acknowledge this intellectual heritage. To let the challenge of integrating regional or national history into world history pass as a new development neglects generations of historical debate in Latin America and obscures what Latin American history and its historians have contributed to world history. Furthermore, acknowledging the centrality of world history to the unfolding of Latin American historiography highlights what is so fraught, and therefore fertile, about the region’s past, and which lies squarely at the heart of its contested histories: the colonial makings of modernity in Latin America, and thus the imperial dimensions of the origins of modernity in Europe.This essay has a vaguely imperial mission—that is, to suggest that Latin American historians have a decisive contribution to make to world history. Today’s critiques of bounded area studies entail certain assumptions that are at odds with the creative ways in which Latin Americanists have for so long approached their subjects. It would be banal—but still true—to say that Latin American historians operate within historiographic traditions that link local and global developments. This essay makes an additional claim: that localized varieties of Latin American history are critical to how we understand world processes. In the rush to draw connections and show convergences, “big” history often misses the ways in which local or regional worlds (note the plural) disconnect and diverge—not because societies are the repositories of autonomous logics of development or survival, but because the structuring processes of world history create deep unevenness, inequalities, and new cycles of fragmentation. This is why although Latin America’s precolumbian cultures, their encounters with Europeans, and the colonial and postcolonial structures they developed may have unique and particularized histories, as a whole they address the ways in which power distributes itself and is reproduced on a world scale.2To some extent, these reflections come out of discussions (some more polite than others) I had over a number of years with my coauthors of a general book on world history. The book’s title, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern World from the Mongol Empire to the Present, conveys some of the ways in which we seek to combine world history with regional and local histories. Each of us was and is a historian of a particular spot in the world, and while we endeavored to compose a larger narrative of our times, we were committed to remaining faithful to our regional specializations, even when they seemed (as was often the case) to diverge from the master narrative. We came to see that this kind of fracturing was as much a part of the story of the world as the making of the unum. In a sense, we faced the dual challenge of integrating world history into regional history, as well as the other way around.3It helps to take some historiographic stock, if only to contextualize this conjuncture. For almost two centuries, Latin American historians have been grappling with the relationship between the region’s past and world developments. This should not be too surprising, given the importance that colonial experiences and heritages (to take Stanley and Barbara Stein’s words) have had on modern life. Even the “liberators” who sought to sever the formal ties between Iberia and its colonies acknowledged that it was much easier to dismantle the vestiges of imperial authority than it was to extirpate the very deep ways in which colonialism shaped social relations across Spain’s and Portugal’s American dominions.Latin American historiography has, since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, been torn between two narrative ambitions. The first responded to the urge to write about the past as the making of an exceptional and distinct people. The other involved storytelling that folded Latin American nations into a larger, universal narrative of human advancement. Was Latin America uniquely condemned to wrestle with its dual barbarian and civilized halves, as the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento suggested, or was its past the springboard to a higher phase of human development governed by a “cosmic race,” as the Mexican José Vasconcelos prophesized?The particularizing and generalizing narratives suggest very different valences. But they are not so logically distinct. For Sarmiento, while Latin America may have had unique, indelible features, its pathologies only made sense as part of a comparative framing; that is, Latin America’s epic experience was different from that of Anglo America, which was the Argentine writer’s implicit and explicit foil. A similar contrasting exercise held true for Vasconcelos. Whether particular or universal, the patterns of the Latin American past, and thus portents of its future, were premised upon the unbounded nature of colonialism—in contrast to, say, the bounded unity of national history writing and myth making in the United States (which is one of the reasons why the challenge of world history appears so new to the academic milieus of the North). The creation of a nativist or “telluric” literary and historical style was, in effect, conjured in opposition to a “Europeanizing” or cosmopolitan one, and vice versa. In Latin America, each acknowledged and needed the other.4Nonetheless, as the historical profession matured, the urge to particularize or generalize Latin American historical narratives proved a vital tension in the region’s historiography. First, consider the broader intellectual developments. If the nineteenth century saw the blossoming of “American,” “French,” and “English” history, it was also a period in which a universal, secular history found its theorists and raconteurs. Along with Bancroft, Michelet, and Macauley, we find Hegel and Marx, who, while hardly aficionados