Introduction

Latin America is one star among many in the firmament of global history. Yet it rarely shines brightly, is often overlooked, and has remained on the periphery of a way of writing about history that consciously seeks networks and connections, and aspires to overcome older imperial and colonial exclusionary narratives. The explanation can be found partly in historiography, in Anglophone historians’ (lack of) language skills, in the way that historians choose their subject materials, and in the institutionalization of the writing of global and Latin American histories. For these reasons, the spread of the discipline of global history has caused some anxiety among Latin Americanists, who have been fearful both of the loss of culture-specific knowledge and of the potential homogenization of the historical discipline.Footnote ¹ This article examines the links and divergences between Latin American history and global history. It argues that the geographical and institutional locations occupied by historians, the languages they read and write, and their relationships with their perceived readerships have been crucial factors in shaping disconnections between fields that should be intimately interconnected.Footnote ²

The first part of this article suggests that, because historians of colonial Latin America operating within Atlantic history and African diaspora frameworks have been more likely to engage with global history than those focusing on the post-1800 period, the disconnections and divergences between Latin American history and global history have been most significant for the nineteenth century, with major interpretative consequences.Footnote ³ Because of the vacuums created by the historiographical discontinuities, too much global history and too much Latin American history has situated Latin America as marginalized, passive, or a victim. The final part of the article outlines a manifesto for combining global history and Latin American history, identifying the key periods and events which historians need to address in order fully to integrate the history of Latin America into analyses of global processes, and vice versa.

A history of disconnections

In 2012 Oxford University Press published the Oxford handbook of Latin American history, edited by José Moya.Footnote ⁴ The book gives a sense of developments in the fields and diverse historiographies that make up what is still called, with some reservations, ‘Latin American’ history. Moya provides a lucid breakdown of the regional subcategories of Euro-American, Afro-American, and Indo-American histories, which he suggests provide more coherent units of analysis for post-1492 history. He concludes, nevertheless, that ‘Latin America’ remains a convenient and recognizable label. In this he acknowledges the important advances in understanding the construction of ‘the idea of Latin America’, to use Walter Mignolo’s term.Footnote ⁵ ‘Latin America’, a term never used on either side of the Atlantic before 1840, was an idea invented by a transnational cosmopolitan elite born in Panama, Chile, and Argentina, who were intellectually active in Paris in the mid nineteenth century. What the ‘Latinity’ of parts of America actually meant has been disputed ever since the term was coined. It includes an opposition to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ North America, a shared history of colonialism, Catholicism, and, in the versions attributed to early twentieth-century thinkers such as José Enrique Rodó, a degree of spirituality and aestheticism lacked by rationalist Protestants to the north and in Europe.Footnote ⁶

In Moya’s volume, eminent scholars trace the contributions in agrarian history, economic history, indigenous history, and so on that have changed the way in which specialist historians have thought about Latin America’s past over the last few decades. There is no chapter on the influence of global or world history on Latin American history. Indeed, there are no references at all to how the writing of Latin American history has been influenced by global history. Those who are not Latin Americanists might be surprised that a major historiographical shift is not mentioned in this comprehensive regional body of analysis, but Moya and his contributors did not miss anything. They are correct that the influence of global history upon the writing of Latin American history has been negligible.

Latin American history is correspondingly underrepresented in world and global history, being an object of study only around certain key moments of conquest, rupture, and revolution. As A. G. Hopkins has observed, the writing of world history faces ‘formidable obstacles’ in which ‘attempts to give the endeavour coherence can easily become proxies, witting or unwitting, for a story that is already well known: the rise of the West – with or without the fall of the rest’.Footnote ⁷ World history practitioners have become increasingly aware of these absences in their curricula, and have debated how best to overcome them.Footnote ⁸ The last two decades have witnessed a creative tension between a world history that aspires to comprehensive and comparative accounts of events and processes, and a global history that focuses on networks and connections in the shadow of contemporary globalization.Footnote ⁹ The marginalization of Latin America within both these approaches remains a mutual weakness requiring consideration, reflection, and remedy.

The disconnect between global or world history and Latin America has long been noted. Patrick Manning commented in 2003 that the region was ‘curiously neglected in most treatments of world history’.Footnote ¹⁰ Seven years later, Rick Warner attempted to explain the continued breach in institutional terms: ‘I would submit that Latin American historians themselves are poorly represented in the membership and activity [… of] world historical communities … anecdotally I can probably count on two hands the number of Latin Americanists I have met over the past decade at our conferences.’Footnote ¹¹

Those calling for better connections have often focused on teaching. In 1997, Lance Grahn proposed that university teachers adopt the themes of economics, politics, and ideas to provide an entry point for Latin America into world history survey courses.Footnote ¹² Warner’s attempt ‘to energize the connections between Latin American Studies and World History’ was aimed at creating better classroom discussions in world history programmes in the US.Footnote ¹³ Latin Americanists there taught world history because they had to, and researched Latin American history because they wanted to. World history survey course textbooks, especially those including Latin Americanist authors or editors, have engaged with some key moments in Latin American history, normally related to wars or political violence.Footnote ¹⁴

Whereas the multi-authored world history comparative approach has secured a place for Latin America in teaching, global history research has not followed suit. Instead, the global history approach that privileges connections and networks has often provided a methodological justification for single authors to concentrate on the regions, empires, and cultures they were initially trained to research.

