I am sending a copy of the Report to the Foreign Office in
view of the fact that it was an initiative by Lord Dundee
which started this particular ball rolling.Footnote 1
The ‘Parry Report’ was the informal title given to the official report of a subcommittee of the University Grants Committee (UGC), chaired by historian John H. Parry, which was accepted by the British government and published in 1965.Footnote 2 Its recommendations served as the basis for the massive expansion (and some historians would argue creation) of Latin American Studies in the UK and the formal co-ordination of Latin-American related activities among British universities.Footnote 3 While the UGC formally convened the subcommittee (and eventually oversaw the implementation of the Report's recommendations), the impetus for its convocation was provided by the Foreign Office (FO). Without the FO's initiative, it is doubtful whether the UGC would have taken an active interest in Latin American Studies, much less launched a major initiative unprompted.
Latin American Studies had been conspicuously excluded from previous government efforts to stimulate area studies and bolster the acquisition of foreign languages deemed strategically valuable.Footnote 4 The ‘Scarborough Report’ (1947) and, subsequently, the ‘Hayter Report’ (1961) had focused on Eurasian, East Asian, and African studies.Footnote 5 The Hayter Report – named for its chairman, Sir William Hayter, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and then warden of New College, Oxford – in particular argued that British higher education had been unresponsive to the geopolitical transformation that had taken place since the Second World War.Footnote 6 This criticism was directed against not only geographical parochialism, but also disciplinary orientation. Hayter sought to shift ‘area studies’ away from its traditional emphasis on Philology and Literature and toward disciplines such as History, Law, Economics, Politics, Sociology, and Anthropology, within which regional and linguistic specialization might occur.Footnote 7
The Parry Report was the outcome of two principal factors. The first was the aforementioned FO's role in gathering congeries of associations and individuals with an avowed or demonstrated interest in Latin America, focusing their attention on a specific policy question. The FO's action, in turn, was instigated by its own desultory attempts to define a coherent policy toward Latin America in the wake of the Cuban Revolution (1959), the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro's regime (1961), and US President John F. Kennedy's ‘Alliance for Progress’ (launched in 1961). British decolonization, which accelerated in these very same years, spurred re-engagement with the ‘Second’ and ‘Third’ Worlds.Footnote 8 The Parry Committee was convened in the same year as a prominent US observer noted that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.’Footnote 9 One might interpret the sudden attention lavished on Latin American Studies as part of Britain's groping for a new role in world affairs, not only in the throes of decolonization, but also as it reaffirmed its commitment to the US alliance following the Suez crisis (1956–7), recovered from the rejection of its application for EEC membership (1962), and came to grips with the limitations of the Commonwealth as alternative framework for geopolitical engagement.Footnote 10
The second factor contributing to the creation of the committee was pressure exerted by constituencies within British universities and by the funding bodies on which universities increasingly relied. St Antony's College, Oxford, and the University of London proved persistent, persuasive, and well-positioned lobbyists. As connections between British universities and American private foundations thickened in the late 1950s, the entwinement of American philanthropy and British higher education provoked a response from the British government. The flow of American foundation money into Britain for Latin American Studies coincided with the apogee of anti-US sentiment in Latin America itself, which put significant strains on inter-American diplomacy and presented an opening for the expansion of British influence in the region.Footnote 11
Once the decision to convene the subcommittee was made, two contexts influenced its work. The first, broader context was the educational expansion heralded by the Robbins Report and the funding environment it (briefly) engendered.Footnote 12 The second, more immediate context was the composition of the committee itself. Literary scholars and social scientists were largely sidelined in favour of historians, and historians of empire in particular.Footnote 13 The Parry Report was spearheaded by historians of empire working in tandem with an FO disoriented by decolonization amidst a higher education resource environment of unprecedented abundance.
This article begins by contrasting Latin American Studies in Britain with the situation prevailing in the US, where the field was considerably larger and more developed by 1960. In particular, the contentious role of government in fomenting academic area studies in the US is addressed, for it offers a basis for comparison with the FO's role in the formation of Latin American Studies in the UK. The article then turns to British diplomatic relations with Latin America in the decade preceding the Parry Report and also to the state of Latin American Studies in Britain in that same period, situating it in the context of other area studies at UK universities. This background makes intelligible the actions of the subcommittee and the character of its Report, including the imprint of its chairman, Parry, which form the core of the article. The article concludes by briefly tracing the reception of the Report itself and its legacies.
