In Disciplinary Conquest, Ricardo Salvatore reconstructs painstakingly and imaginatively the beginnings of Latin American studies in the United States, which he retraces to the years 1900–45, a period of transition from Big Stick policy, to Dollar Diplomacy, to Good Neighbour Policy, and to Pan-Americanism. Narrating the development of the field as an integral and crucial part of the expansion of North America's ‘benevolent informal empire’ south of Panama – as a region distinct from Central America and the Caribbean – this monograph brings to culmination the author's two-decade-long study of the North–South encounter in the realm of culture.

The narrative centres on in-depth individual discussions of five scholars in five different disciplines, who studied the region and are considered representative of what they themselves perceived as a ‘second discovery’ of South America: historian Clarence H. Haring, geographer Isaiah Bowman, political scientist Leo S. Rowe, sociologist Edward A. Ross, and archaeologist Hiram Bingham. The title of one of the three introductory conceptual chapters refers to the latter as ‘five traveling scholars’, thus emphasising, similarly to the book's subtitle, the significance of transnational displacement in the production of academic regional knowledge. However, the reader who expects a detailed discussion of individual experiences in the tradition of travel writing scholarship will find relatively little along this line in the biographical core chapters. What one gets instead are comprehensive intellectual itineraries which effectively weave together both academic and political ideas and practices, drawing less on travel notes than on a rich variety of other sources, mainly scholarly publications, personal correspondence and newspapers.

Put differently, this book is truer to its main title than to its subtitle in that it recounts a predominantly one-sided rather than two-sided encounter. Thus, for example, the First Pan-American Scientific Congress held in Santiago, Chile, in 1908, is mentioned here as ‘the event that triggered closer intellectual connections between the two Americas’ (p. 25), but very few details are given about social or scholarly exchanges during the meeting. Likewise ignored is the fact that the Santiago congress was the continuation of a series of three purely Latin American scientific congresses inaugurated in Buenos Aires in 1898 on the initiative of the Sociedad Científica Argentina.

Exceptional in this regard is the author's discussion of Bingham's ‘discovery’ of Machu Picchu and its aftermath, which revolves around the interaction of the Yale Peruvian Expedition with local indigenistas in the 1910s. In this case, we learn, the North American conqueror met with resistance from Cuzqueño and Limeño intelligentsia, who initiated an alternative project of archaeological-historical knowledge, as well as from indigenous and Mestizo peasants and labourers who formulated an early critique of Yankee imperialism predating the ideas of famous thinkers such as Valcárcel, Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre. Eventually, though, ‘the centre's epistemological apparatus’ defeated them.

In general, Salvatore observes, US scholars interacted with upper-class intellectuals and/or indigenous peoples. Yet, both types of ‘native informants’ had very limited presence in their writings (p. 249). This may explain the remarkably little attention he himself pays to individual and collective projects of empirical knowledge production across South America that might have influenced or challenged northern scholarship, besides the aforementioned case of Peru. Still, Disciplinary Conquest remains a South American story, or more precisely, an anti-imperialist South American story – although anything but a crude antiyanqui one – written from the vantage point of an unusually versatile Argentine historian with a prolific career in the contact zone between US and Latin American academia. This in-between location is relevant since the book not only traces the origins of unequal power relations between scholarly institutions in the North and in the South but also reads as an indictment of the continuation of such relations today. Disciplinary knowledge produced in centres of Western power not only serves imperialism but is imperialistic in itself, asserts Salvatore, in that it appropriates and uses local knowledge. Intellectuals from the periphery may strive for international recognition, ‘but scholars at the centre often dismiss or discredit their activities as second-rate replicas of original North Atlantic thought’ (p. 14).

This notwithstanding, Salvatore distances himself from ‘the slippery terrain of great discursive formations or grand epistemes’, arguing that the portrayals of South America by his five scholars ‘were governed more by the evidence they gathered than by any metaconceptions about humanity, races, gender roles, or national prejudice’ (p. 8). Combined with a rigorous political contextualisation, this approach stresses change over time and yields an important contribution to the history of inter-American relations: during the interwar period, academics delineated South America as a distinct geopolitical entity, more capable of US-like governance, civility, and progress than the rest of Latin America. Yet this overarching innovative argument about the partition of the subcontinent into discrete territories of inquiry is somewhat problematic in view of the continued dominance of the unifying idea of ‘Latin America’ – rooted in semi-essentialist notions of Latinidad or Iberianism – as a structuring concept in North American academia. In fact, Disciplinary Conquest itself provides evidence and analysis in this direction, focusing, as it does, on the early history of Latin (rather than South) American studies. Moreover, the book ends with acknowledging the weight of old degrading views of Iberian inferiority: ‘Perhaps it was the discovery of the complexities of transferring free-market capitalism, machine civilisation, and political democracy to lands permeated by premodern sociability, Hispanic traditions, and colonial residues in culture’, concludes Salvatore, ‘that led these scholars to imagine the possibility of a different form of US hegemony’ (p. 259, emphasis added).

There is a tension, then, in this work between the author's straightforward emphasis on the dynamically situated nature of empirical knowledge, and an unwitting recognition of the durable influence of stereotypes and prejudices. In the final analysis, though, these two threads are complementary rather than mutually exclusive, and only enrich the overall thesis concerning the interdependent formation of new ideas about and policies toward South America during the early twentieth century. Not only a well-documented, nuanced, and challenging account, but also a rare and bold attempt to write the history of the hemisphere from South to North instead of from North to South, Disciplinary Conquest will hopefully be published also in Spanish and Portuguese and read by all practitioners in the field across the Americas and beyond.