The first obligation of the reviewer of these expensive volumes is to let prospective buyers or readers know what they are getting. In this case readers get a short introduction by the editor, a mere eight pages, three of them taken up by a list of wars, and 41 photographically-reproduced articles from well-known English-language journals or chapters from books, which works out at about £7 a go. It seems to this reviewer that the prevailing criterion for their selection has been cheap and easy availability. Though most of the labour involved has been photocopying, the photocopier is not acknowledged, though he or she must have put in more work than anyone else. In short, this is a blatant piece of bookmaking, and it is a duty to say so.
What of the resulting selection? The coverage is consequently uneven. One would expect from such a collection at least an adequate introduction to the major episodes of warfare that the region has experienced. The editor has made a five-fold division: pre-conquest and conquest; independence; international wars; civil wars; strategies and institutions. The first section is exclusively Mexican, and the book then jumps with one exception – Antony MacFarlane on late colonial rebellions – to Independence. So there is virtually nothing on the military and naval experiences of colonial times, which would include the civil wars in early colonial Peru, warfare in the Caribbean, the Indian frontiers of Mexico, Chile, the River Plate and New Granada, the formation of the local military establishments and the defence of the Empire against external enemies. With the exception of Christon Archer's article on the army of New Spain – Mexico again – these matters are lucky to get a glancing mention.
Things do not look up much with Independence, and here one sees clearly that another editorial trouble, along with the restrictions imposed by confining oneself to journal articles and chapters in English, is a failure to concentrate on warfare, on matters strictly military. There is a lack of such focus in these two volumes. The articles chosen on the Independence Wars are not only rather narrow in their geographical range – no room for the River Plate, for Belgrano, San Martín, Chile, Peru or the Bolivian guerrillas – but are not of much interest when it comes to their conduct. The wars were formative experiences, in which a military in a comparatively virgin part of the world had to learn about war and devise the local means of carrying it on, which were not necessarily those laid out in the manuals of the time. Logistics, recruiting, strategy, tactics, leadership, arms – the reader is left pretty much in the dark on all those fundamental subjects, on which a good deal was written then and since, though not perhaps ‘peer-reviewed’ in established academic publications.
In his short introduction, the editor Miguel Centeno – whose Blood and Debt (Penn State Press, 2002) was certainly a stimulating and provocative study – seems rather to have lost patience with the subject as nineteenth century conflicts fail to live up to his expectations. He has been, in the Spanish phrase, pidiendo peras al olmo, looking for pears from the elm tree. Here he writes on international wars in the region: ‘Bibliographical accounts of the wars are remarkably simple, there is often no need for more than one strategic map, battles can be described in a single paragraph, and whole wars summarized in a few pages. Not surprisingly, by contemporary standards, the wars involved relatively few men and minimal equipment … Soldiers fighting each other … do so without the form of collective hatred so common in other parts of the world … Looking back on nearly 200 years of global violence, one can find few incidents as apparently meaningless.’ From such simplification one can only conclude that he has been reading the wrong bibliographies and misdirecting his curiosity.
No Latin American war has received the obsessive attention paid to the US Civil War, but a proper bibliographical trawl and a willingness to look at a variety of wars with an open mind, not just to find that they are not altogether like some wars elsewhere, might have produced a very different reading and set of readings. He does make an exception for the War of the Triple Alliance, but here again the selection of articles gets one nowhere near the essentials of that war, well covered in English by contemporary observers and by recent historians. The Triple Alliance and the War of the Pacific occupy most of the international conflict section. There is nothing on the US and French invasions of Mexico, or on the Chaco War.
The civil wars of the nineteenth century get only two articles, and there is nothing here on the developments that by the century's end had in most countries brought them to an end. We then pass swiftly via a couple of peripheral looks at the Mexican Revolution to recent insurgency and counterinsurgency. The selection is once again capricious, and ranges in quality from the always thoughtful Piero Gleijeses on Guatemala – a solid Latin American Research Review article – to an ill-informed and grossly misleading Foreign Affairs piece on Colombia by Julia E. Sweig. The collection concludes with an institutional survey, its two historical articles both being on Brazil, and a brief look at current hemispheric security. Many individual articles have their merits, though few can be ranked as essential reading on their subject. The whole is a shapeless pudding without a theme or themes.