I
There is no dearth of scholarship detailing how governments (in co-ordination with major private foundations) promoted area studies with a view toward wresting or retaining political-economic advantage in the rapidly decolonizing ‘Third World’ during the Cold War era. The size and scope of the investment of the US government in particular has received robust treatment. ‘From the late 1940s onward’, historian Michael Latham noted, ‘social scientists aiming for funding, professional stature and inclusion in the network created by the Cold War concerns turned toward a rhetoric that combined claims of public relevance with assertions of rigorous objectivity’.Footnote 14 A 1964 statement by McGeorge Bundy – sometime dean of Harvard University, national security advisor under Kennedy, and later president of the Ford Foundation – epitomizes the aspirations of those who advocated placing scholarship in the service of the state and dismissed the notion that scholarship would suffer from such explicit, purposive engagement:
In the life of our universities there is much room for men writing the kind of History which is possible only when there is a deep engagement of sympathy to the battlefield of politics and to the way the men on that battlefield conceive of their war. I think it is wrong to suppose that the university is usefully disconnected from this reality. I think rather that there is gain for both the political world and the academy from an intensified process of engagement and of choosing sides and of engaging in battle. The university, while nourishing inquiry at the edges of learning, while maintaining detachment and offering sanctuary, while properly offering the moral equivalent of the exile of Thucydides, must offer these things not only to people who commit themselves finally to the academic life but also to people who come and go.Footnote 15
Animated by such ideas, the Ford Foundation alone funnelled $270 million to thirty-four universities in area and language studies from 1953 to 1966. The US government was not far behind, as the 1958 National Defense Education Act funded the expansion of area studies programmes to create specialists able to furnish the government with their policy relevant expertise. Notoriously, the government financed ‘Project Camelot’ in the mid-1960s, which employed social science, and social scientists, to generate ‘useful’ knowledge with immediate strategic, particularly military, application.Footnote 16 To be sure, such notions were far from universally embraced. Bundy's Harvard colleague, the Sinologist John King Fairbank, offered an alternative vision (and almost pre-emptive rebuke) in his 1959 Presidential Address at the Association for Asian Studies. ‘We who specialize in Asian Studies’, Fairbank declared,
should not be expected to deal with American Foreign policy. Our task is to focus on scholarship…[Otherwise] the Asian specialist may wind up as an Asian expert busily serving the American public those answers which are in the common mind in a process of public give-and-take which is touted as democratic discussion, or even as policy formulation, but which may be no more than collective autointoxication.Footnote 17
Latin American Studies was especially vulnerable to the designs of US policy-makers well before the Cold War. The concomitant rise of US formal and informal empire in Latin America, together with the protean ideology of Pan-Americanism, produced a deepening of interest and scholarship. The Pan-American Union, founded in 1889, fomented educational exchanges and subsidized publications. The Hispanic Society of America, founded in 1904, became yet another major cultural institution devoted to the study of Latin America. Robert Woods Bliss established a chair for Latin American Studies at Harvard in 1913 and later donated his unparalleled collection of Pre-Columbian art along with his estate, Dumbarton Oaks, to Harvard. The Hispanic American Historical Review was published from 1918 and, following a few rocky years that saw its operations suspended (1922–6), enjoyed a widening circulation.Footnote 18 Other enormous collections were coming into existence and made publicly accessible around the same time: the Hispanic Division at the Library of Congress; the rich Latin American collection at the University of Texas–Austin; and the Oliveira Lima Library of Brazilian books and rare artifacts at Catholic University of America. This frenetic activity supports historian Helen Delpar's claim that ‘by the second decade of the twentieth century, conditions were propitious for the emergence of Latin America as a subject worthy of study in the American University’.Footnote 19 In historian Ricardo Salvatore's more doleful assessment, the magnitude and orientation of scholarly activity in these decades amounted to nothing short of a ‘disciplinary conquest’ of Latin America.Footnote 20
In the 1930s, US President Franklin Roosevelt's ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ propelled the further expansion of Latin American Studies. The American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace funded publication of the Handbook of Latin American Studies from 1936. As the US sought to retain Latin American states as allies as global war loomed, the State Department established a Division of Cultural Relations to ‘encourage the work of private institutions in carrying out exchanges that would contribute to inter-American understanding’. By 1949, a survey of 1,500 institutions of higher education found that 875 offered at least one course with significant Latin American content, with a total of 3,346 courses offered in total. Spurred by the Cuban Revolution, American foundations went into hyper-drive. A Joint Committee on Latin American Studies was founded in 1959, which used Carnegie Foundation funding to underwrite advanced research, seminars, and conferences, as well as grants to recently minted Ph.D. recipients specialized in other areas who wished to switch to a Latin American focus. In 1962, the Ford Foundation gave $1 million, and a further $1.5 million a year later, to support Latin American Studies.Footnote 21 Around this time, leading Latin Americanist Richard Morse somewhat caustically observed that Latin American Studies in the US had become ‘a faintly ridiculous tail to a politico-commercial kite. In the groves of academe the scholar lies down in darkness with the former diplomat, the casual pundit, and the entrepreneur.’Footnote 22
II
Admittedly, the connections between Latin American Studies in universities and government policy were more visible and robust in the US than they were in Britain. This engagement and entanglement reflected geographical propinquity and national strategic priorities. It is attributable also to the public largesse to which academics specializing in Latin America enjoyed access, buttressed by private foundations with closely aligned priorities. Nevertheless, the links between statecraft and area studies were robust in Britain, too. Instrumental application of knowledge in the service of empire had long been the norm. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the English East India Company trained its officials in Persian and South Asian languages. As the governor-general of British India, Warren Hastings, noted in 1784, ‘every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state’.Footnote 23 The Company set up Haileybury College, in Hertfordshire, which provided its officials with both a general education and the rudiments of ‘Oriental’ languages, training that would be continued at the College of Fort William in Calcutta, with the expectation that officials ultimately would develop competence in two languages.Footnote 24 Knowledge of languages enabled Company officials to police, collect taxes, and issue commands. It enabled them to convert the Indian reality they encountered, yet often dimly understood, into potent instruments of governance, from encyclopaedias to statistical data.Footnote 25