One explanation as to why Latin Americanists have not embraced global history might be the high profile of the strand of global history represented best by Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye in their Global history reader. Their approach sets out to understand the processes that have led to the present, globalized world. Historians are encouraged by Mazlish and Iriye and their followers to seek to understand the world they live in. The problem with this approach is that it relegates to the periphery the roads not taken, the processes and events that, while significant to contemporaries and indeed to other historians, did not lead to the world ‘we’ live in today. The Global history reader displayed a clear dichotomy between global history and Latin American history. Of twenty-eight chapters, only two made more than cursory mention of anywhere in Latin America: a study of how US-based environmental activists got involved with, and helped, Brazilian campaigns against environmental degradation, featuring the celebrated martyred campaigner Chico Mendes; and a treatment of human rights abuses in the Southern Cone in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ¹⁵ Latin America thus appeared only as a bit-part actor. Latin Americans themselves are presented as victims rather than as active participants in global history, and the pre-1950 history of the continent is entirely absent.Footnote ¹⁶

The premise that global history is predicated on a notion of how globalization is experienced today is one that is wholly unsatisfactory for historians of Latin America, who have developed deep-seated historical explanations of contemporary issues. In addition, Latin Americans themselves of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries already had a realization of the global shadows that shaped their lives, just as clearly as do Anglophone global historians writing today.Footnote ¹⁷ The way in which global processes have been assimilated and incorporated into local histories has been part of the history of Latin America since well before Leslie Bethell’s Cambridge history of Latin America collections in the 1980s, to say nothing of more recent historical scholarship.Footnote ¹⁸

The global history of Latin America, therefore, is not the history of globalization writ backwards. Yet the historiography of global history has been up to now largely Anglo-centric. As Dominic Sachsenmaier has shown, the ‘environments of global history’ and the places where the discipline is produced have in many ways mirrored the unevenness of the histories being related.Footnote ¹⁹ The focus of research in global history has been predominantly angled at exploring the shifting power dynamics between South Asia, China, and Europe or ‘the West’. Kenneth Pomeranz’s Great Divergence did discuss Latin America, describing it as ‘a new kind of periphery’, as its resources and labour ‘abolished the land restraint’ elsewhere.Footnote ²⁰ That view – that Latin America was a periphery – is common in global history. The possibility of Latin American agency has been neglected – and sometimes left out of research questions entirely. C. A. Bayly barely engaged with the continent, and the peripheral place that he and others allocated to Latin America has served to buttress claims that place China and South Asia, along with Europe, at the centre of global history.Footnote ²¹

One explanation for the neglect of Latin America is that global history is to some degree a descendent of British imperial historiography, and thus still focuses primarily on the lands that once were painted red on the map, or where British soldiers fought battles and shed their blood. Assumptions about global agency have deep roots. John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: the rise and fall of global empires, 1400–2000, for example, conceded that, despite its title, ‘the problem with which this book is concerned [is] the shifting balance of power and wealth within Eurasia itself in the last half-millennium’.Footnote ²² A good corrective to Anglophone blindness to Latin America for the nineteenth century is Jürgen Osterhammel, whose monumental The transformation of the world takes care to reflect seriously on Latin American events such as independence, revolutions, urbanization, and the extermination of indigenous peoples. Latin America gets much more attention in Osterhammel than in Bayly, certainly. But there is little difference in overall interpretation: Osterhammel brings Latin America back from the margins but leaves it on the periphery of global processes.Footnote ²³

This is the crux of the matter: the central questions asked by global historians have often been about East–West connections and comparisons. Latin America’s problematic identification with ‘the West’ complicates this binary focus.Footnote ²⁴ Global historians and Latin American historians have not always been asking similar questions – or speaking the same language. This is not to advocate the ‘rediscovery’ of Latin America by global historians, but rather an argument for engagement with the region’s histories as a constituent part of global processes, systems, and networks rather than as a constantly peripheral victim.Footnote ²⁵

Explaining isolation

The disconnections between interpretations of Latin American history and global history, outlined above, rest on the ambiguous place that the writing of Latin American history occupies in the fields of world and global history. The following analysis of articles published in the two major journals, the Journal of World History (founded 1991, henceforth JWH) and the Journal of Global History (founded 2006, henceforth JGH) illustrates the origins of this ambiguity and explains how it persists.

JWH is the longest-established journal focusing on global history, and its publishing patterns show a strong focus on the Pacific World (it is based at the University of Hawai‘i). The founding and long-time editor was Jerry Bentley, who worked on cultural encounters in the pre-modern world, and the current editor is Fabio López Lázaro, a world historian who works on colonial Spanish America.Footnote ²⁶ A review of the articles published in JWH demonstrates some clear patterns relating to the type of history of Latin America that it has attracted and preferred. Out of 304 articles published between 1991 and 2015, 20.5 have a focus on Latin America (where articles are explicitly comparative between somewhere in Latin America and somewhere else, I have allocated 0.3. or 0.5, according to the depth of the comparison – this is a rough and ready form of calculation and the results should be treated accordingly). This number equates to 6.7% of the total dealing in any detail with Latin American history. Those articles that engage with Latin American history are overwhelmingly focused on the colonial period (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries), while the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear very infrequently. The most likely explanation for this is the preference among world history researchers for themes relating to the conquest and colonization of Spanish America, over modern or republican Latin America. A relative paucity of studies of Latin America in the journal from 1991 to 2004 was followed by a rise in the number of articles in the mid 2000s, followed by a falling off recently. This pattern might be explained by the temporary rise in the popularity of Atlantic history in the mid 2000s among historians of the post-1750 period.Footnote ²⁷

