2013/11/25 by Michel Gobat · 142 citations
Social Sciences · #Cuban History and Society #Democracy #Gender studies #International Relations in Latin America #Latin Americans #Law #Political science #Political theory and Gramsci #Race (biology) #Sociology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/ahr/118.5.1345
published in The American Historical Review 118(5), 1345-1375 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2013/11/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Michel Gobat is Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Duke University Press, 2005). He is currently writing a book on Latin America's encounter with U.S. overseas settler colonialism during the mid-nineteenth-century era of global imperial expansion. With the publication of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities in 1983, it has become commonplace among scholars to view nations no longer as things natural but as historical inventions.1 Far less ink has been spilled concerning the formation of larger geopolitical entities such as continents. Many still take their origins for granted. Yet as some scholars have shown, the terms “Africa,” “America,” “Asia,” and “Europe” resulted from complex historical processes.2 The concept of the continent emerged in ancient Greece and guided Europeans in their efforts to dominate other areas of the world, especially from the fourteenth century onward. Non-European societies certainly conceptualized their own geopolitical spaces, but the massive spread of European imperialism in the nineteenth century ensured that the European schema of dividing the world into continents would predominate by the twentieth century.3 The invention of “Latin America” nevertheless reveals that contemporary continental constructs were not always imperial products. True, many scholars assume that French imperialists invented “Latin America” in order to justify their country's occupation of Mexico (1862–1867).4 And the idea did stem from the French concept of a “Latin race,” which Latin American émigrés in Europe helped spread to the other side of the Atlantic. But as Arturo Ardao, Miguel Rojas Mix, and Aims McGuinness have revealed, the term “Latin America” had already been used in 1856 by Central and South Americans protesting U.S. expansion into the Southern Hemisphere.5 Less known is the fact that these resisting Latin Americans also feared European intervention, albeit to a lesser extent. Such fears involved not only French designs on Mexico but also Spain's efforts to regain territories it had lost with the Spanish American wars of independence. Opposition to U.S. and European imperialism thus underpinned the idea of Latin America. This anti-imperial impulse helps explain why “Latin America” lives on, in contrast to the concept “Latin Africa,” which was developed by French imperialists in the late nineteenth century but adopted by few Africans.6 The staying power of “Latin America” in today's age of unprecedented globalization underscores Sugata Bose's claim concerning the continuing significance of entities located between the national and the global—especially to advance anti-imperial projects.7 That “Latin America” became a lasting concept had everything to do with the little-known trigger behind the 1856 protest against U.S. expansion: the decision by U.S. president Franklin Pierce to recognize the “piratical” regime recently established in Nicaragua by William Walker and his band of U.S. filibusters.8 Pierce's act shocked foreign governments. 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