Far from a nineteenth-century phenomenon, the early twentieth century was marked by the British government's formal cultivation of ‘area studies’ avant la lettre in the service of the state. The 1909 Reay Report concluded that Britain lagged dangerously behind other countries in the provision of training in the languages and cultures of the Middle East, which paved the way for the creation of the forerunner of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1916. This school was, in historian Ian Brown's judgement, ‘founded principally to train the colonial administrators who ran the British empire in the languages of Africa and Asia’, of which thirty-two were taught by the 1919–20 academic year.Footnote 26 Also during the First World War, the newly founded Department of Political Intelligence produced position papers for the Versailles Peace Conference. In the interwar period, the boundary cordoning off knowledge produced in universities, ‘scientific research organizations’, and government was highly, sometimes distressingly, permeable. The Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) exemplified the challenges faced by ‘an intermediary institution, situated between government and the wider public’. The scholars associated with Chatham House studied ‘international issues from a definite point of view, without appearing as an official one’.Footnote 27 Generally speaking, there was something of a revolving door between universities and government in early twentieth-century Britain, with the former conceived of as finishing schools for elite civil servants.Footnote 28
Given the prevalence of such government-university (and ‘think tank’) interactions, it is tempting to portray area studies in the UK as emerging from a similar set of concerns and priorities as those in the US, though with different regional foci arising from the geography of the disintegrating British empire. But such an explanation fails to account for the incongruous arousal of interest in Latin American Studies in Britain. There is a significant paradox, as historian Eduardo Posada-Carbó and political scientist Louise Fawcett observed twenty years ago, that the surge of interest evinced by the British government and universities in Latin American Studies began in the early 1960s, precisely at the moment when Britain's own connection with Latin America slackened dramatically and tumbled toward its nadir.Footnote 29
Nineteenth-century pretensions to ‘informal empire’ in Latin America were dimly remembered by 1960, even if the concepts of the ‘imperialism of free trade’ and ‘informal empire’ were galvanizing historiographical reassessments of Britain's external relations in precisely this period.Footnote 30 In 1930, Latin America's share of Britain's total overall overseas investment stood at 35 per cent whereas in 1962 that figure had dwindled to 4 per cent. There are numerous explanations for the precipitous drop: sovereign debt defaults in the 1930s were followed by nationalizations in the late 1940s, most notably Argentina's 1948 acquisition of British-owned railways, all of which decreased existing and deterred future investment.Footnote 31 The only significant economic links that remained were Royal Dutch Shell's assets in Venezuela, the Bank of London and South America's branch network, and a few manufacturing and utility companies. Other commercial and trade indices confirm the steep decline and extend it into the 1980s (and beyond). Latin America took 7 per cent of British total exports in 1950 but only 1.2 per cent in 1988. Latin American countries supplied 8 per cent of British imports in 1950 as opposed to 1.4 per cent in 1988.Footnote 32
There were, however, spasmodic revivals of official interest in Latin America. In a notorious 1945 diplomatic cable, J. Victor Perowne, head of the FO's South American Department, implored his colleagues that ‘we can no longer afford to dismiss the people of Latin America as inconvenient and rather ridiculous dagoes living at the world's end. We must recognize the need to pay them more, and more reasoned, attention if our interests are not to suffer.’Footnote 33 Even if the subsequent nationalizations did not halt British efforts altogether, as the Crosland Trade Mission to the northern countries of South America and Mexico in 1952 attests, the 1950s were undoubtedly a low point. Historian Raymond Carr reported that Harold Macmillan in the 1970s could not recall Latin America cropping up in a cabinet meeting during his premiership (1957–63) beyond ‘a few discussions on Argentine beef’; he claimed never to have read a dispatch from a Latin American embassy.Footnote 34
Macmillan's recollections aside, there was a notable uptick of official interest in the early 1960s, as the Parry Report's genesis suggests. The duke of Edinburgh made an extended visit in 1962, which led directly to the Cabinet Committee on Latin America and presaged Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart's visit to the Southern Cone and Peru in 1966 (coinciding blatantly with the government's export drive). The FO sponsored a massive conference on Latin America, held at Lancaster House, in 1972.Footnote 35 But none of these initiatives detract from the veracity of Posada-Carbó and Fawcett's gloomy conclusion that ‘all of the evidence suggests that Latin America had become increasingly marginal to British interests. Despite the intermittent economic and political initiatives of different governments and the urgent prompting of concerned individuals, the pattern of relations in this period wavered between abandonment and indifference.’Footnote 36
If commercial and political relations were neglected, endogenous forces within British universities hardly propped up interest in Latin America before 1960. To be sure, there was a long tradition of outstanding British writing about the region, including William Robertson's History of America (1777) and Robert Southey's History of Brazil (1810). And there were non-university centres for discussion of Latin American affairs, notably the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Councils (Canning House) and later Chatham House. But academic interest lagged far behind. As early as 1934, Professor H. Hale Bellot implored the University of London's Board of Studies in History to allocate resources to the study of Latin America. ‘The history of the independent Latin American republics’, he argued,
cannot be omitted from any effective study of the extra-European world, and it is closely connected with the financial and commercial history of Great Britain during the nineteenth century…this country is conspicuously behind the US, where extensive provision is made in the universities for the study of Latin American History.Footnote 37
This campaign resulted in the establishment of a chair in 1948.
