Two Countries: Capitalism, Revolution, and Nations in the Americas, 1750–1870 ed. by John Tutino (review)

John Tutino brings together a diverse set of scholars to examine how four nations impacted by slavery and four nations with Amerindian majorities adapted to and became a part of a world economy fueled by industrial capitalism. No singular thesis brings together these studies of the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala. Yet, a common theme that brings together the chapters of this edited volume is the imperial legacy of linking colonies to silver mining and trading along with sugar cultivation buttressed by enslaved labor. Two Countries charts the independence movements of these countries after the Age of Revolutions followed by their nation-building attempts during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Tutino's introduction situates this edited volume in attempting to integrate local national histories into larger regional, comparative, and hemispheric frameworks. Over the last thirty years, scholars such as John Lynch, Robin Blackburn, Lester Langley, J. H. Elliott, and Jeremy Adelman have taken local histories of independence wars, slavery, and colonial empires and situated them into larger regional, hemispheric, and Atlantic frameworks. The different chapters of this edited volume continue these attempts by consolidating these topics and frameworks that bring together studies on colonies and countries impacted by slavery with those outside of its purview. In addition, Two Countries follows new historiographical trends towards global views of history, the new understandings of the Haitian Revolution and Mexican independence, and the relationship between liberal innovation in Spain during the Age of Revolutions and "the origins of regimes of popular sovereignty" (4). What the readers are faced with is a collection of articles emphasizing the integration of Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa first through silver capitalism and then through slave-based production and trade that supplied coffee, cotton, and sugar to an industrializing Europe and North America.

The scholars of this edited volume synthesize the larger recent and seminal literature of slavery from national and regional histories and put them in a larger framework. Together, other historians such as David Sartorius (Cuba) and Jordana Dym (Guatemala) include correspondences, proclamations, and travel narratives that enrich the reader's understandings of the link between the political histories and economics of these two places. What is noteworthy is not only the breadth of different nations and trajectories spanning from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, but also situating these new interpretations that connect the relationship between emerging nations in the Americas to the nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. For instance, Adam Rothman's chapter on the United States up to the Civil War focuses on its imperial expansion across North America as the North and South developed into two distinct but interconnected regions. The theme of divergence in this volume helps to contextualize and compare thematically the development of various nations and their imperial legacies.

Some significant findings for Two Countries include that the sugar and silver economies in the Americas not only developed in parallel, but were also linked to their similar stages of development and their place in "the competition for geopolitical economic primacy among European powers" (40). Chinese cotton and Indian silk were important commodities in the trans-Atlantic trade in further connecting the divergent plantation and mining economies. Tutino and Alfredo Ávila reveal the struggle to reinvigorate or replace the former mining industry in nineteenth-century Mexico hindered its political stability. Carolyn Fick focuses on the varying paths that Haitian leaders Alexandre Petion and Henri Christophe took to replace slavery and maintain plantation production and exports. Sarah Chambers and Erick Langer highlight the alternative visions of nation and autonomy among indigenous peoples in the Andean region whom existing trade routes continued to connect to one another and the outside world. Together these compositions mutually exhibit the development of a globally interconnected economy and the paths taken from new nations in the Americas.

Two Countries makes a case for the imperial legacies of silver and sugar economies...