JGH is the younger of the two journals addressed here. Like JWH, it has also published a small minority of articles dealing with Latin America. In comparison to JWH, nevertheless, JGH has taken Latin America rather more seriously as a participant in global networks and processes. Its more modern/contemporary focus seems the most likely explanation here. Some patterns can be usefully traced. Of the 174 articles published, 16.5 have looked in depth at Latin America: that is approximately 9.5% of the total. A review of the subject material of those articles provides us with a useful overview of the types of Latin American history which have engaged with global history. There is no clear pattern, but rather a variety of specialized research projects and divergent historiographies: the histories of labour, nationalism, the Cold War, economics, gender, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, human rights, and commodities. The lack of pattern is reflective of the weak integration of the concerns of Latin American history and global history, but this diversity is also one of the great strengths of global history, engaging cultural, political, economic, and material history, and bringing the experience of understudied regions into dialogue with places elsewhere. The recent issue of JGH on sport, edited by Matthew Taylor, clearly shows the benefits of a global history approach for Latin Americanists. Paul Dietschy’s article on the global football body FIFA demonstrates the way in which its governance and politics were shaped after the First World War by non-Europeans and especially Latin Americans.Footnote ²⁸ The apparent overrepresentation of Latin American national teams in FIFA world cups, and their apparent overachievement in those competitions, compared to size of population, territory, and economic wealth, was previously explained in cultural terms (namely, that Latin Americans are intrinsically ‘good at’ football). Dietschy explains this, however, through practical, economic, and geopolitical factors rooted in the 1920s and 1930s. The origins of football and other modern sports in Latin America were resolutely global, linked to cultural and commercial networks encompassing the whole world, rather than national or imperial as has been suggested in the past.Footnote ²⁹ The absence of Latin America’s agency in these processes can be explained by the ongoing disconnect between scholarly production of world history narratives, sports history, and Latin American studies.

In summary, the JWH has published 6.7% of articles on Latin America, and JGH 9%. These figures do not seem unreasonable, though it is clear that Latin America is still underrepresented on some scales. In terms of land mass, Latin America is usually held to occupy around 13% of the world’s land-surface area. In 2013 the population of the lands conventionally understood to be part of Latin America (the republics of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela) represented around 8% of the global population (603 million out of 7.1 billion). Latin American history is therefore a little underrepresented but by no means absent, at least in terms of publications in the major journals as measured against the size of the territory.Footnote ³⁰ Were migrant and Latino/a communities taken into account, the underrepresentation would be even starker.

The point remains to explain why Latin American history has not yet made the transition from a subject of research by global historians to full integration into the explanatory models of global history. The historiographical and institutional parts of the answer relate to regional differences in the development and conditions of the professionalization of the historical discipline in the twentieth century. Historians of Latin America working in non-English/Spanish/Portuguese-speaking Europe seem to have found it easiest to engage with global history, without having to disengage messily from imperial historiographies that have left Latin America on the periphery. Spain has followed the British model, with its own ‘imperial’ history divorced from ‘Latin American’ history (with the exception of the work of pioneers such as Josep Fradera and Chris Schmidt-Nowara).Footnote ³¹ Some Spanish historians, such as Carlos Barros, have hoped that global history would revitalize their ‘moribund’ national historiography.Footnote ³²

French historians of Latin America have taken the lead here, perhaps indirectly influenced by the universal history advocated by Fernand Braudel and others. The journal Annales, which ‘has always sought to transcend its prestigious heritage by continually presenting the most innovative research in the field of history’, has published numerous works of global history.Footnote ³³ These have included writings on Caribbean and Latin American history and ‘colonized memories’, global paradigms beyond the Atlantic, diaspora, and global representations of the tropics during the Enlightenment.Footnote ³⁴ The separate development of histoire croisée is another factor. The influence of François-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lempérière in Paris, supervisors of numerous Latin American doctoral students, encouraged comparative and transnational histories of Latin America.Footnote ³⁵ A similar trend can be noted in work coming out of the Latin American History Centre in Berlin: the theme of the 2014 conference of the Association of Historians of Latin America in Europe (AHILA), held in Berlin, was precisely the challenges for Latin American history within its global context.Footnote ³⁶

In the United States, Latin American history has been taught as part of world history courses and therefore integrated into major syntheses and textbooks. The focus, as for JWH articles, tends to be on the pre-colonial and colonial periods. One factor explaining the reluctance of US-based Latin Americanists to engage with global history might be the influence of subaltern studies among their number (peaking in the 1990s). This movement encouraged scholars to push down into the ‘local’ to capture non-elite agency, at the expense of the themes of global history. Latin American subaltern studies was principally a cultural and literary studies phenomenon, but it did heavily influence the kinds of projects devised by historians. As Gustavo Verdesio observed, subaltern studies became ‘one of the most influential endeavours in the fields of Latin American literary and cultural studies in the United States’ and, through area studies conferences such as the Latin American Studies Association, had a direct effect on historians too.Footnote ³⁷ Some of those historians affiliated with these area studies organizations were members of the Latin American Subaltern Studies group, or were taught by them. While originally inspired by the South Asia Subaltern Studies group, and regional and globally comparative in approach, the strongest legacy of subaltern studies for historians of Latin America has been in its followers’ commitment to local and micro-history, usually involving the study of indigenous or Afro-American communities.