The chair was held by Robin A. Humphreys, who had been hired as a historian of colonial North America and who had distinguished himself sufficiently in that field to gain promotion to reader prior to his elevation to professor. Humphreys essentially retrained as a Latin Americanist on his own initiative, driven by his own curiosity and without formal support.Footnote 38 Humphreys proved to be an indefatigable advocate for the expansion of Latin American Studies, both the establishment of academic posts and the expansion of library holdings. He played a pivotal role on the Parry Committee and later in the implementation of its Report. Humphrey's dynamism and reputation (he was elected president of the Royal Historical Society in 1964) should not distract attention from the profound intellectual isolation with which he struggled following his reincarnation as a Latin Americanist. As he recalled in his memoir, ‘concerned with a branch of History relatively ignored in Britain…I had to follow a rather lonely road, finding refreshment and inspiration in meeting like-minded scholars abroad’.Footnote 39
Even in those years, however, he attracted postgraduate students who would soon emerge as distinguished scholars, including John Lynch and Leslie Bethell. Furthermore, the dearth of chairs in History masks the long-standing richness of Hispanic Studies in Britain, particularly in literature, as well as a smattering of highly regarded scholars in other disciplines who worked on Latin America (and the Iberian empires), but whose posts were not designated explicitly as ‘Latin American’.Footnote 40 These included several members of the committee that eventually produced the Report, notably Charles Boxer, who held the Camões Professorship of Portuguese at King's College London and whose scholarship concerned the early modern Luso-Brazilian empire.Footnote 41 There were also rising stars in Spanish history, such as J. H. Elliott, then at Cambridge, whose vision was a firmly imperial one, encompassing Colonial Latin America as well as the Iberian Peninsula.Footnote 42
Increased interest in Latin America at UK universities was evinced by a 1964 meeting attended by sixty-four scholars, including historians with prominent public profiles such as Hugh Thomas and Eric Hobsbawm, that resulted in the creation of the Society for Latin American Studies. In addition to academic researchers, a wider public demonstrated interest in Latin America from the early 1960s. Chatham House played a major role in nurturing interest in Latin America through seminar series that brought together FO officials, journalists, executives, and left-of-centre politicians. The political and economic transformations in the region were sufficiently alluring to inspire students to undertake wanderjahrs, sometimes a prelude to formal university study of Latin America. Furthermore, there was increased awareness of, and commitment to, Latin America by the Fourth Estate. Encounter devoted an issue to Latin America in September 1965, the same month in which The Economist published a dossier on the region. Reuters expanded its Latin American presence in 1964 and The Economist produced a Spanish-language version from 1967.Footnote 43
III
In the late 1950s, several academic institutions articulated a serious interest in Latin American Studies. St Antony's College, Oxford, had taken steps well before the Parry Committee was convened and accelerated its efforts in the wake of the Cuban Revolution.Footnote 44 The College received funding from the Astor Foundation in 1959 to promote Latin American Studies, and, in the following year, the College formally convened a Latin American Study Group to generate further funds. In 1962, the College's Warden, F. W. Deakin, and Raymond Carr undertook an exploratory trip to several Latin American countries financed by the British Council and Astor Foundation. Later that year, Oxford organized its first Latin American Seminar, under Carr's direction. Deakin, who had served on the Hayter Committee, then sought Ford Foundation support. The Leverhulme Trust awarded the College a grant of £16,000 in 1963 while the Ford Foundation offered a five-year grant, in conjunction with the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), of over £90,000 for the same purpose.Footnote 45 Other academic institutions did not lag far behind. Sir Ifor Evans, then provost of University College London, established an advisory committee on Latin American Studies in 1962, which solicited the support of the Ford Foundation. ‘I hope that our Advisory Committee’, Evans told the Ford Foundation's Stanley Gordon, ‘may come to act as something in the nature of a coordinating body, both in London and perhaps outside of London also.’Footnote 46
These initiatives notwithstanding, the prospects for full-fledged Latin American Studies programmes remained bleak. As Harold Blakemore, an influential administrator of the University of London's Latin American Centre, noted in 1970, there were in 1960 only ‘isolated posts, no more than nine in all, designated to refer explicitly and exclusively to some branch of these studies; relatively few students; practically no provision for the recruitment and training of staff; and little opportunity for the interested few to undertake field research or find outlets for publication’.Footnote 47 Yet the context in which Latin American Studies could be incubated was improving rapidly. The expansion of British universities in the same period made possible the concomitant proportional expansion of academic programmes and the creation of new lectureships. The Parry Report's recommendations, therefore, were scarcely conceivable without the preceding Robbins Report, which massively increased the number of students matriculating at universities, made normative the taught higher degree, and engendered an academic environment that was (fleetingly) comparatively resource rich.Footnote 48
