Caribbean and Latin America
evidence from the archives of Germany, the United
States, and Great Britain.
Mitchell begins by reviewing how scholars have built
a presumption of Teutonic menace into their works.
For example, Samuel Flagg Bemis's classic, The Latin
American Policy of the United States (1943), characterized as "the quintessential statement of the heroic
explanation of American imperialism," stresses the
importance of humanitarian motives and security
needs (p. 4). Bemis's idea of "protective imperialism"
attributes a benevolence to U.S. practices, setting
them apart from those of self-serving Europeans, and
incorporates an assumption of German designs on the
Western Hemisphere. Other historians also misconstrue the issue. Frederick Marks's speculation that
President Theodore Roosevelt forced the Germans to
back off by serving an ultimatum during the Venezuela
crisis lacks confirmation. The Germans accepted arbitration for other reasons. Similarly, Holger Herwig and
David Trask attach too much significance to a German
plan for war against the United States. The planning
exercise, fairly trivial in effect, had scant influence on
top-ranking German leaders, including the kaiser. In
addition, Friedrich Katz overstates the degree of German machinations in Mexico before the onset of
World War 1. The Germans disliked President Woodrow Wilson's policy of nonrecognition toward Huerta's
government because it undercut their interest in stability, but they had no intention of strongly opposing it.
Consequently Mitchell judges as baseless Colonel Edward M. House's warning in November 1914 that
German officials wanted the Monroe Doctrine to
extend only to the equator so that they could exploit
Brazil. The German government lacked both the will
and the means. In any case, the members of the
German community in Brazil, numbering perhaps not
quite half a million, identified more with their adopted
country than with their homeland.
In such matters, Mitchell fair mindedly acknowledges the ambiguities of archival evidence. The documents oftentimes are subject to multiple interpretations and defy exact analysis. As she notes, "Policy is
... a hodgepodge of cables, letters, marginalia, reminiscences. One can pull quotes from the record to
support almost any point of view. Policy is rarely
simple or truly consistent" (p. 160). Nonetheless, her
thesis holds up, as she shows, because of an absence of
evidence of expansive German ambitions in the Western Hemisphere. The kaiser, however mercurial and
unpredictable, posed no danger to the Panama Canal.
How then should historians account for the persistency of such suspicions among opinion makers in the
United States? In a powerful conclusion, Mitchell
argues that impressions of prospective German aggression, no matter how inflated or preposterous, well
served U.S. leaders by masking the true incentives for
their own imperialist practices. If military interventions, the establishment of protectorates in Caribbean
regions, and the violation of the right of small countries to self-determination had a defensive purpose,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1351
then such actions became more palatable to the inhabitants of the United States. Indeed, this self-deception
became a vital part of the myth of United States
exceptionalism. As she insists, "There have been several waves of explanations of U.S. expansionism at the
turn of the century that have stressed different motives: security, humanitarianism, domestic politics,
economic gain" (p. 227). These comprised the components of hegemony and empire. There was nothing
very exceptional about them.
This fine book no doubt will elicit controversy and
debate. It bravely states a dissenting view and effectively marshals strong arguments and an array of
evidence in its support. Scholars no longer can look
upon the issue in quite the same way as before. The
book's title underscores the power of misperception in
foreign relations and the difficulty of discerning national intentions accurately.
MARK T. GILDERHUS
Texas Christian University
ARTHUR CHARLES DAYFOOT. The Shaping of the West
Indian Church, 1492-1962. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida. 1999. Pp. xvii, 360. $49.95.
The reader of this book needs first to think clearly
about what it covers. As Arthur Charles Dayfoot puts
it, "wherever we can identify Christ-centred worship,
proclamation, teaching, fellowship, pastoral help and
social concern, the Church is recognized" (p. 4). This is
a good definition of the ecumenical approach that
follows. But the title of the volume is misleading: this
church will be studied not in the "West Indies" but in
the English-speaking Caribbean. So the churches of
Cuba, "Santo Domingo," and Puerto Rico, not to
mention Curacao, will not be studied here; this book is
in fact about the shaping of the church only in the
English-speaking Caribbean.
Even so, the subject is vast, and the twelve chapters
have a rather encyclopedic feel; about one hundred
pages of notes and bibliography accompany a little
over two hundred pages of text. The author, a Canadian, served for years in both Trinidad and Grenada,
but this is hardly noticeable in the text, which evenly
covers an immense range of territory from Bermuda
through the Caribbean to Guyana, taking in Belize on
the way. Dayfoot summarizes accepted views rather
than advancing any startling new ideas. Thus, on one
central question he observes that "historians ... have
written off the established Church in the West Indies
during the slavery period as a mere travesty of what a
Church should be. This verdict must stand" (p. 90). All
the same, even if there are no striking new arguments,
the very range and thoroughness of the coverage
ensure that for almost all readers there will be novel
themes. On Bartolome de Las Casas, for instance,
Dayfoot is concerned to emphasize that he was merely
the most outstanding champion of aboriginal rights;
far from being the first and sole defender of the
Indians, he was only one among "many Las Casases"
OCTOBER
2000
1352
Reviews of Books
(p. 23). Sometimes the author's reflections on ecclesiastical history resonate far into general history. He
observes, for instance, that criollos (American-born
Spaniards) were rarely appointed to high office in the
church because they were felt to be less reliable than
the peninsulares, and he notes that this conflict did not
die down as time went on. Indeed, he observes that "it
was one of the causes of the Spanish-American revolutions of the early nineteenth century" (p. 28).