The concern with (and debates over) ‘giving voice’ to subaltern peoples, through either oral history or ground-breaking archival work with legal records or municipal collections, has found a comfortable home within Latin American studies. Ulrike Strasser and Heide Tinsman observe that ‘Latin American history anticipated the concern of both world history and transnational cultural studies with international dynamics of domination, dependency, and difference’.Footnote ³⁸ Historians who have related their local subjects explicitly to global processes within this tradition, such as James Sanders and Karin Rosemblatt, have been relatively rare.Footnote ³⁹ This partially explains why non-historians have come to be the ones who have theorized about the scope and range of Latin American history in the longue durée. Away from subaltern studies, pioneers in integrating Latin American history with global history, such as Jeremy Adelman, Lauren Benton, and Micol Seigel, have drawn fruitfully on Atlantic, Pacific, and transnational historiographies.Footnote ⁴⁰

Latin American history as practised in the UK, as in the US, emerged in the 1960s, ‘animated by a deep and fruitful commitment to challenging universal claims’, as was gender history and other new approaches to the discipline.Footnote ⁴¹ Historians of Latin America working in the UK on what from other perspectives are seen as global history topics such as liberalism, modernity, or the Columbian exchange, have seldom published in global history journals or edited books, preferring instead ‘universal’ history or ‘area studies’ journals.Footnote ⁴² That generation of historians of Latin America was trained under what we might broadly characterize as the ‘founding fathers’ generation of UK-Latin American History at the post-Parry Report Centres for Latin American Studies, none of whom published a work of global history themselves. I would argue that these historians have practised global history with a focus on Latin America, while identifying themselves, their publications, and their careers as being in the field of Latin American history. This generation’s professional commitment to area studies probably explains their reluctance or delay in responding to global history in the 1990s and 2000s. Some historians working in the UK have thought outside these boxes, bringing them a little closer to global history. Francisco Bethencourt’s work on race, noting the disjuncture between historical conceptions of ‘Iberian’ as against ‘Latin American’, is one good example.Footnote ⁴³

Within Latin America itself, most history departments remain overwhelmingly national in their research agendas and teaching curricula. Funding streams, likewise, highlight national concerns, which shape research projects and publications. Where external forces are studied it is in the effect of the global on the local. The long-standing distinction in Latin American history teaching between historia nacional and historia universal is worth noting. In 1897, Ecuador’s first lay school was created, the Instituto Nacional Mejia, in Quito. Its history programme was separated into historia del Ecuador and historia universal. The latter ranged from pre-colonial South American history to Greek and Roman history. No connections were suggested between the two, creating an apparent separation, which persists to this day in bookshops, library classifications, and teaching curricula.Footnote ⁴⁴ Though teaching has moved towards regional and thematic teaching, the distinction between historia nacional and historia universal can still be found in journal mission statements and undergraduate programmes.Footnote ⁴⁵ One example of a historian of Latin America who fully situated his studies (on Brazil) within global contexts was Gilberto Freyre (who died in 1987), whose research on race, slavery, migration, and Brazilian culture had global transcendence and left a strong legacy. However, Freyre was not a professional historian but rather a sociologist who wrote some history.Footnote ⁴⁶

Historians in Latin America are marked by their professional loyalties, their training, and their institutional homes. This partly explains the tensions with global history that are identified here. The slow disengagement from the ‘national’ might be seen as symptomatic of the inability of the historical discipline there to deal with the pressures and challenges of a globalizing world, or of the resilience of the national paradigm many years after this was deemed obsolete elsewhere. Language also remains a significant explanatory factor. The past fifty years have seen an increased attention to language skills among US and European graduate students, and in-country immersion through long periods of archival research. Historians of Latin America from elsewhere have developed language and cultural skills in Spanish and Portuguese as part of their tools as professional historians, and those from Latin America have been slower to access sources in other languages. Together these trends perhaps unconsciously contributed to making the field more parochial than it needed to be as academia itself was globalizing.

In the last two decades, however, historians working in Latin America itself have taken significant steps towards breaching the strong national historiographical paradigms that have shaped much research funding and publication across the region. Historical journals throughout Latin America now regularly publish articles dealing with neighbouring countries, and engage with historiographical innovations regardless of origin or language.Footnote ⁴⁷ Global history is still barely being written in Spanish or Portuguese, but in the last ten years it has started to find some adherents looking to overcome the ‘great institutional obstacles’ facing it within Latin America. Their historiographical surveys and criticisms may lead to a flowering of publications in future years. One example is Hugo Fazio, in Colombia, who has written several good historiographical reviews that interpret and annotate the English-language literature on global history.Footnote ⁴⁸ He is a historian of the contemporary period, and a follower of the school of global history seen in the Global history reader, writing that ‘global history needs to be thought of as the environment where the history of the present day takes place’. He concludes that: ‘The global historian needs the ability to learn different languages, to be submerged in different historical-cultural contexts, and to be open to understanding other points of view about the past. The global historian, in this sense, is not a simple translator of the past but the translator of other cultures.’Footnote ⁴⁹

Wherever it is written, some strands of Latin American history correlate closely with global history without identifying themselves as such. These strands diverge from Pamela Kyle Crossley’s assertion that global historians tend to use secondary sources and so are distinguished from those doing regional or national history ‘more by their methods than by their facts’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Like many global historians, some Latin Americanists attempt to ‘tell a story that aspires to explain global-scale changes over time’, but disagree that this means relinquishing the obligation to locate and analyse primary sources and resort instead to sifting secondary sources alone.Footnote ⁵¹ Retaining a focus on archival work rather than synthesis, some Latin Americanists have adopted the methodologies of transnational history, through the study of travellers and travel writing, economic exchange, and the networks of material culture. The results of these studies have been Atlantic, and sometimes global, as Latin Americanists have followed their research questions across continents and oceans. In this they have been motivated by the relative failure of Atlantic history to decentre narratives from their northern cores, and by new geopolitical concerns of the twenty-first century, such as the rise of the Global South. A good example of these newer trends is the work of Micol Seigel on the construction of racial identities in Brazil. Through the study of musical cultures and the travels of Brazilian musicians between the First and Second World Wars, Seigel explores ‘the global in the local’ and succeeds in ‘eroding assumptions of the passivity, ignorance, and impotence of marginalised people’.Footnote ⁵²

This more global and transnational research has not necessarily been noticed by global historians, however. A perfect example of this is the work of Catherine Legrand on the United Fruit Company enclaves in Colombia in the first half of the twentieth century, published in 1998. She begins with these research questions, which might come from any introduction to a work of self-declared global history:

Legrand is a widely respected scholar within Latin American history, well known in Colombia, North America, and Europe. Using Google Scholar (admittedly not a very reliable citations index) we see that nearly every historian of Latin America writing in English in the last decade has cited this work, which has been universally recognized as insightful, original, and bringing new understanding to the way in which Colombia was incorporated into the global economy, and its effects, during the early twentieth century ‘banana boom’. But there is not a single work of global history that cites Legrand, and her work has had very limited impact in publications outside the field of Latin American studies.Footnote ⁵⁴ The reasons for this unfortunate absence lie both in the institutional orientation of this work within area studies and also in its chronological focus: as a study of the long nineteenth century Legrand’s work falls well after the conquest and colonial period in which world history generally discusses Latin America, but before the contemporary lens of some global history has started paying attention.

