History Today's Reviews > America, América: A New History of the New World

shaped the United States. America, América may be his most ambitious effort yet. As Grandin explains, he planned to start with the Monroe Doctrine, but his editor convinced him to begin three centuries earlier with the Spanish Conquest. As a result, America, América is really two books, one nested inside the other.

The ‘inner book’ offers a well-substantiated case for the Latin American origins of an international order rooted in respect for borders and rejection of the right of conquest. Why were these origins Latin American? As Grandin explains, the US was born expansionist, its unrelenting push westward driven by the confluence of geopolitics, cotton capitalism, the opportunities of the frontier, and white supremacy. The republics of Spanish America, in contrast, emerged from their independence wars as a multi-nation community on a continent with fuzzy but mostly settled borders, whose indigenous peoples were treated as part of the national community rather than foreign nations with which one signs and then breaks treaties. Those republics also faced the theoretical threat of recolonisation by Europe and the not-theoretical threat of US annexation. It made sense that they would pioneer the idea of a global order guided by principles they called ‘American International Law’, seeking to constrain great-power ambition and protect the integrity of all nations as sovereign equals.

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David S. Parker is Professor of History at Queen’s University, Canada.