This book aims to highlight the role, past and present, of Latin American countries in world history. I believe that historical analysis can lead to insights useful in understanding how, when, and why Latin American regions participated in various worldwide events and the role that each played in the vast network of collaborative relationships and institutions, formal and informal, that exists both on the Latin American subcontinent and between it and the rest of the world.

History helps us to understand past and current events by identifying the forces that either stimulated or hindered the role of various countries in...

America’s entry into the Western world is the result of a process whose first phase, from the discovery by Christopher Columbus in 1492 to about 1570, when much of the continent had been transformed into an Iberian territory, entailed the violent destruction of the many native American civilizations and peoples. A longer view, however—from the discovery through the first colonization in the early seventeenth century—shows that precisely because the Amerindian populations declined so rapidly, both natives and Iberians were practically forced to build novel forms of cooperation. As the conquistadors were conquered by a plurality of Amerindian forms,...

The first Western traits adopted by people on the American continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Iberian. The Westernization consisted of adapting and redefining tools, such as those pertaining to the economy and social life, and symbolic ones pertaining to religion, language, and culture. The interpretation of European forms was the work not just of Indians, mestizos, and mulattos but of the Spanish and Portuguese settlers as well. All adapted the European forms to the specific American context, taking into account their own cultural background, their new needs, the wild state of nature, and the reduced demographic density....

From the end of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth, that is, in the period from the French Revolution to the end of the Restoration, Latin America faced unprecedented challenges. Some had come about as a result of changes that had developed at the end of the eighteenth century; others had been triggered by a need to react to the new international system born from the demise of the old colonial empires; still others had been caused by the birth of independent countries on the American continent, most of which had adopted a republican form of...

Historians generally have presented the expansion of the international system from the 1850s to the outbreak of the First World War by tracing the various historical factors back to a primary fundamental one. Some studies give more weight to a specific aspect, such as the bourgeoisie, or the imperialist powers, European hegemony, or the crisis of the lesser powers. The flaw in this analysis is that it gives too little weight to the interactive processes at work between the Mediterranean and Atlantic European areas and between these and the rest of the world: the former are depicted as dynamic, the...

The most significant trait in the evolution of the Latin American world in the nineteenth century was not its modernization but the achievement of the material comforts and cultural sophistication that allowed it to participate in world events with a self-assuredness that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the century. The new cultural and economic maturity enabled Latin America to face the complex challenges of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries both internationally and on the home front.

Another achievement was an expanded capacity to adopt and implement collective decisions with a logic identical to that of the West....

In the late 1980s historians became tired of narrow ideological approaches and turned to the then-emerging postmodernist theories. Some, however, like me, still believed that historiography should be able to collaborate with the social sciences and the humanities and compare national and continental experiences. We turned to comparative history, thus going beyond the strictures of structuralism, and resumed the analysis of events in chronological patterns, relating local phenomena to events happening in other parts of the world.

The comparative approach has helped us to better grasp the innovations of globalization and to criticize those theories that see the phenomenon as...