The History of Chile

Abstract

“East is East and West is West,” Rudyard Kipling believed, and the difference could only be resolved “at God’s Great Judgment Seat.” When it came to cultural mysteries, sixteenth-century Spanish friars were more optimistic about understanding the differences between North and South. With a foot in both Europe and the Indies, often speaking Indian languages as well as Spanish, they undertook a self-conscious effort to explain one side to the other. In the nineteenth century, the role of informational intermediary was often filled by the travelers whose sketches and prose brought vivid accounts of Latin American ways of life (and investment opportunities) home to Europeans and North Americans.The past 60 years or so have produced a fairly large number of European and North American history textbooks on various Latin American countries—or the region as a whole—which might be seen as a continuation of earlier efforts to explain the culture of outlying regions to the inhabitants of the imperial center. One might notice in passing, however, that the friars not only aimed to explain the ways of the conquered to the empire but also (from the parish or doctrina pulpit) undertook to explain the ways of the Europeans to the natives. Today, the cultural bridge represented by historians and history textbooks runs in only one direction. There are very few courses and fewer texts by Latin Americans themselves that try to explain the deeper features of the United States to their students, thus leaving them at the mercy of Hollywood and pop culture for their understanding. As a result, ordinary Latin Americans are even more ignorant of the United States than U.S. citizens are of Latin America. In Chile, for example, where history has long been a high art, there is not, to my knowledge, a single specialist with a Ph.D. in U.S. history and no proper textbooks on U.S. history in Spanish.The first notable English-language text on Chilean history was the 1941 translation of Luis Galdames’s Historia de Chile. Since then, English-reading students are fortunate to have a number of lesser texts and two outstanding ones, Brian Loveman’s broad and dense Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2001), which covers the entire sweep from pre-Hispanic times to the present, and the late Simon Collier and William Sater’s A History of Chile: 1808–1994 (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Both books are deeply researched and much admired by Chileans, as well as by our own students in the United States. This is, perhaps, particularly true of Collier’s book, which has been translated into Spanish and praised in Chile for its intimate understanding of Chilean political culture.John Rector aims his text at a more rudimentary student level than the Loveman and Collier volumes. The book provides a clear narrative, a useful glossary of conventionally important historical figures, and a chronological list of principal events. He organizes the material around the impact of economic change on a rather uncomplicated sketch of social classes (the elite, the middle classes, labor), but there are also deft asides—for example, thumbnail sketches of Pablo Neruda, the “power of ideas,” and the human rights issue. This is an even-handed treatment of Chile’s history. With a firm grip on the factual tiller, Rector tacks down the political middle and holds to this course even through the stormy and contentious post-1970 years. These last 30 years occupy about 20 percent of the entire text.Because of its orderly, plainly written, encyclopedic arrangement, this book may be most useful as a companion to the other general histories of Chile already mentioned. It will also, on its own, be accessible to beginning undergraduates and even to advanced secondary-school students, for whom the detail and sophisticated interpretations of the Loveman and Collier texts may represent an excessive challenge.