Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism [Hardcover]

Greg Grandin (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 2, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0805077383 | ISBN-13: 978-0805077384 | Edition: 1st

An eye-opening examination of Latin America's role as proving ground for U.S. imperial strategies and tactics

In recent years, one book after another has sought to take the measure of the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy. In their search for precedents, they invoke the Roman and British empires as well as postwar reconstructions of Germany and Japan. Yet they consistently ignore the one place where the United States had its most formative imperial experience: Latin America.

A brilliant excavation of a long-obscured history, Empire's Workshop is the first book to show how Latin America has functioned as a laboratory for American extraterritorial rule. Historian Greg Grandin follows the United States' imperial operations, from Thomas Jefferson's aspirations for an "empire of liberty" in Cuba and Spanish Florida, to Ronald Reagan's support for brutally oppressive but U.S.-friendly regimes in Central America. He traces the origins of Bush's policies to Latin America, where many of the administration's leading lights--John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich--first embraced the deployment of military power to advance free-market economics and first enlisted the evangelical movement in support of their ventures.

With much of Latin America now in open rebellion against U.S. domination, Grandin concludes with a vital question: If Washington has failed to bring prosperity and democracy to Latin America--its own backyard "workshop"--what are the chances it will do so for the world?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

America's post-9/11 policy of idealistic military adventurism has a long history, argues this incisive study. NYU historian Grandin (The Blood of Guatemala) sketches the vexed course of U.S. relations with Latin America, but focuses on the Reagan administration's involvement in Central America during the 1980s, when it backed the Salvadoran government in a brutal civil war against left-wing insurgents and the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinista regime. Then as now, Grandin contends, Washington justified a militarist stance by citing a threat to America (Communists advancing on the Rio Grande) and championing democracy and human rights. America did not send troops but did sponsor native death squads in El Salvador, and the author notes recent press reports that the U.S. military is sponsoring similar death squads in Iraq. Grandin's conception of American imperialism—covering everything from outright invasion to corporate investment and Fed interest-rate hikes—is too broad, and he overstates the importance of Central America in the making of the American New Right. But this timely book offers an analysis of the ideological foundations of today's foreign policy consensus and a cautionary tale about its dark legacy. (May 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Most Americans pay little attention to our southern neighbors; however, according to NYU Latin American history professor Grandin, the U.S. government has indeed been paying attention to the region. Grandin contends that Latin America has been a testing ground--a laboratory, if you will--for the U.S. government to exercise its imperialistic tendencies. Grandin argues that U.S.-Latin American relations, from the administration of Thomas Jefferson up to the present Bush presidency, should be seen as sure indication the U.S. has always harbored imperial intentions. Our interventions in Latin America, both military and economic, have gone on repeatedly over the decades and reveal that the current administration's foreign policy, built on the concept of using military action to spread and establish our "ideals," is nothing new; it's been practiced in Latin America again and again. Contentious, certainly, but well presented. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (May 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805077383
• ISBN-13: 978-0805077384
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #757,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Greg Grandin is the author of Fordlandia, Empire's Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala. A professor of history of Latin American history at New York University and a Guggenheim fellow, Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, and The New York Times.

Grandin received his BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY, in 1992 and his PhD from Yale in 1999. His many books and articles explore the connection between the diverse manifestations of everyday life and large-scale societal transformations that took place in Central and South America related to agricultural commodity production and state formation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Grandin has published extensively on issues of revolution, popular memory, U.S.-Latin American relations, photography, genocide, truth commissions, human rights, disease, and the tensions that exist between legal and historical inquiries into political violence. In 1997 and 1998 Grandin worked with the Guatemalan Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico--the UN-administered truth commission set up to investigate political violence committed during Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

106 of 116 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars best neocon history out there May 14, 2006

By Amika

Format:Hardcover

This book is much more than a history of the US in Latin America. It's an explanation of the importance of Ronald Reagan's Central American policy in the formation of the conservative movement and how that policy led to war in Iraq. All of the stuff that we are reading about today - abuses of power such as the NSA wiretapping controversy, the surveillance of antiwar protesters, the way the Bushies have used public relations companies and so-called "grassroots" conservative groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the justification of torture in the name of supporting freedom, the lying and misinformation - have their beginnings in Reagan's Central American policy. The stuff in chapter four on how Otto Reich and the rest of the neocons learned out to manipulate the press is fascinating and scary. And Grandin's discussion of how the Christian evangelicals joined forces with the neocons to fight liberation theology is the best discussion I've so far read on the origins of Bush's foreign policy. It's much more interesting than Kevin Phillip's book on the theocons or any of the multiple books on the neocons. This is the smartest historical examination of neoconservative foreign policy adventurism that I have read.

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Work of Enormous Synthetic Breadth February 6, 2007

By Dana Garrett

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Greg Grandin's Empire's Workshop is a work of enormous synthetic breadth. While it is a commonplace for commentators to point out that many of the policy analysts and foreign policy specialists that staffed the Reagan administration have also staffed the George W. Bush administration, in my reading Grandin's work is the first to chart the philosophical, policy and propagandistic correlations between them.

Grandin demonstrates that many of the techniques employed by the Bush administration to garner and sustain support for its wars and to employ effective disinformation were forged and refined in the laboratory (or "workshop" as Grandin puts it) of Central America during the Reagan years. Particularly novel is Grandin's analysis of how both Reagan and Bush curried the active support of the USA religious right in pursuit of its foreign and military policy aims. In the end, the reader realizes that the Reagan years became a template for the Bush years.

The book is brilliant. I found it difficult to put it down.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars the context June 3, 2006

By Beel

Format:Hardcover

The second reviewer above misses the point of this book, which is to show the historical relationships between the players in current United States Foreign Policy (e.g., Cheney, Rumsfeld, Negroponte) and the players of the mid-'80s in the Reagan Foreign Policy. Moreover, his number one point, that no one in "Latin America" killed 3500 Americans (presumably a reference to the attacks of 9/11), sort of misses the obvious fact that no one in Iraq did either. I think the fact that so many players in Reagan's Iran-Contra clandestine foreign policy have surfaced once again in the current Middle East policy cries out for a book like this. Buy it and learn more.