A manifesto for a global history with Latin America: periodization

The first two parts of this article have outlined the disconnections between interpretations of Latin American and global history, and have proposed some explanations as to how these might have emerged. This part identifies the principal periods and processes which should form the basis of engagement between global history and Latin American history, outlining a potentially rich and fruitful research agenda for both sides of this ‘geohistoriographical’ divide.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is intended as a contribution to ‘what might optimistically be considered to be a dialogue’ between the two sides.Footnote ⁵⁶

The first key period in which Latin America influenced and shaped global history is the well-known Columbian exchange from around 1500. Ever since the residents of the islands of the Caribbean observed the arrival of Christopher Columbus’ ships in 1492, Latin America has participated in global crises and international commercial, political, and social networks. Columbus’ arrival began the exchange of products, peoples, and practices that created the conditions for the ascendance of empires ruled nominally from Madrid, London, Paris, and Lisbon, and a degree of transculturation, syncretism, and hybridity between cultures and religions. Merchants exported tobacco, tomatoes and chillies, while dietary innovations caused settlers in the New World to contemplate what it meant to be European, Indian, or human.Footnote ⁵⁷ Excellent comparative advances have been made here within Atlantic paradigms, by J. H. Elliott and Jeremy Adelman, which draw major conclusions as to the legacies of Spanish and Portuguese colonialisms long after their control of the American continent was undone by the independence movements of the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁸

The second period is the establishment of slave plantation complexes in the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in the USA, Haiti, Cuba, and Brazil, which has been recognized by Pomeranz as a crucial input into global history, with labour working in Latin America and materials produced in Latin America catalysing significant change in Eurasia.Footnote ⁵⁹ Histories of slavery and slave trades by scholars on the north and south Atlantic have shown how the slave economies of St Domingue (Haiti from 1804), Brazil, and Cuba were central to the development of the global economy and to ideas about freedom, labour, and democracy worldwide. Long-term study of migration to the Americas – forced and voluntary – complicates Eurasian-centred periodization of ‘proto’ and ‘modern’ globalization.Footnote ⁶⁰

Third, and less well known, is the period around 1820. The independence of most of Latin America from the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the 1820s came about through anti-colonial movements but they were also ‘liberal’ in the sense that sovereignty came to reside in the people, and legitimacy became grounded in the consent (rather than just the domination) of the governed. The French Revolution of 1789 may have initiated this period in European history, but events and ideas in Latin America often overtook Europe and provided a huge swathe of republics, some liberal, some not so, that Europeans and North Americans looked to for inspiration – and often with some anxiety – during the rest of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶¹ Latin Americans’ participation in global processes in the Age of Revolutions is often ignored.Footnote ⁶² The independence of Latin America gave rise to a series of brand new nation-states and republics, entities that characterized this continent much more, and much earlier, than any other region of the world. Such an occurrence is often dismissed, but mistakenly. In the long term, Latin American faith in the nation-state has contributed significantly to the global persistence of this form, and to the successes of multinational organizations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Footnote ⁶³

Fourthly, the years around 1850 have been identified by James Dunkerley as the key period when transport and communication revolutions connected global currents with Latin American lives with greater depth and rapidity than ever before.Footnote ⁶⁴ Historians could spend more energy investigating the influence that Latin America has had upon the rest of the world in the mid nineteenth century, a research area that remains understudied in key works, despite some important advances by Latin Americanists. These include Patience Schell, who has shown that Charles Darwin’s Chilean friends were crucial to his travels, investigations, and publications; Paula Caffarena on scientific knowledge about the smallpox vaccine in Chile; and Irina Podgorny on fossil collection in Argentina. All have shown how Latin Americans shaped scientific knowledge as it became global.Footnote ⁶⁵

It was not just people and commodities that circulated between Latin America and the rest of the world. As Helen Cowie has shown, Latin American animals were an intrinsic part of the global networks of collection and display of exotic animals centred initially on Paris and London, in the mid 1800s. These turtles, llamas, alpacas, alligators, and others became highlights of zoological gardens and travelling menageries, and enabled spectators to reflect upon their own places in the world. In 1836 London Zoo proudly displayed and restrained an Andean condor, which for visiting journalists symbolized the global dimensions of the collecting networks, encompassing Latin America.Footnote ⁶⁶ The global dimensions of the lives and histories of Latin American animals were more than symbolic. Peccaries sent from Valparaiso, turtles from the Galapagos Islands, alligators from Tampico: those that survived the arduous Atlantic crossing were studied and marvelled at by Britons.Footnote ⁶⁷ Cowie shows how hunters and collectors always relied upon local guides and often upon indigenous knowledge. The global networks that resulted reflected the inspiration and improvisation of these agents, rather than any clear imperial agenda to collect and dominate.Footnote ⁶⁸ Nor were the networks unidirectional: while condors were taken to London, many Old World animals travelled in the opposite direction to Latin America, beginning with the conquistadores’ horses and donkeys, and continuing through cows, sheep, and pigs. The global movement of animals was the result of idiosyncratic as well as broader commercial motives.

