“The editors have assembled an outstanding group of scholars in this very welcome addition to our understanding of Latin American external relations and British foreign policy towards the region in the 20th century.”— Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Honorary Professor, Institute of the Americas, University College London & Former Director, Chatham House “This is an important and timely book, reappraising the UK’s role in Latin America in the 20th century. What emerges is far more interesting than the usual narrative of linear UK decline in the face of growing US predominance.”— Peter Collecott, CMG, UK Ambassador to Brazil, 2004–2008 This book explores the role of Great Britain in twentieth-century Latin America, a period dominated by the growing political and economic influence of the United States. Focusing on three broad themes—war and conflict; commercial and business rivalries; and responses to economic nationalism, revolution, and political change—the individual chapters cover a number of countries and issues from 1914 to 1970, stressing the reluctance with which Britain ceded hegemony in the region. An epilogue focuses on Anglo-American relations and concerns in Latin America in the more recent past. The chapters, all written by leading scholars on their particular subjects, are based on original research in a wide variety of archives, going beyond the standard Foreign Office and State Department sources to which most earlier scholars were confined.

After the fall of the Porfirio Díaz regime, pueblo representatives sent hundreds of petitions to Pres. Francisco I. Madero, demanding that the executive branch of government assume the judiciary's control over their unresolved lawsuits against landowners, local bosses, and other villages. The Madero administration tried to use existing laws to settle land conflicts but always stopped short of invading judicial authority. In contrast, the two main agrarian reform programs undertaken in revolutionary Mexico--those implemented by Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza--subordinated the judiciary to the executive branch and thereby reshaped the postrevolutionary state with the support of villagers, who actively sided with one branch of government over another. In Matters of Justice Helga Baitenmann offers the first detailed account of the Zapatista and Carrancista agrarian reform programs as they were implemented in practice at the local level and then reconfigured in response to unanticipated inter- and intravillage conflicts. Ultimately, the Zapatista land reform, which sought to redistribute land throughout the country, remained an unfulfilled utopia. In contrast, Carrancista laws, intended to resolve quickly an urgent problem in a time of war, had lasting effects on the legal rights of millions of land beneficiaries and accidentally became the pillar of a program that redistributed about half the national territory.

A comprehensive Statistical Appendix provides regional and country-by-country data in such areas as GDP, manufacturing, sector productivity, prices, trade, income distribution and living standards."--BOOK JACKET.

"A co-publication with the Social Science Research Council."

Written in tribute to the work of Professor Alan Dobson, this collection of essays brings diplomacy and the Anglo-American relationship together, considering politics and foreign policy in tandem with cultural interactions. Uniquely placed to define exactly what transatlanticism is, and to explore the ways in which this idea has evolved in the last 150 years, this book asks to what extent can it be argued that there was a transatlantic world, how can it be defined and what was unique about it? With contributions from leading scholars it offers an overview of the field as well as a comparative exploration of Anglo-American relations. From emotion in foreign policy decision making, to the RAF in the Vietnam War, as well as leader personalities and transatlantic reactions to women's rights in China, Transatlanticism and Transnationalism since the First World War explores this 'special relationship' at many levels and from many angles. It further asks how this relationship has evolved over the years, and considers how it might survive in a globalized, post-industrial world.

Carleton Beals was among America’s most distinctive foreign correspondents. His colorful, combatively critical reporting of U.S. intervention in Latin America had a fearless energy and authority that won him millions of readers. He interviewed the Nicaraguan rebel leader Sandino in the camp from which he fought thousands of U.S marines in 1928, covered two revolutions in Cuba (1933 and 1959), and interpreted the Mexican Revolution for American readers. Beals’s dispatches and features appeared regularly in the Nation, New Republic, Current History and the Progressive, and often in the New York Times. Time magazine called him “the best informed and the most awkward living writer on Latin America.” Forty books, including chronicles, political analysis and novels, drawn mostly from his travels and wide-ranging contacts in what he called “America South” made that characterization apt. But Beals was also an eyewitness reporter on Mussolini’s rise in Italy. He wrote on U.S. topics too, such as Louisiana’s Huey Long, and the environmental damage and rural migration in the 1930s caused by emerging agri-business in America’s South and West. Many of his books were best-sellers, their evidence-based assessments earning at least grudging respect even among those who took issue with his indictments of U.S. economic and government elites. At once biography and analytical history, The Rebel Scribe tells the story of a fiercely independent non-conformist. It probes Beals’s interactions with political leaders, democrats, demagogues, populists and revolutionaries, and reveals how his ability to immerse himself in their societies gave his accounts a palpable authenticity and, time has shown, a prescience that is almost prophetic. Christopher Neal’s layered narrative traces how Beals identified patterns of political behavior and concepts that later became fully-fledged schools of thought, such as the idea of a Third World, dependency theory, U.S. neo-imperialism, and aspects of critical theory. His story sheds light on the evolution of U.S. foreign policy and intervention, from Mexico and Nicaragua in the 1920s, to Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s. It reveals the fraught trail that faced—and still faces—contrarian journalists who challenge conventional assumptions, while also showing how probing journalism drives change.

Winner of the 2019 Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Conference on Latin American History This is a book about the links between politics and literacy, and about how radical ideas spread in a world without printing presses. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Spanish colonial governments tried to keep revolution out of their provinces. But, as Cristina Soriano shows, hand-copied samizdat materials from the Caribbean flooded the cities and ports of Venezuela, hundreds of foreigners shared news of the French and Haitian revolutions with locals, and Venezuelans of diverse social backgrounds met to read hard-to-come-by texts and to discuss the ideas they expounded. These networks efficiently spread antimonarchical propaganda and abolitionist and egalitarian ideas, allowing Venezuelans to participate in an incipient yet vibrant public sphere and to contemplate new political scenarios. This book offers an in-depth analysis of one of the crucial processes that allowed Venezuela to become one of the first regions in Spanish America to declare independence from Iberia and turn into an influential force for South American independence.