America, América by Greg Grandin: An extraordinarily ambitious history of conquest and control in the Americas

Trump’s spectacular act of national chauvinism was an early indication of the kind of foreign policy he would adopt in his second term. Indeed, as Greg Grandin demonstrates in his excellent new book, America, América, US policy toward Latin America has shaped its position toward the rest of the world. The US has often assigned itself as the sole “America”: an exceptional nation with the right to act unilaterally.

Yet it has often been challenged by those identifying with “the Americas” and advancing a co-operative vision for the hemisphere and the globe. Grandin, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is one of the best historians today at writing for both scholars and the general public. This is an extraordinarily ambitious book.



It promises to be a history of the New World, from the Spanish conquest to the present. It is not exactly that. Key events, such as the Mexican-American War in which the US acquired by force nearly two million square kilometres of territory, happen offstage.

Portuguese-speaking Brazil and much of the Caribbean appear in the narrative only occasionally; Canada, hardly at all. Even accepting that Grandin’s focus is the relationship between the US and Spanish-speaking America, his range remains impressive. His book is as sprawling as the territory that it covers in 50 chapters.

America, América reads at times as the historical equivalent of the great epic novels of a Gabriel García Márquez. Yet, though Grandin’s narrative often meanders, its detours are typically worthwhile. The book’s central theme is “the New World’s long history of ideological and ethical contestations”.

Grandin begins with the horrors of the European conquest of the Americas, resulting in what one scholar calls the “greatest mortality event in human history”: the population of the original 50-100 million inhabitants of the Americas was cut nearly 90 per cent in a century. [ The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West - Surprisingly nuanced food for thought Opens in new window ] Grandin demonstrates that the atrocities of conquest spurred a new vision of human equality. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar, was one of the first Spanish settlers to the Americas.

At first, he participated in the exploitation of indigenous labour. But he soon became the most prominent critic of Spanish brutality. Arguing against those who viewed indigenous Americans as “natural slaves,” Las Casas portrayed them as children of a shared God who were unfairly persecuted.

“I saw Jesus Christ, our God,” he cried, “scourged and afflicted, and buffeted and crucified not once, but a thousand times.” The English conquerors of North America treated indigenous Americans no better. Yet, there was no English equivalent to Las Casas.

Very few English settlers thought their treatment of indigenous Americans “merited remorse.” Instead, they were persuaded that they were “historical agents of natural liberty” entitled to take any land they needed – through genocidal warfare if necessary. Beginning with the American Revolution of 1776, the Americans presented themselves as a “redeemer continent”: a model of freedom and republican government for the rest of the world.

Grandin opens his narrative with the remarkable story of Francisco de Miranda, one of the first world revolutionaries. Miranda fought in the American Revolution, the French Revolution and in the Spanish American wars of independence. He received backing from leading American revolutionaries such as Alexander Hamilton, who hoped that Spanish colonists would follow the US and break free of European rule.

Led by Símon Bolívar, Spain’s mainland American colonies won independence by the 1830s. [ The Color of Family: History, Race and the Politics of Ancestry: Academic page-turner decodes US administrative racism Opens in new window ] These wars of independence led the US to formulate its most famous foreign policy principles. Derived from an 1823 address by US president James Monroe, only later did it acquire the status of the “Monroe doctrine”.

As Grandin points out, this doctrine was ambiguous and double-edged. Monroe warned European powers to stay out of the Americas and pledged US resistance to any European attempt to retake colonies. Yet Latin Americans were too quick to hail this as an anticolonial document, for Monroe also asserted the US’s right to unilaterally intervene in its hemisphere.

Indeed, shortly after Mexican independence, the US engineered the first of many coups against Latin American governments. This one was masterminded by US ambassador Joseph Poinsett, after whom the poinsettia is named since he shipped the plant back to the U.S.

As a slaveholder, Poinsett was angry about Mexico’s refusal to return escaped slaves to their American “owners”. Versus US unilateralism, the new Latin American nations developed the basic tenets of international law. They pledged to accept the boundaries between their nations as given so as to avoid future wars.

