AMERICA, AMÉRICA

Five centuries of persecution and resistance.

In the 150 years after Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas, the Indigenous population dropped by roughly 90%, writes Grandin, a historian who has written perceptive books about corporate and governmental iniquity, among them Fordlandia and The Empire of Necessity. Native people were enslaved, felled by disease, disemboweled with swords. According to the book’s conscience—16th-century Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas, an early and outspoken critic of violent colonialism—his countrymen blithely tortured Indigenous children. English colonists committed countless atrocities of their own, and while Grandin describes these and subsequent evils in necessary detail, he’s primarily interested in the intellectual, political, and moral battles over what it means to be American. Many in Mexico and countries to its south, who’d “thought themselves Americans,” he writes, seem to have first found their self-definition challenged in the 1820s by an American diplomat who didn’t want Mexico calling itself Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Against this backdrop of contested identity, Grandin’s sweeping narrative leaves no major event unexplored, chronicling the horrors of slavery in the U.S., wars against Spanish colonialism in South America, and the CIA’s reckless meddling in Latin America. Grandin also spotlights lesser-known developments, such as the resentment stoked by the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt postwar Europe, in part with resources extracted from Latin America. The book’s most fertile throughline concerns willful moral blindness that caused incalculable suffering—and, conversely, principled opposition to invasion and exploitation. As early as the 16th century, Grandin writes, Spain’s subjugation of Indigenous people inspired England’s repression of the Irish. Later, God-fearing Americans considered it benevolent to give human beings as gifts to respected elders. More recently, Grandin details, Latin America’s intellectual movements—in literature, history, economics—proved immensely influential in their “persistent opposition to intervention and conquest.”

An authoritative history of the debates and brutality that made our world.