This book takes us into corners of Caribbean history
long neglected. The first governor of Barbados, William Tufton, is shown struggling against the cruelty of
the system of indentured labor in the 1630s and
eventually losing his life when he tried to argue against
his successor, the ruthless Henry Hawley. Dayfoot
skillfully sets out the history of those who struggled
against various aspects of the emerging system, including not only the Quakers (pp. 81-84) but also King
Charles II and James II (p. 101). After the Glorious
Revolution of 1688, the planters would be much less
troubled by people with qualms.
Chapter eight, on "the Evangelical movement," explains the origins and progress of the Moravians with
particular sympathy, and chapter nine sets out the way
in which the Catholic Church returned to the "English" Caribbean. Sometimes this led to amusingly
incongruous events, like the confirmation of the first
Catholic bishop of Trinidad in 1820 by the head of the
Anglican church, George III (p. 143).
Pages 157 to 164 interestingly set out the ways in
which the evangelical missions were persecuted, but by
then we have passed the heart of the book, and chapter
eleven summarizes "the late colonial period (18701962)" in about thirty pages. In the conclusion that
follows, the author ventures into some interesting
generalizations, based on the huge mass of evidence
that he has gathered. For instance, "If the alleged
affinity of Calvinism with the rise of capitalism be
believed, it would have to be remembered that the
seventeenth-century Puritan movement failed as a
colonizing factor in the West Indies as spectacularly as
it succeeded in the New England colonies" (p. 226).
A longer section of such theorizing would have been
welcome, but this would not have met the author's
objective. Dayfoot has succeeded, as Robert Stewart
observes on the dust jacket, in providing "an essential
compendium of information on the Christian church as
an institutional and social force in the making of the
[anglophone] West Indies"; it will indeed become "an
indispensable handbook for further research."
DAVID BUISSERET
University of Texas,
Arlington
CELIA MARfA PARCERO TORRE.. La perdida de la Habana y las reformas borbonicas en Cuba, 1760-1773.
(Estudios de Historia.) Spain: Junta de Castilla y
Leon. 1998. Pp. 291.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Historians describing the eleven-month British occupation of Havana in 1762 often insist that English
merchants engaged in a hectic trade that provoked a
commercial boom and initiated an economic awakening in Cuba. In Spain, the strategic ramifications of the
defeat and loss of "the key to the Caribbean" were
terrible to contemplate. To obtain the return of Havana, in 1763 King Carlos III surrendered Florida and
introduced Bourbon administrative, economic, and
military reforms that would later be extended throughout Spanish America. In the present study, Celia Maria
Parcero Torre reevaluates the conquest of Havana
from the Spanish side and examines the impact of
British rule called the dominacion by Spanish and
Cuban writers.
When Governor Juan de Prado arrived in Havana in
1761, he discovered that the defensive works of the
port needed immediate attention. The fortresses of La
Fuerza, San Salvador de la Punta, and El Morro
formed a protective triangle that guarded the harbor
entrance. While El Morro was the strongest and best
equipped with heavy guns, mortars, and small arms,
army engineers were well aware that it could be
dominated by artillery from the nearby and almost
undefended heights of La Cabana. The inexplicable
failure to fortify La Cabana was a major factor in the
Spanish defeat and in later recriminations, investigations, and the punishment of some senior commanders. The defenders believed that the port could withstand a lengthy siege and anticipated assistance from
the mortifying climate and endemic yellow fever. With
war against Britain almost inevitable, in 1761 the
Spanish imperial government dispatched two peninsular battalions of the infantry regiments of Aragon and
Espana and other troops to bolster the Fixed Infantry
Battalion of Havana and the Cuban militias. There was
also a strong naval squadron in Havana consisting of
ten ships of the line, frigates, and other support
vessels. In total, there were about 11,000 regular
troops, militiamen, and seamen available to defend the
port city.
When the powerful British invasion force appeared
on June 6, 1762, arriving by way of the little-used Old
Bahama Channel, the Spanish defenders were caught
by surprise. The naval squadron commanded by the
Marques del Real Transporte failed to get to sea and
was blockaded in port. Some warships assisted the
defense, but most of the naval officers and seamen
joined the land forces. The British army of about
16,000 troops, commanded by the Earl of Albemarle,
assaulted the city from the land side and from artillery
batteries situated on the heights of La Cabana. As
Parcero Torre points out, the Spaniards failed to
prepare adequately for the attack and were unable to
gain the initiative. Despite heavy casualties, they
fought back from El Morro, dispatched raiders, called
up militia units from outside Havana, and scuttled
three warships to seal the harbor mouth. They hoped
that they could prolong the siege until yellow fever
incapacitated the invaders and the hurricane season
OCTOBER 2000