Bandits and Liberals, Rebels and Saints: Latin America since Independence by Alan Knight

Abstract

This book of essays is full of personality. Readers come to know the author and his likes, dislikes, quirks, and delights before they have even finished the introduction, and the friendship between author and reader continues to build throughout the essays. The book is also full of erudition (Knight’s early training in the history of many places besides Mexico emerges in enlightening ways), insights (most often, but by no means only, for Mexico), and lovely writing (slightly baroque, with lots of dashes, parentheses, and other well-placed extenders that somehow manage to conclude their sentences brilliantly).The essays, written between 2008 and 2016 but never published, center on the period from the late colony to about 1930, with forays both backward into the early colony and forward into the later twentieth century. The text spans 215 pages, and the must-read, chatty notes add another 150. All the essays use comparative methods to sharpen understandings of national or regional phenomena, but the first four primarily operate within Latin America (Mexico being at the core of the comparison). The last three essays situate Latin America within a more global comparative framework. The first grouping contains one chapter that reconsiders Hobsbawm’s take on banditry in light of recent research, concluding that much of Hobsbawm’s view is still useful; one about liberalism across Latin America that accomplishes a great deal in fewer than forty pages (more below); one about religion and conflict; and one that, with excellent results, explicitly asks when and why the histories of Mexico and Peru diverged only to converge in the late colony, the aftermath of independence, and the early twentieth century.1The second grouping has chapters about the British and U.S. formal and informal empires in Latin America, the role of internal colonialism in shaping those empires, and the changing British views of Latin American revolutions. Its chapters about the Mexican Revolution in comparative global perspective include an interesting and convincing discussion of the similarities between Plutarco Elías Calles and Kemal Atatürk—especially their “Jacobinism,” as Knight calls their particularly vehement revolutionary anticlericalism. The book takes the roles of religion, anticlericalism, and the Catholic Church seriously, much more so than do Knight’s classic volumes on the Mexican Revolution.2Yet even though culture, and especially religion and church, is more present in this volume than in Knight’s early output, these essays nonetheless remain fundamentally rooted in the social-science approaches that have consistently shaped his work. Knight’s way of making sense of the “sprawling, shape-shifting thing we call ‘liberalism’” (64), for example, is to identify three “generations” of liberalism across time, the last of which, in the late nineteenth century, splits into three different types—developmental, social, and anarcho. Knight then analyzes these different generational liberalisms from three cross-cutting angles—political economy and class relations, culture (religious and popular), and nationalism. Using these categories as conceptual tools, he produces a compelling comparison of the histories of Latin American liberalism. Every chapter proceeds in a similar way. The goal of identifying and categorizing historical patterns is to reveal complexity, not to emerge with a homogenizing generalization. Most scholars who cover all of Latin America use this process to elucidate complexity and pattern, as well as structure and contingency, but few do so as well as Knight does in this valuable set of essays.