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  • Introduction:Placing Latin America in World History
  • Erick D. Langer

What role does Latin America play in the field of world history? This is an important question to ask as we move into an ever-more-globalized world. In the past two decades, world history courses have proliferated in many U.S. universities, and world history has slowly begun to emerge as a viable research field. Although Latin America plays a part in this globalizing vision, its place within the field remains problematic.

The essays that follow examine the place of Latin America in world history from three different perspectives: how the region is written into world history textbooks, how it fits into world history research, and how it should be taught in world history courses. The authors ask what a more thorough incorporation of material on Latin America will mean for the field; all areas need to be considered very carefully, for each aspect affects the others.

Jeremy Adelman's essay develops these themes from a historiographical perspective, especially the role Latin American historiography in defining the region's relationship with in world history. Adelman shows how Latin American historians (typically from elite backgrounds) from the beginning considered regional history in relationship to the "Western" world. While they first viewed Europe as the fount of Latin American civilization, by the second half of the twentieth century Europe had been transformed into the source of the region's problems. Adelman has coauthored a world history text, and so he is able to delve concretely into the problems of writing world history from a Latin Americanist perspective. In doing so, he shows how Latin America has made its own history and has not just been an appendage of another region, even when it was under colonial rule. He takes Steve J. Stern's approach (from Stern's important 1988 American Historical Review essay) as an example.1 Adelman, following Stern, argues that subalterns' particular and varied strategies of [End Page 393] accommodation and resistance significantly affected colonial rule and provided an important interplay between Western Europe and Latin America. In this processual relationship, Latin Americans exerted considerable agency.

Susan Besse, in a somewhat different vein, is concerned with how Latin America is represented in world history textbooks and what that means for understanding the region's history. One is struck by the failure of most textbooks to discuss Latin America in any profound way. She blames this, in part, on the genesis of these texts (written by Europeanists and often evolving out of Western Civ textbooks). World history texts have, however, slowly evolved from what I would call "Rise of the West plus" texts (in other words, texts that have as their core Western Europe and then include the rest of the world as add-ons). One can now find a few that genuinely examine all regions of the world on a more equal footing. These more innovative texts are based not on the linear and European notion of progress, but rather on interactions between societies over time.2 Besse asserts that Europeans in most texts still are the actors, while Latin America's populations, native and otherwise, are the acted-upon. She disputes this Eurocentric interpretation, pointing to the Haitian Revolution as a case where the effects of subalterns' actions on the course of European (and world) history are ignored or dismissed by scholars and textbook authors. She argues that the texts, when they reach the twentieth century, leave Latin America out of much of the story and that there are new ways to elaborate on the connections between Latin America and the rest of the world. She sees the analysis of women's roles and shifting gender relations as a particularly promising lens through which to examine these issues.

Lauren Benton's essay focuses on the frequently held view that Latin American history is "atypical," due to its early history of colonialism and independence and its idiosyncratic labor systems, culture, and ecology. Benton sees transnational approaches that tackle the issue of narrative differently as a means of overcoming the tendency to see Latin America as outside the common currents of world history. She addresses the research agenda within world...

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