Drawing on Schell, Cowie, and Dunkerley, we might see the mid nineteenth century as the moment when Latin America embraced and was embraced by the global, in culture as well as commerce. This was the period when sport expanded worldwide and coffee and rubber colonized much of the world from the fertile soil of Latin America. But it was also ‘the birth of the modern world’, when the central motors of global history as traced by Bayly, Pomeranz, Osterhammel, and Darwin shifted east from Europe, not west. The overlap between economics, modernity, empires, and nationhood is the critical issue at the crux of the intersection between global history and that of Latin America in this period.Footnote ⁶⁹ The work of Chris Evans and Olivia Saunders on the ‘world of copper’ that evolved between 1830 and 1870 around networks embracing Wales, Chile, Cuba, and Australia suggests ways to proceed with a research agenda on this era.Footnote ⁷⁰

Fifthly, the late nineteenth century, between 1870 and 1920, is perhaps the crucial period for these questions, whose global contours have begun to be examined. Alejandro Mejías-López has shown how the Latin American modernismo movement of the 1880s predated Anglophone modernism, and has used this to argue that ‘the Hispanic Atlantic, as an integral part of “the West”, can help expose the biased and skewed ways in which “Western” history has been written’.Footnote ⁷¹ Another example comes from Ecuador’s position as the world’s principal cacao producer at the start of the twentieth century. As landowners there came to understand and exploit the global networks through which their cacao was traded, principally through the British ships that took their products to French consumers, they adapted the ways in which they contracted labour. Struggles over the geographical movement of the Ecuadorian workforce became a principal factor in that country’s political and military conflicts of the early twentieth century. These conflicts were understood in Ecuador at the time – and since – as primarily national, and the global networks which triggered them, shaped them, and provided a continuing dynamic, were made peripheral to the national interpretation favoured by politicians and subsequent historians.Footnote ⁷² But Latin American and Pacific producers of cacao shaped European and global tastes, and market demand catalysed infrastructure development and investment in some but not all producing areas, as William Clarence-Smith has shown.Footnote ⁷³

The late nineteenth century was a significant point of transition in environmental global history set against a longue durée framework. Gregory Cushman’s work on guano (bird droppings) begins with the indigenous, pre-Columbian stories about the origins of guano and about the seabirds that excrete it.Footnote ⁷⁴ Using sources produced and located across the world, Cushman demonstrates how the actions of Peruvians and others interested in capitalizing guano had environmental, colonial, and economic consequences that spilled out across the Pacific to other nitrate-producing islands, and stimulated other nations with colonial designs to control neighbouring islands and rock formations. Fluctuating populations of seals, chinchillas, and vicuñas were part of this history, as were the mass migrations of Asian workers to shovel the guano and the dreams of British and Peruvian engineers to re-engineer the Pacific coastline to maximize profit and make the guano trade sustainable. Writing the global history of Latin America like this can allow the detection of causation and effect outside national or regional paradigms, and open horizons in a way that area studies approaches, almost by definition, cannot.Footnote ⁷⁵

At the end of the nineteenth century migration patterns carried hundreds of thousands of people from Europe to Latin America, echoing the journeys of the millions of enslaved Africans up to the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. Latin America was one of the most important receiving destinations for migrants in the nineteenth century, but is typically overlooked by historians and theorists of immigration.Footnote ⁷⁶ Ideas followed these unprecedented movements of peoples. Benedict Anderson has produced a remarkable study of the global histories of anarchism and anti-colonialism in the 1890s, circulating between Europe, the Americas, and the Philippines.Footnote ⁷⁷ Also at the end of the century, Latin American products flooded onto world markets. Economic historians, in particular, have shown that Latin America was never simply the impotent provider of raw materials – gold, silver, sugar, coffee, rubber, oil – that some of the literature which casts the continent as a peripheral victim might have us believe. The work of Steven Topik, Arnold Bauer, and others has shown how economic and material cultures from Latin America came to be embedded globally and how non-Latin Americans came to be unknowingly addicted to its exports, such as silver, indigo, cochineal dye, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cacao, bananas, guano, nitrates, rubber, henequen, and cocaine.Footnote ⁷⁸ Research on commodity chains has shown ‘that Latin American producers were much more than simple marionettes set to dance by overseas commands and demands’.Footnote ⁷⁹ As Topik and Mario Samper have it, for example, in the late nineteenth century, by virtue of the continuing use of slave labour in Brazil and its international trading connections, ‘Latin America turned much of the Western world into coffee drinkers’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Topik, Marichal, and Frank conclude that ‘frequently Latin Americans have been the price-makers and developed the cutting-edge production technology’ which has been adopted elsewhere, rather than slavishly following outside models.Footnote ⁸¹

It is worth noting that, in the field of economics, Latin Americanists have been major contributors to discussions of globalization, and have generated much of the theory on which others have drawn.Footnote ⁸² The explanation might simply be that these Latin American economists had better English-language skills early on, which drew them into global debates, than their monolingual counterparts in history, who were therefore ‘naturally’ drawn into national or regional discussions limited by common language. This is certainly the case for Brazil, whose historiography is written largely in Portuguese, in contrast to economics, where Brazilian economists publishing in English have made major global contributions.Footnote ⁸³

Future historians will decide whether, as Oscar Guardiola-Rivera suggests, the years around 2010 saw another key shift in the relationship between South and North, whence Latin America may come to ‘rule the world’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Anthropologists have begun to map the changes of late twentieth-century globalization in Latin America, inspired by pioneers for other regions such as Donald Wright.Footnote ⁸⁵ Wendy Call traced them across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico over several decades.Footnote ⁸⁶ Joy Logan’s study of the mountainous peak of Aconcagua, the highest summit in the Americas and now an international adventure tourism destination, is another insightful example of changes in the world’s relations with Latin America.Footnote ⁸⁷ Regardless of whether the contemporary period marks continuity or change in the nature of Latin America’s relationship with the world, it has been argued here that accurate periodization is crucial to the incorporation of Latin America within global history. Such an incorporation of Latin American experience might necessitate reimagining exactly what global history considers itself to be.