“All the basic principles that would later go into the founding of the League of Nations and the United Nations,” Grandin writes, “are present in the early years of Spanish American independence: the rejection of aggressive war and the doctrines of conquest and discovery; the ideal of anticolonial nationalism, an embrace of territorial sovereignty tempered by multilateral self-defence and co-operation to solve problems bigger than the nation-state, a belief in the equality of nations, and a commitment to the dignity of humans.” It was Latin American nations, Grandin shows, that influenced US internationalism in the 20th century. Long before Woodrow Wilson brought the US into the first World War and proposed the League of Nations, he engaged with Latin America.

Wilson took office during the Mexican Revolution, just after the American ambassador had aided the murder of the Mexican president in order to defend US property interests. An outraged Wilson declared that he was “President of the United States and not of a small group of Americans with vested interests in Mexico” and that he would not “recognise a government of butchers”. That Wilson didn’t ultimately adhere to the high ideals he formulated foreshadowed the later failures of his internationalism after the first World War.

Wilson did, however, anticipate the remarkable moment when the US learned lessons from Latin America: during the presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt. At a time when Adolf Hitler was proclaiming he wanted “a Monroe Doctrine in Europe”, the US pledged to be a “good neighbour” and renounced its right to unilaterally intervene in Latin America. Roosevelt refused to interfere on behalf of US business interests when Mexico enacted land reform and nationalised its petroleum industry.

The US exported the New Deal principle of a basic standard of living for everyone. Roosevelt’s policies emboldened social-democratic forces in Latin America to protect and extend democratic governance and to resist the importation of fascism from Europe. A “unified Western Hemisphere” was moreover “indispensable to victory” in the second World War because it kept the US continuously supplied with necessary materials.

Unlike Germany, the US did not have to fight “one battle for resources”. Vice-president Henry Wallace, who had proclaimed the 20th century the “Century of the Common Man”, insisted that Latin American suppliers sign “labour clauses” that would raise wages and guarantee worker rights. The unprecedented co-operation between the US and other American nations was ultimately reflected in the formation of the United Nations, with 20 of its original 50 nations from Latin America or the Caribbean.

Unfortunately, the era of inter-American co-operation was short-lived as the US turned from war against fascism to a cold war against communism and revived the neo-imperialist Monroe Doctrine. While the US helped Europe reindustrialise through the Marshall Plan, the US insisted that Latin American nations remain exporters of raw materials and encouraged them to create a “healthy investment climate” of private property rights, low taxes and profit repatriation. When the US felt it necessary – as in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in the 1960s, Chile in 1973 and Nicaragua in the 1980s – it sought to overthrow governments that failed to protect US business interests.

Much of the Latin American left was destroyed in the US war against communism, and with it the chance for stable democratic institutions. Emerging from this wreckage was neoliberalism – an economic policy focused on privatising state institutions and undermining basic social protections – first implemented by Augusto Pinochet after his US-backed coup in Chile. Yet Latin America also provided an alternative in liberation theology, which asserts the duty of Christians to oppose oppression and inequality.

Though Pope Francis is not exactly a liberation theologian, it is no accident that he hails from Argentina. “No one can accept the premises of neoliberalism,” he has proclaimed, “and consider themselves Christian.” If there is a beacon of hope in the Americas today, it certainly does not shine from the United States.

But those longing for a more equal, just and peaceful world can still take inspiration from Latin America. Even as the US elected Trump in 2024, Mexico elected by a landslide Claudia Sheinbaum on a platform promoting social equality. The ideals of a Las Casas, Bolívar or Roosevelt may yet resonate in the 21st century.

The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan Books, 2014) Uses the story of a slave rebellion on a Spanish ship (one that was fictionalised by Herman Melville in Benito Cerino) to tell a characteristically wide-ranging story about slavery and freedom in the New World during the Age of Revolution. The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776-1888 by Robin Blackburn (Verso, 2024) The last of several path-breaking volumes by Blackburn on slavery in the New World, it examines the interconnected abolition of slavery in the last three nations in the Americas to do so: Brazil, Cuba and the US. Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Peter Chapman (Canongate, 2008) This examination of how a leading American corporation organised the export of bananas from Central America – with the aid of covert CIA operations and bloody coups – shows how US business interests and state power shaped Latin America in the 20th century with devastating effects.

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