of the narrative voice, were nonetheless more than comfortable writing about historical development in unabashedly universal terms. By the time of the First World War, H. G. Wells, Arnold Toynbee, and Oswald Spengler were advocating a general history of human “civilizations” to accompany (or reinforce) the more familiar and professionalized “national” histories.The severing of national and universal history was more apparent than real. For Marx, as for Toynbee, a universal history had distinctly European features. As parallel tracks of civilization began to converge and overlap, each acquired similar personalities. There was, of course, much consideration of the world’s multiple civilizations (Christian, Asian, and so forth), but there was still a general drive toward a more synthesized, increasingly isomorphic globe, one that reflected Europe’s ability to use its commercial, cultural, and military resources to make a universal center. Thus, from an early stage, world history was synonymous with the “rise of the West” and therefore fully compatible with European stories of emerging national integration and greatness. To be sure, William McNeill’s foundational opus (not coincidentally entitled The Rise of the West) distanced itself from the triumphal language of the making of European peoples, but the organic relationship between a centered world and the privileged place of Europe in it is hard to miss.5From a Latin American perspective, world history’s Eurocentrism made sense, even for those who were struggling to compose new national narratives for emerging countries. Nineteenth-century historians such as José Manuel Restrepo, Bartolomé Mitre, and Lucas Alamán tended to see their own countries (Colombia, Argentina, and Mexico respectively) as enacting epic national variations on the impulse of Europe, and especially Christendom, to bring civilization to distant, “barbarian” outposts, and in so doing to create nation-states. In a sense, there was no incompatibility between national stories and universal ones—though there was plenty of frustration (or celebration) about just how much civilizing efforts penetrated local cultures. Octavio Paz captured the universal aspects of the Latin American past especially elegantly when he observed that “before having our own historical existence, we began by being a European idea. We cannot be understood if it is forgotten that we are a chapter in the history of European utopias. . . . In Europe, reality preceded the name. America, on the other hand, began by being an idea. A victory for nominalism: the name engendered reality.” There is an important twist here: that is, that what was so unique or exceptional about Latin American history was the extent to which it was so thoroughly the by-product of universal, and imperial, designs. So, from the get-go, there developed an intellectual heritage in Latin America that refused to separate the region’s past from the rest of the world. Indeed, what made it so exceptional was the ways in which efforts to generate more fully sovereign projects, tied to the bounded and realized unity of the nation-state, floundered.6Such stories about how Latin Americans matured into modern nations as reflections of more universal processes echoed through the twentieth century. What became known as a “modernization” approach to history, which tended to look at the clashing of “traditional” (status-bound and ascriptive) social norms with modern (rational and prescriptive) ones, flourished from the 1950s. This approach often showed how Latin America’s past could be synthesized as a tale of the enduring powers of its traditional properties. A long list of distinguished historians wrote, and continue to write, in this vein. A recent collection of essays poses the legitimate question, “Why did Latin America fall behind?”—necessarily a more global and comparative query—but frames most of the answers in terms of local, particularized personalities and institutions anchored in the region’s past (obstacles to free-flowing markets, persistent rent-seeking, etc.). One might object to what is called “fundamental attribution errors”: when observers attribute behaviors to characteristics that are internal to their “traits” or “essences.” But what should be clear is that these kinds of approaches never separated Latin America’s history from the rest of the world, even if there was a normative expectation that Latin America was “failing” because local residues were holding it back from joining the forward flow of universal history.7At the same time, a countercurrent also flourished. By the time a more revisionist, antiliberal historiography took root in the 1930s and 1940s, the uplifting narratives about civilization’s diffusion to the Atlantic peripheries had given way to a more critical view. Increasingly, Latin America was seen as being made by Europe, but as the victim of European material ambitions rather than as the repository of Europe’s civilizing aspirations. By the time that Caio Prado Junior wrote about the history of colonial Brazil, conquest and exploitation replaced conversion and uplift, and Latin America was made into Europe’s first and finest periphery—enabling Europe to position itself as the center of the world. It was not, therefore, that European conquest created modern societies abroad, but that imperialism created the conditions for European modernity. This was a foundational text for what burgeoned into a historical approach that Latin Americanists passed on to world historians: dependency theory. What characterized Latin America was not so much the binary clash of civilization and barbarism, tradition and modernity, but modernity’s “darker” side. Without this historical reckoning, narratives of the making of the modern world are more than just partial; they enable world history to be cast as the spread of Europe’s agentic mission