Ultimately, however, the expansion of Latin American Studies in the UK was undertaken at the behest of the FO. To be sure, prominent academic and administrators clamoured for resources and, as the cases of St Antony's and London indicate, solicited well-endowed, US-based, private foundations. But the support of these foundations never would have put Latin American Studies on a firm, permanent footing, as the term of the grants they awarded seldom exceeded five years. It was the FO that convened and co-ordinated the disparate parties sharing an interest in Latin America. An FO minute describes a meeting between the FO's H. A. A. Hankey and Deakin in March 1962, in which Deakin broached the possibility of government support for Latin American Studies. The sum Deakin estimated would be needed to establish Latin American Studies at ‘each of the principal universities’ was £1 million. Hankey and Deakin agreed that US foundations would be ‘better disposed to support efforts if Britain itself showed the initiative’.Footnote 49 The Hankey–Deakin meeting coincided with vague awareness of potential material support from the Duke of Edinburgh Foundation, which some speculated might be announced in conjunction with Prince Philip's imminent departure for a tour of South America.
What did the FO envision in March 1962? A minute by Stephen Clissold suggests its reasons for supporting the study of Latin America. ‘What is particularly needed’, he argued,
is to enable Britain to profit from Latin America by studying and taking into account the very wide and varied Latin American experience. To take only one example: Brazil. Quite apart from commercial advantages, this country could find great advantage in the study of Brazil's race relations, sociology, and contemporary architecture.Footnote 50
About a month later, Lord Dundee, then minister of state for foreign affairs, wrote to administrators at Chatham House, the British Council, Canning House, the Leverhulme Trust, as well as a scholar (Humphreys), two university administrators (Evans and Deakin), the chair of the Committee of University Vice-Chancellors (W. Mansfield Cooper), and the chair of the UGC (Sir Keith Murray). He invited them to a meeting ‘to discuss the promotion of Latin American Studies in the United Kingdom’ in early June 1962. In his letter, Dundee bewailed the present state of Latin American Studies in Britain and averred that ‘the FO in particular has much to gain from a closer association with the development of Latin American Studies in this country as it has undoubtedly benefited in the case of Oriental, African, and Slavonic Studies’.Footnote 51
Accompanying Dundee's letter was an FO memorandum ‘on the promotion of Latin American Studies in the UK’. It bluntly acknowledged the relative dearth of scholarship and facilities devoted to Latin America, ‘the one major under-developed area for which no special provision exists in Britain for the promotion of academic studies and research’. In this respect, the UK had fallen hopelessly behind France, the USSR, Belgium, Sweden, and other European countries. But keeping pace with other European states was hardly sufficient incentive to invigorate the study of Latin America in Britain. The memorandum made clear that the chief rationale for the promotion of Latin American Studies was to fortify the ‘Western Alliance’, an especially urgent concern given the pervasive negative views of the United States held by Latin Americans, particularly in the immediate wake of the Cuban Revolution, but also as a result of its record of unbidden interventions against regimes deemed inimical to its interests. The judgement of US analysts, the memorandum indicated, was
obscured by a cloud of ‘anti-Yankee’ prejudice encountered there and by the emotions of self-justification, impatience or irritation which it elicits on the part of North American observers. The European can see more clearly and be listened to more readily. Moreover, unless the other partners in the Western Alliance keep themselves sufficiently informed about the real nature of Latin America's public, the policies pursued by the US in that area are likely to meet with less than their fair measure of comprehension and support.Footnote 52
The outcome of the 5 June 1962 meeting convened by Lord Dundee was straightforward. As an FO minute of 6 June indicates, ‘there was general agreement that a committee should be set up, somewhat on the lines of the Hayter Committee for Eastern European Studies, to consider how Latin American Studies could be stimulated in British universities’.Footnote 53 In Dundee's own recorded impressions of the meeting, he lamented that Latin America had not come under the Hayter Committee's purview in 1959, as this would have obviated the need for a new subcommittee to address Latin American Studies specifically. Nevertheless, he regarded the meeting as ‘useful and our initiative in calling it was appreciated by the Dons and others present…Much will now depend on the chairman of the proposed subcommittee.’Footnote 54
