America, América

Historian Greg Grandin argues that the history of the modern world, including the rise of liberal multilateralism, cannot be understood without examining the rivalry between English-speaking North America and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America. The book traces this hemispheric contest from the sixteenth-century Spanish Conquest through the founding of the United Nations and into the present, contending that Latin America served as an "irrepressible critic" of the United States, challenging it not by rejecting its ideals but by accusing it of failing to live up to them.

The narrative opens with Francisco de Miranda, a colonel in the Royal Spanish Army who had fought alongside North American rebels, touring the newly independent United States in 1783. Miranda admired the republic's dynamism but recorded its contradictions: slavery, religious intolerance, the subordination of women, and a provincial indifference to the wider world. His diary captures a central tension that persists across centuries: When English speakers said "America," they meant the United States; when Spanish Americans said "América," they meant the entire New World.

Grandin begins with the Spanish Conquest, which he frames as a catastrophe that provoked an extraordinary moral crisis within Catholicism. The arrival of the Spanish triggered what demographers call the largest human mortality event in proportion to the global population; violence and disease reduced Mexico's population from as many as 30 million to roughly 2 million within about 80 years. Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, who witnessed massacres firsthand, abandoned his own holdings and devoted his life to arguing that all humanity shared a single lineage. At the University of Salamanca, law professor Francisco de Vitoria developed a "law of nations" based on reason rather than divine revelation, insisting that Native Americans possessed property rights and that neither conversion nor accusations of barbarism justified war. These debates laid the foundation for modern international law.

English settlers in North America, Grandin argues, evaded the moral reckoning the Spanish confronted. The Mayflower colonists arrived in 1620 in the wake of an epidemic that killed an estimated 90 percent of the Wampanoag people, and Puritans interpreted the emptied landscape as divine providence rather than a cause for doubt. Governor John Winthrop developed the legal concept of vacuum domicilium, holding that abandoned or uncultivated land was available for the taking. England's brutal conquest of Ireland served as a rehearsal, its tactics of starvation and massacre transferring directly to the Chesapeake colonies. English philosopher John Locke drew on the Jesuit José de Acosta's ethnographic classifications to argue that peoples who did not mix their labor with nature could not claim sovereignty, justifying dispossession. England's 1655 capture of Jamaica also transformed the country into a major Atlantic slave-trading power.

The Age of Revolutions created divergent republican traditions. Spain helped the United States win independence, supplying arms and declaring war on Britain, then moved to contain the republic it had helped create. Venezuelan independence leader Simón Bolívar led a decade-long continental war of liberation marked by catastrophic violence and battlefield emancipations of enslaved peoples. Venezuela's 1811 constitution established Spanish America's first republic with universal male suffrage regardless of race and placed the word "social" at the center of its conception of rights, insisting that individual liberties must be balanced by the common good. This contrasted with the U.S. Constitution, where neither "social" nor "society" appears.

After independence, the hemispheres developed competing legal frameworks. Spanish American jurists developed uti possidetis, the doctrine that colonial borders become national borders, transforming an ancient Roman principle that had rewarded the spoils of war into one that prevented war by fixing boundaries and affirming sovereign equality. The doctrine later became the basis of decolonization in Africa. President James Monroe's 1823 declaration warned Europe against further colonization of the hemisphere, but its ambiguity allowed it to serve both as an anticolonial statement and as a warrant for U.S. dominance. Bolívar's 1826 Congress of Panama aimed to establish a Latin American confederation committed to mutual defense and the abolition of slavery, but the U.S. debate over attending consolidated the proslavery coalition behind Andrew Jackson, who won the presidency in 1828.

The mid-nineteenth century saw parallel intellectual awakenings. In the United States, Manifest Destiny, the belief that continental expansion was providential and inevitable, animated westward expansion. President James K. Polk's war on Mexico seized 55 percent of Mexico's territory. The mercenary William Walker's 1855 conquest of Nicaragua, where he reestablished slavery, catalyzed the invention of "Latin America" as a political identity defined in opposition to "Saxon America." Cuban revolutionary José Martí, living in New York, warned that Washington's planned intervention in Cuba would serve annexation rather than liberation. At the 1889 Pan-American Conference, Latin American delegates achieved a near-unanimous vote outlawing conquest, with Argentine delegate Roque Sáenz Peña answering Washington's slogan "America for America" with "Let America be for humanity."

Mexico's 1910 revolution, the twentieth century's first great social revolution, redefined property rights. Its 1917 constitution declared that subsoil resources belonged to the nation, establishing the legal basis for government nationalization of foreign industry. President Woodrow Wilson cited the hemisphere's cooperative system as the template for the League of Nations, but the effort failed: The League's affirmation of the Monroe Doctrine was interpreted by European imperialists as legitimating spheres of interest, Japan's proposal for a racial equality amendment was rejected, and the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency marked a turning point. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, at the 1933 Montevideo conference, renounced the right of conquest and pledged nonintervention. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy became the moral framework for his 1936 reelection, uniting export-oriented corporations, urban workers, farmers, and racial minorities. When Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the petroleum industry in 1938, Roosevelt refused to intervene despite enormous pressure, giving time for social-democratic reforms to take shape. Latin America proved indispensable to Allied victory in World War II, providing the unified resource base without which the United States could not have waged a two-ocean war. At the 1945 San Francisco conference founding the United Nations, Latin American delegates pushed for the prohibition of war, the equality of women, the dismantling of colonialism, and the recognition of economic and social rights.

The Cold War destroyed this social-democratic opening. The Marshall Plan excluded Latin America, and Secretary of State George Marshall told the 1948 Bogotá conference that capital must come from private sources. The assassination of Colombian populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán triggered a devastating uprising and allowed Washington to pivot toward anti-Communist security resolutions. U.S. diplomat and Cold War strategist George Kennan recommended permanent "psychological war," and the CIA orchestrated its first comprehensive regime change in Guatemala in 1954. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 intensified U.S. interventionism, leading to 16 regime changes between 1961 and 1969.

Latin America experienced a period of intense intellectual vitality. Liberation theology, a Catholic movement linking faith to the liberation of the poor, and dependency theory, the argument that global capitalism structurally subordinates poorer nations, challenged the foundations of political and economic domination. Washington responded with force. The 1973 coup against Chile's elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, served as the origin point for neoliberalism, as University of Chicago-trained economists dismantled the welfare state under military protection. President Ronald Reagan financed the Contras, U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary forces in Nicaragua, while the Vatican condemned liberation theology. The Atlácatl Battalion's 1989 murder of six Jesuit intellectuals in El Salvador symbolized the destruction of an entire generation of Latin American thinkers.

Grandin closes by arguing that Latin America served as a "ground" for U.S. power, constraining and disciplining it in ways that ultimately served American interests. The postwar decision to break free of that restraint unleashed Washington's worst impulses, from endless wars to institutional decay. Latin America today remains among the most peaceful continents in terms of interstate relations, with strong social-democratic traditions and expanding rights. The way to defeat rising authoritarianism, Grandin contends, remains what it was in the 1930s: "welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights."