Trade and Gunboats: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Empire by Steven C. Topik (review)

200 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienned'itudes americames The title of the volume collects all of its protagonists, several of them young boys-but among them also aging women and men-into the category of "children," a name that, like each of the stories in relation to the others, accumulates multiple levels of meaning. All of the characters in these works, whatever their age, national history, or location in the war are children of the Holocaust, educable subjects of its profound impact. All are children too, in terms of their potential, which Lustig draws out in carefully constructed accounts that emphasize the losses marking the survivals he records. Because these stories also force the reader to locate her or himself in relation to the material presented, the title becomes an address to the volume's readers, inviting a process of identification that necessarily challenges received impressions about the Holocaust and one's relation to human violence. Children of the Holocaust is an important contribution to the growing body of literature that is emerging from the Holocaust, made available here in a paperback edition that would be useful in undergraduate as well as graduate studies of trauma literature. The presence of Lustig's personal history , veiled by the construction of these stories as fiction, is nevertheless apparent in the particular affinity for the perspectives of the many adolescent boys whose stories appear in the collection, and in the limited access to women's lives under the Holocaust. An important addition to any personal library, this volume would be well situated on a course list that includes a text witnessing as responsibly to women's experiences as this one does to Lustig's perspective on the lives that were transformed by, and that, through the processes of witnessing, continue to transform the legacies of the Holocaust. Marie Lovrod Hunter College Steven C. Topik. Trade and Gunboats: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Empire. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 301 and bibliography and illustrations. Rapid technological innovation, sweeping industrial restructuring, profound alterations in international relations-these qualities as much characterized the 1890s as they do the 1990s. The United States stood then, as it does now, at the centre of these complex changes, which were linked to and Book Reviews 201 influential on each other. The most striking of the developments in the late nineteenth century was the emergence of the United States as an imperial power. The taking of Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and the Panama Canal zone all occurred within a twenty-year period. Furthermore , the United States sought, with its customary mixture of selfrighteousness and self-interest, to expand its new zone of influence so as to cover much of Latin America. The causes for the U.S. expansion have been the subject of considerable debate, a three-way argument between those who have seen the United States as the natural policeman of the Western Hemisphere, those who have viewed expansionism as a consequence of changing strategic necessities, and those who have seen expansionism as caused by the need for foreign markets to absorb surplus industrial production. In Trade and Gunboats, Steven Topik seeks to provide a fresh understanding of the subject through an analysis of relations between the United States and Brazil, focusing on the trade agreement made on 30 January 1891, usually known as the Blaine-Mendon9a agreement under the recently enacted "reciprocity" provision of the McKinley Tariff. That tariff permitted the free entry of sugar, molasses, tea, coffee, and hides into the United States, but gave the president the right to suspend this free entry in the case of countries whose tariff policies discriminated against U.S. exports. This provision, favoured by James Blaine, then Secretary of State, allowed the United States to force selected nations, mainly in Latin America, to open their economies to U.S. trade and so to U.S. investment. The agreement with Brazil was, in Blaine's eyes, the first step in the creation of U.S. economic hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. For Brazil, the agreement offered more political than economic advantages. The federal republic, established by an army coup...