By July, Sir Keith Murray, chair of the UGC, informed the FO that he had gained the tentative approval of the UGC, the Committee of Vice-Chancellors, and the treasury to form a subcommittee to report on the state of Latin American Studies and to make recommendations. As a ‘very rough estimate’, he believed that £30,000 per year might be appropriated to support Latin American Studies. The membership of the subcommittee, Murray recommended, should be composed chiefly of academics (Humphreys, John Street of Cambridge, and Peter Russell of Oxford were the names explicitly raised), but also potential stakeholders from the world of business and finance, with Sir George Bolton, chair of the Bank of London and South America, earning special mention. It was proposed that Parry, principal at University College Swansea, ‘a specialist in Latin American affairs who has served with distinction at Cambridge, the West Indies and Ibadan Universities’, serve as the committee's chair.Footnote 55
In suggesting Parry as chair, Murray already had taken numerous soundings and whittled down the nominations he had received. Parry's was not the only name to have surfaced. C. H. Philips, director of SOAS, proposed Kenneth Younger, director-general of Chatham House, as an ideal candidate, for example.Footnote 56 Among the potential academics, Humphreys was an obvious candidate, both because of his scholarly stature and his high-level academic connections.Footnote 57 But his often-stated aspiration to make London the undisputed centre of Latin American Studies in Britain likely disqualified him on the grounds of partiality. Another possibility mooted was William Atkinson, a professor at the University of Glasgow, the founder of the only honours degree course in Latin American Studies in the entirety of the UK. Atkinson clearly anticipated the appointment as chair of the committee and when he was passed over, his disappointment was palpable.Footnote 58 Murray soon settled upon Parry as his first choice. It is evident from their initial correspondence that the invitation took Parry by surprise. Nevertheless, Parry immediately agreed to serve as chair, and stated that regardless of the ultimate composition of the committee, it was indispensable that Humphreys was made a member.Footnote 59 He later would argue for the inclusion of a Brazil specialist, specifying Boxer as ‘the best’ available.Footnote 60
There were several advantages to Parry's appointment, but one symbolic advantage stood out to Murray. Though formerly a lecturer in Cambridge, he was then the principal of a ‘redbrick’ and ‘provincial’ university. One of Murray's persistent anxieties was ‘solving the problem of representing the provincial universities’. Murray wrote to W. Mansfield Cooper for further advice: ‘You recall you were going to let me have a Redbrick name since you felt, and I agreed with you, that my proposals were too much Oxford, Cambridge, and London.’Footnote 61 Finally, the subcommittee was rounded out and convened, which generated considerable excitement. As Humphreys told his Ford Foundation contact in late 1962, ‘I am now more hopeful than I have been at any time in the last fifteen years’, noting further that ‘[the subcommittee's] establishment alone marks a tremendous step forward’.Footnote 62
What were Parry's other attributes? Some biographical details are suggestive of the intellectual factors and career trajectory that led to his appointment. His committee colleague Boxer later penned an obituary in which he noted that Parry ‘combined great erudition with a compulsively readable style. He never wrote a dull page or a clumsy paragraph.’ He also lauded Parry's ‘genial and unaffected manner’.Footnote 63 Parry was first and foremost a historian and administrator of empire. A fellow of Clare College Cambridge from 1938, his academic career was interrupted by service in the Royal Navy for the entirety of the Second World War, after which he returned to Cambridge as a university lecturer from 1945 to 1949. His tenure in Cambridge saw the publication of The Spanish theory of empire in the sixteenth century (1940) and Europe and the wider world, 1415–1715 (1949). These books reveal Parry's orientation toward imperial history and comparative history.
It is perhaps the subsequent decade, after he had left Cambridge definitively and prior to his appointment as chair of the eponymous UGC subcommittee, that suggests most vividly the milieu out of which interest in Latin American Studies emerged. In 1949, Parry became chair of the History Faculty at the University College of the West Indies (Jamaica), where he remained for seven years. Following that post, he became principal of University College Ibadan (Nigeria) from 1956 to 1960, when he returned to the UK to become principal of University College Swansea, before he became chancellor of the University of Wales from 1963 to 1965. In 1965, as the ink was drying on the Parry Report, he decamped for Harvard, where he had previously spent a year in the mid-1950s, to become the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History, a post he held until his death in 1982. The years immediately following the publication of the Report provide an indication of Parry's research during its gestation. In 1963, he published The age of reconnaissance: exploration, discovery and settlement 1450–1650 and then, in 1966, probably his best-known, and certainly most comprehensive book, The Spanish seaborne empire. He never drifted far from his original focus on empire, and, in fact, gravitated toward the study of Great Power rivalry as his career progressed, publishing in 1971 Trade and dominion: European overseas empires in the eighteenth century.