The universal global history of Latin America

The years around 1820, 1850, 1870, and 1920 form key stages in the transformation of the nineteenth-century world when global histories must not avoid the history of Latin America. An alternative approach to that outlined above, which eschews such close attention to periodization, attempts to fit these and other moments of Latin American history into a new, radical universal history. These narratives have come from writers inspired by the dependency and world-systems approaches of the 1970s and 1980s. There is a crucial caveat here, however: the scholars seeking to redefine and rewrite Latin American history from a global perspective in this way are not historians. Latin Americanists working in social sciences and cultural studies have used the language of coloniality/decoloniality to propose new ways of understanding Latin America’s historical and contemporary relationships with the rest of the world. Scholars such as Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Ileana Rodríguez, and Arturo Escobar warn Latin Americanists against following global trends and encourage autochthonous responses to the academic challenges of globalization. Like Jean-Frédéric Schaub, they argue that the move to global histories carries the danger of flattening out the inequalities that locally focused colonial and imperial histories have identified.Footnote ⁸⁸

The coloniality/decoloniality version of history contains much observation of colonial and imperial parallels and networks across global empires, and focuses on the resistance and exploitation of indigenous peoples in the Americas.Footnote ⁸⁹ Mignolo draws on Immanuel Kant’s ‘The idea of universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view’ (1784) to construct compelling links between ideas of progress, race, civilization, and colonialism.Footnote ⁹⁰ A universal history with Latin America written back in, as proposed by Mignolo and others, emphasizes victimhood as well as moments of revolutionary and transcendental humanity. There is interesting overlap here with the way that Susan Buck-Morss, in her widely cited Hegel, Haiti, and universal history, asked: ‘how are we to make sense out of the temporal unfolding of collective, human life?’Footnote ⁹¹ Buck-Morss argued that ‘The need to rethink this question today in a global context, that is, as universal history, has not been felt so strongly for centuries – perhaps not since Hegel, Haiti, and the Age of Revolution.’ She followed global historians in stating that ‘because the central question of history’s meaning cannot be asked outside of time but only in the thick of human action, the way the question is posed, the methods of the inquiry, and the criteria of what counts as a legitimate answer all have political implications’.Footnote ⁹²

This approach to universalizing Latin American history – emphasizing its radical significance alongside other versions of history – sets itself as a counterweight to global histories that tell the stories of those who won globalization. Buck-Morss concludes: ‘The definition of universal history that begins to emerge here is this: rather than giving multiple, distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of collective cultural identities, human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture.’Footnote ⁹³ By this she means seeing ‘raw’ humanity emerging in subaltern ruptures with established orders: the Haitian Revolution of 1791 is the starting point. Other examples of universal moments of human emancipation in this interpretation would include the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Sandinistas, Hugo Chávez, and the new Bolivian Constitution of 2009, ‘the second founding of Bolivia’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Crucial to this project of universalizing Latin American history is the integration of Caribbean history alongside continental Latin American history. It makes particular use of events and people from the history of Haiti, which is presented as the classic case of an authentic, popular revolutionary uprising suppressed by imperial/external powers. Laurent Dubois’s work on the Haitian Revolution has tied French, Haitian, and global history together.Footnote ⁹⁵ Historians of the Caribbean have embraced global approaches as well as Atlantic paradigms, which can be seen in John McNeill’s Mosquito empires and David Geggus’ publications on the global wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fought out in the Caribbean basin.

In its present state, however, the attempt to write a universal history of radicalism is not so different from old-style universal history, or history of civilizations: it picks what it sees as the ‘best’ bits of history and displays them together as the narrative. History of civilizations retains a considerable legacy in the public consumption of history, as well as in some university syllabuses. It is still visible in Europe’s major museums as a legacy of its highpoint in the early twentieth century. Universal history put the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum and the Persian Reliefs on display in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, leaving the artefacts collected from Latin American civilizations in cupboards and basement annexes, or as part of colonial collections in Madrid or Lisbon. In his A history of civilizations, Fernand Braudel was part of this marginalizing of Latin America, despite the three years that he spent at the University of São Paulo between 1935 and 1938. Although he was very conscious that Latin American history had been absolutely linked to global currents from 1492 to 1963, when he wrote the book he did not have much time for the indigenous civilizations of the Americas.Footnote ⁹⁶

The global connections of South American archaeology and their collections were substantial, and have recently come to be better understood by historians.Footnote ⁹⁷ Indeed, recent global exhibitions on gold or Inca and Aztec societies suggest that curators and historians of the global are keen to incorporate Latin American stories and move beyond what Stefanie Gänger identifies as the ‘systemic hierarchies and the chasms of global modern intellectual culture’ that shape their collections.Footnote ⁹⁸ It remains unclear how these have been integrated into global visions, however, or whether old interpretations of periphery, exoticism, and victimhood are being perpetuated. New, radical, universal history is admirable in bringing the indigenous knowledge out of the cupboard and placing it as an exhibit in support of an alternative interpretation. But if global history is going to test and challenge its practitioners and its students, and provide a useful framework for understanding the worlds we live in, then it will have to do rather more than that. In this case, following Braudel’s lead, we need to study the past comparatively as well as focusing on networks and their power relations.