over the rest, as if only the West had the capacity to rise of its own, endogenous accord.8In a sense, revisionists inverted what liberals celebrated, but they did not necessarily transcend it. It was still Europe that was the agentic history maker and Latin America a reactive place history only made sense as part of a governed by a a whole that had a distinctly centered European The attribution were in favor of narratives and of differences across the world that and What of Europe in Latin of endogenous Latin American behaviors that in the way of a more universal development of modern it was the what was universal was modernity’s to Latin America in its two were strains in Latin American of which had with world history. one in relationship to these all their internal it cannot be that Latin American history was never especially or from world history. So, what might be about traditions in take one that the bounded unity of the to a more international and thus had American historians in about be about Latin American In a sense, the was Latin America was the way it was because of world historical this may be the historiographic which as Latin American we might consider some The first is almost and that is the persistent of Latin America’s historical to its (or and thus to the rather that what made Latin America’s history was Latin America’s The is and it may well a of regional or national histories: that is, the that world, or general developments it was the of the or modernity The of the unum and the of the reflected the or ways in which these universal processes out to the of the world from their of This made it hard to see that the were so different not because they were part of a but because the whole was itself a and thus could not but to however, enable the historian to from that have come from Latin American historians as well as from world historians as world who have found the “rise of the West” narrative In effect, there has been a or more a of Latin American and world historians who integration as what makes part of world history, and which Latin Americanists to see the region and its own as shaped by being by two recent to the “big” In an important of world to some extent, its dependency that the unum may but that its in the a world local that cannot be to a and local developments not the of a or its of its For while which is critical to the nature of and which the of the of a a of for Latin its history cannot be from local and (and their the of these local the of exploitation would be To the story about the world local histories. So, in a sense, world history was not about the into the but almost the is and has since become a more developed position through the of on world and regional historiography. is, the world may have a center or a but its is itself a of other that are at being at the of at the This is a so let an European The World had a of those historians who to In that there was a world that the “rise of the showed that come and Furthermore, they can be or center be are the that on the that the The that and the world involved the ways in which or societies an about how to (which still to be the of conquest traditional and conversion of research in which Latin American historians a comparative given the of the of There are plenty of and even from such as and that cast Latin America in world that power over the between Latin America and the world was in one and by this as we were on Worlds Together, Worlds we often to as is, we were to Europe, the that even historians were and (to use the we this that we were to a master narrative of the world a center. long we that it was hard to the that the world had is other and as well as as in their history thus became one that to contextualize the making and of world What our text was a to the history of the of power in particular places the world’s peripheries of agentic We also to that this was not necessarily but a between the of the The that made the what they were also that such were as as the they The making of colonial societies was therefore internal to, and not the the rise of civilizations or the development of In this while acknowledging the importance of and we to the of into the is not, one might the only way to the There have been other efforts to draw upon Latin American history to make sense of world history that have Latin America’s role to than the rise of Europe or the The first is the and by which to look at human and why some societies had while others did Some of the historians the of the and not the rather more and between the and that the into and But what is important to about is that the to rather than vice had more to with the and to which than it did with European or a as a center that out to This is a kind of that the even if object to what has called one is very The Europe, and the of the Modern World took a the in it on its of Europe’s with its own internal play a he that Europe was the of the of the conquest of the What Latin America did was to Europe’s and enable to to join and for to in The book has an important and Latin America has a role to play in the global way of this as Latin American Nor to that this kind of world history is Latin American history. But is we to about for the of the to local and may have on the but this not make logically to the of the If the Europe’s of and was upon the creation of institutions to this This is why recent book on in colonial societies is such a it challenges the that were on to create The kinds of and are through the of colonial and postcolonial Latin the of and in for colonialism to from one to the world history in important the “rise of the West” narrative and that a new will have to one might to say about the But as a story about the it is For a more of how Europe was to Latin America’s integration into the

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