These biographical details would perhaps be less pertinent were Parry to have disavowed their influence on his intellectual development. But Parry viewed himself, above all, as a historian and administrator of empire. He recognized that ‘the problem of colonial empire’ stitched together the threads of his own life. In an unpublished lecture, delivered in Bogotá in 1973, Parry prefaced his remarks with ‘a word of personal explanation’. He observed that:
I have been concerned throughout my career with the problem of colonial empire. As a naval officer, I was concerned with the protection of sea communications between Great Britain and its dependencies in wartime, and with the administration of naval bases in India and Ceylon. Subsequently as a colonial administrator, I was concerned with a system of higher education in Africa and the West Indies, as part of the preparation for eventual independence. More recently still, as a professional historian, I am concerned with the study of, so to speak, the anatomy and physiology of the principal European empires: with the reasons for their beginnings, their growth, their decline and their end.Footnote 64
During the work of the subcommittee itself, Parry strenuously rejected the view that the study of the colonial period was in some way irrelevant to the study of contemporary Latin America. He dismissed as inaccurate the criticism that colonial specialists were mere ‘romanticists, enthralled by the earlier colourful and stirring scene’.Footnote 65 In the previously mentioned Bogotá lecture, he defended such studies as providing insight into the present politics: ‘major political structures [such as empires] do not disappear without a trace; revolutions are never total. The contemporary world society may or may not be better off without the European colonial empires; but it is inescapably a society which they helped in large measure to create.’Footnote 66 Colonial History was not the only intellectual taproot that nourished Latin American Studies in the UK, but it was a conspicuous one since many of the leading lights on the committee might be classified as such.
IV
As the British government considered acceptance of the Parry Report and the adoption of its recommendations, the FO's Planning Staff developed a policy paper on Latin America, which was circulated internally in July 1965. The paper emphasized that Britain's approach to Latin America must be understood in the context of the Cold War: ‘In the world balance of power, Latin America could provide notable reinforcement to the West. Contrariwise, if Latin America swings her weight against the West, it could be severely damaging.’ Trade was considered the second priority of British policy toward Latin America, and the unfavourable balance of trade was lamented. Yet the Planning Staff's paper tempered expectations that the imbalance could be redressed: ‘we have already missed the boat’. A distant third priority outlined in the paper was the creation of ‘a satisfactory framework into which British Guiana and British Honduras can fit’. How did proposed British policy mesh with the US's recently launched Alliance for Progress? The paper stressed that Britain endorsed the Alliance for Progress's goals, but maintained that Britain should carve out a discernibly independent position. Conditions, the draft paper argued, were propitious:
Considering how small the British presence in Latin America has been in recent years, we are surprisingly popular. Probably this is because we are seen as ‘substitute Americans’. We are on the right side, we speak the right language, we have the right liberal ideas and we are not Americans…A British and European presence in Latin America will introduce additional stability by giving the Latin Americans an alternative to the dilemma of America or the Communist World.Footnote 67
That alternative, however, was inconceivable without American patronage. The Ford Foundation, which previously had supported St Antony's efforts, underwrote the tour of US Latin American Studies programmes that several members of the committee, including Parry, undertook in 1962–3. Ford also funded trips to Latin American and continental European institutions, for the purposes of kindling relationships that might be formalized in the future. Parry marvelled at what he observed, but he quickly disabused himself of the fantasy of replicating the size and scale of American programmes in Britain. As he soberly wrote to a Ford Foundation official,
The difference in scale between the resources devoted to Latin American Studies in our respective countries obtains throughout, and is not likely to be changed greatly even if Latin American Studies are quite considerably developed here following our report. No English University is likely to be able to emulate those of your universities eminent in the field, such as Texas, Berkeley and Columbia. With such resources as we are likely to have we think our initial aims should be to increase staff and extend studies, to ensure that more people travel to Latin America and to provide the tools for study and research by building up our libraries, rather than to set up formal institutes within universities or to encourage provision of separate buildings for such institutes.Footnote 68
Compared with American universities, Parry was convinced that British efforts in Latin American Studies should remain modest, which is reflected in the cautious tone of the Report, with its commitment to incremental enhancements over extravagant displays. Still, the government did not endorse the Report immediately, perhaps due to questions of how closely it aligned with the new policy.Footnote 69 The lag instigated Parry to prod the UGC for information concerning the Report's status. He noted that ‘it is important in starting any new scheme to try to seize the moment when interest is high and increasing and not allowed to evaporate’. He was assured by the UGC's chairman that the UGC was ‘ready to go into action as soon as the signal [from the government] is given’.Footnote 70 The Report was eventually accepted by the government.
Yet even that moment, which should have been triumphant, was marred by anxieties that the financial commitment would fall short of what was needed to realize the vision adumbrated in the Report. As an FO onlooker lamented, ‘Unfortunately, HMG, in accepting the Report in principle, have declined to commit themselves to any very substantial financial [contribution].’Footnote 71 Still, an implementation committee was convened to allocate the funds the government did make available. Five universities – Liverpool, Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge, and London – were empowered to establish centres eligible to receive funds. As might have been be anticipated, the Report's recommendations generated resentment, as not all aspirants to centre status could be accommodated. Blakemore acknowledged the initial discontent stirred up by the Report: ‘Inevitably, the Committee's choice both of the number of centres to be set up and the universities to be invited to establish them was not universally applauded, but the committee was well aware of the highly invidious nature of duty and discharged it well in the circumstances.’Footnote 72 After the centres had been set up, newcomers were treated as interlopers. The University of Essex, founded in 1964, was ineligible for designation as a ‘Parry Centre’, but nevertheless applied to the Nuffield Foundation in 1967 for funding to establish its own Latin American Centre. This effort earned its founding chancellor, the eminent Hispanist Albert E. Sloman, a sharp rebuke from Humphreys.Footnote 73
Additional criticisms of the Report came from scholars whose disciplines were seemingly neglected by it. Writing in Hispania, James McKegney observed with some justice that, ‘There is no doubt…that History is the subject most strongly stressed in library holdings, in staff and in the minds of the Parry Committee, and the Report does not seem to indicate any desire to make Literature, as such, an important part of any program.’Footnote 74 Others concluded that the Report's initial promise went unfulfilled. As Gerald Martin remarked, ‘I soon came to the view that Parry, although apparently path-breaking and undoubtedly an important boost to Latin American Studies in its time, quickly became, like most things in Britain, a somewhat conservative and hierarchical influence.’Footnote 75
Nevertheless, valid criticism aside, the Parry Report's long-term impact at the postgraduate level was formidable. If in 1966–7 the number of theses in progress (both MA and Ph.D.) in all branches of the Latin American Studies was 117, the number had risen to 282 by 1973–4. In some disciplines, the expansion bordered on exponential: there were a mere ten postgraduate theses in progress in Latin American Politics in 1966–7 and sixty-three in 1972–3.Footnote 76 Academic staff designated as Latin Americanists mushroomed: there were 88 such staff at universities and polytechnics in 1967, a figure that swelled to 252 in 1988. The Society for Latin American Studies was founded in 1964 and the Journal of Latin American Studies published its first issue in 1969.Footnote 77 By 1996, there were 339 doctoral dissertations-in-progress on some aspect of Latin America across all disciplines whereas there had been a mere 94 in 1966.Footnote 78
If one uses dissertations-in-progress as a proxy measure for flourishing, then it is possible to conclude that the Parry Report fulfilled its promise. Yet other indices were more equivocal. The Parry Centres, for example, have oscillated between dynamism and decrepitude. Some scholars view this fate as a ‘success’, since they ‘fulfilled an “infant industry” function while the subject became established’. Survival of the centres would have signalled that ‘the subject remains in a ghetto’.Footnote 79 Others view this trajectory with disquiet, arguing that the centres have been undermined by external assessment measures such as the RAE 2008 and REF 2014. In spite of their avowed support for interdisciplinarity, embodied in area studies, they claim that ‘the regional expertise of scholars has often become of lesser consideration than the contribution their research can make to their disciplines’.Footnote 80
Similar ambiguity of results may be seen in the distribution of Latin Americanists across the disciplines and regions. Cultural Studies, for example, has expanded at the expense of History and Literature; several social science disciplines have contracted since their initial efflorescence in the first decade following the Parry Report; the preponderance of scholars focus on Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, leaving vast swathes of the Western Hemisphere understudied if not ignored altogether. Finally, there is the issue of the surprising, unintended political orientation of Latin American Studies since the Parry Report. Historian Rory Miller astutely observed that the government aspired to forge links between universities, government, and private corporations. Many of the students who received Parry grants, however, eschewed such connections. After imbibing marxisant Dependency Theory, they produced scholarship presumably anathema to the funding bodies underwriting their research, preferring alliances with human rights and environmental organizations over the governmental and corporate partners envisioned by the FO and UGC.Footnote 81
The chief purpose of this article, however, has not been to assess whether the promise of the Parry Report was ultimately fulfilled or to determine whether it was promising at all. Instead, this article has sought to recover the genesis of the committee that produced the Report, specifically to identify the factors that led to its establishment and influenced its trajectory. The FO precipitated the UGC's decision to convoke a subcommittee. But its instigation would have yielded little had there not been an influential coterie of scholars and administrators already seeking support from American private foundations. The Parry Committee benefited, too, from the recent precedent of the expansion of area studies, notably the Hayter Report, as well as the expansion of universities inaugurated by the Robbins Report. To these factors must be added the context of the peculiar composition of the committee itself, with its preponderance of historians of empire, including Parry himself. In the throes of decolonization, the FO and UGC turned to an administrator and historian of empire to foster the study of a region where Britain had only a fragmentary formal dominion, where its informal influence had waned vertiginously, but where it might redirect its political energies and economic resources in a Cold War world in which its stature was greatly diminished.