New universal history is informed by a narrative of Latin American victimhood within world history shaped by dependency theory and world-systems analysis.Footnote ⁹⁹ Narratives of radical universal history as proposed by Buck-Morss, featuring occasional moments of revolution, great works of literature, or charismatic Latin American leaders tragically overthrown, draw heavily on this school. Raw materials are central to the histories of Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and Eduardo Galeano, which offer redemption in the future against the background of victimhood in the past.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ From the opposite end of the spectrum, other grand narratives of world history invoke Latin American ‘failure’ to demonstrate and justify the ‘success’ of other places. A good example is Niall Ferguson, who omitted the region from Empire, and then used Latin America with scant regard for its history in Civilization as an example of where Western ideals and practices had failed.Footnote ¹⁰¹

If we reflect on the global geopolitical, financial, and commercial shifts that have been shaped by Latin American events, migrants, and innovations, discussed above, we see that Latin America’s history can be judged neither as a forgotten continent of hope and dreams nor as the pitiable victim of the machinations of evil empires. In Mignolo’s interpretation, ‘coloniality’ in Latin America was produced by Enlightenment and colonialism emanating from Europe. Long-term analysis is crucial, but that does not mean selecting favourite events and stringing them together to tell a supposedly universal tale. Latin America has sometimes been a victim of empire, sometimes an agent of globalization, and has also been made peripheral to some global processes. As Mejías-López has argued, ‘cultural theories of transculturation, dependency, hybridity, and parody, while undoubtedly seeking to empower Latin American cultural production through difference, have ultimately perpetuated, in one way or another, the imperial sameness of the metropolitan centre under critique’.Footnote ¹⁰² Historians have shown that such stark dichotomies between victim and victor on opposing sides of the ocean do not fit with the surviving evidence. As noted above, periodization is key: Latin America’s relationship with the world changed qualitatively around 1500, again around 1800, and once more around 1880, and perhaps again around 2000. At all of these junctures, imperial and decolonizing processes emanated from Latin America, with significant effects globally.

So instead of dismissing Mignolo and others for their sometimes crude ahistoricism, it is worth considering whether their interdisciplinary insights might be usefully applied to the global history of Latin America by historians. Mignolo reflects on ‘global histories’ from the perspective of a cultural critic who wants to ‘decolonize’ knowledge. He suggests that a decolonized global history would not have only one narrative of the history of Latin America but rather many voices relating parallel and interrelated histories. Later in the same work, he observes that the writing of history has been linked too closely with coloniality. He suggests that ‘undoing the colonial difference means to accept and act on the fact that History is the flat narrative of imperial dominium that pretends to capture the flow of reality, while histories, ancestralities, memories are local, marginal, insignificant narratives from the perspective of History’.Footnote ¹⁰³

Few practising historians, in Latin America or elsewhere, would recognize themselves or their profession in Mignolo’s brash caricature of History versus histories. Historical research as a method and set of approaches allows us to go beyond the ‘flat narrative’. Indeed, it is the questions raised by global history about causations and connections that must force historians of Latin America to continue to go beyond the ‘flat narrative’ and to open up sources, regions, and histories to comparative analytical critique.

Concluding thoughts: writing Latin American global history

Global history has been slow to see Latin America as one of its centres of gravity, which instead were believed to lie in Eurasia. Furthermore, well-publicized present-focused strands of global history emanating from the US have been particularly unattractive for historians of Latin America, as they presented an image of the continent as peripheral or victim – if not, indeed, entirely absent. Institutional factors and the dynamics of funding have presented a further obstacle to Latin Americanist engagement with global factors, encouraging national paradigms or, at best, area studies frameworks. Within these circumstances, over the past two decades a younger generation of historians of Latin America has emerged who continue to define themselves as such, yet for whom global processes and exchanges are at the centre of their research agendas. It is the contention of this article that they should see themselves both as historians of Latin America and as global historians.

It should be taken as a given that all historians, global or otherwise, should be reading JGH on a regular basis, and that institutional reciprocal arrangements should be set up for JGH and JWH (and other historical journals with aspirations to global coverage) to be translated into and published in Spanish and Portuguese (and Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani) for monolingual readers in Latin America. If we want debates about global history to be truly global, then we cannot allow English to be the sole language of discussion. At the very least, works of global history should be required to engage with the historiography of the places under analysis, either directly or in translation.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

A. G. Hopkins observed in 2002 that debates around globalization had remained ‘almost exclusively Western in conception and indeed in orientation too’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Latin Americanists must therefore engage with global history on an equal footing with South Asianists, Europeanists, North Americanists, and so on, arguing strongly that Latin American connections and experiences are just as significant to the development of global processes as those of places elsewhere, especially where these have been understudied, as for the nineteenth century. This article has argued for a reinvigorated research agenda shared across these disciplines which examines key periods of Latin America’s nineteenth century that have hitherto been relatively neglected by global historians. New political, social, intellectual, and economic formations arose in Latin America in the nineteenth century, whose global dimensions remain lamentably poorly understood. The major contribution of global history in the last two decades has been to demonstrate that some places are not more important than other places, only that they have appeared to historians to be of less significance with regard to particular questions.

Historians of Latin America should continue to decolonize their discipline and to address the big questions of global history from their own unique standpoints. This means having the confidence to step over the line into debates that might seem unfamiliar, unnecessary, or shrouded in difficult language. Historians of Latin America have relished frontier-crossing actors and have produced studies of hybridity, borders, and contact zones. It is time for them to step further into this new territory themselves and to apply themselves to global history. With full consideration of nineteenth-century Latin American histories of migration, trade, war, sport, ideologies, products, and practices, global history itself will look very different, as it should.