Books in Brief

The Winds Of Revolution: Latin America Today-—And Tomorrow, by Tad Szulc (Praeger, $5.95). Here comes the New York Times again, and on a familiar subject. This time around they kept Herbert Matthews at home, and in his stead sent Tad Szulc gamboling about Latin America for six years. Having now digested his notes, he presents us with some impressive facts and specious arguments in support of his implied thesis that the only possible future for our neighbors to the South lies with the democratic Left. Plagued by the inherent contradictions of Latin American society, rising statistics, and vicious circles (e.g., the area needs more industry, industry dumps waste into water supplies, people get sick, etc.), the possibilities for chaos south of the border are enormous. The Alliance for Progress hasn’t worked, Szulc tells us, because Latin Americans haven’t identified with it politically; military juntas, by definition, áre Bad Things; the Communists keep stirring up trouble, especially since Fidel betrayed his revolution; and the winds of social revolution blow ever stronger. Nobody has yet suggested a genuine way out. But Szulc is hopeful that the forces now at work will eventuate in a synthesis—neither Communist nor wholly democratic in Western terms. The Liberals have offered that solution before, and it’s getting rather breezy. r. d. Mackenzie

Merchants Make History, by Ernst Samhaber, translated by E. Osers (John Day, $6.95). It would be foolish to deny that good mercantile history can be written by a merchant, or that there is a need for a comprehensive history of trade and the influence of trade upon history. Such a study would be based upon monographs such as Strandes’ The Portuguese Period in East Africa—itself the classic case of mercantile history by a merchant—and Leemans’ Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period, and upon selections of texts like Lopez and Raymond’s Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World, if not on the manuscript sources themselves. Unfortunately, the author of Merchants Make History has neither turned his own local knowledge to good use in a limited monograph, as Strandes did, nor written an interpretive essay in the manner of, say, Ashton’s Industrial Revolution, nor yet compiled a full chronological account of his chosen subject. What he has done, is give an anecdotal, albeit pleasantly illustrated, account, verging toward completeness in the history of John Parish of Hamburg in the 1790’s (10 pages), but dismissing Mesopotamian and Anatolian trade in the pre-Phoenician period in one dubious sentence, neglecting the expansion of mediaeval English Icelandic trade (with its important effect on Anglo-Hanseatic relations), neglecting Dark Age trade, skirting the issue of the Newfoundland fisheries through four pages, overlooking intra-American commerce, and so on. There are some highly misleading statements that have very little to do with trade (i.e., that the Western provinces of the Roman Empire were more important than the Eastern provinces in the 2d Century A.D.) ; and there is, at the end, as though to make up for the lack of interpretation before, a highly partisan attempt to make history the handmaid of dogma (“The merchant, now as ever, stands for freedom”) —which, as Maitland pointed out, means she will soon cease to be history. J. c. lobdell

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The Winds Of Revolution: Latin America Today-—And Tomorrow, by Tad Szulc (Praeger, $5.95). Here comes the New York Times again, and on a familiar subject. This time around they kept Herbert Matthews at home, and in his stead sent Tad Szulc gamboling about Latin America for six years. Having now digested his notes, he presents us with some impressive facts and specious arguments in support of his implied thesis that the only possible future for our neighbors to the South lies with the democratic Left. Plagued by the inherent contradictions of Latin American society, rising statistics, and vicious circles (e.g., the area needs more industry, industry dumps waste into water supplies, people get sick, etc.), the possibilities for chaos south of the border are enormous. The Alliance for Progress hasn’t worked, Szulc tells us, because Latin Americans haven’t identified with it politically; military juntas, by definition, áre Bad Things; the Communists keep stirring up trouble, especially since Fidel betrayed his revolution; and the winds of social revolution blow ever stronger. Nobody has yet suggested a genuine way out. But Szulc is hopeful that the forces now at work will eventuate in a synthesis—neither Communist nor wholly democratic in Western terms. The Liberals have offered that solution before, and it’s getting rather breezy. r. d. Mackenzie

Merchants Make History, by Ernst Samhaber, translated by E. Osers (John Day, $6.95). It would be foolish to deny that good mercantile history can be written by a merchant, or that there is a need for a comprehensive history of trade and the influence of trade upon history. Such a study would be based upon monographs such as Strandes’ The Portuguese Period in East Africa—itself the classic case of mercantile history by a merchant—and Leemans’ Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period, and upon selections of texts like Lopez and Raymond’s Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World, if not on the manuscript sources themselves. Unfortunately, the author of Merchants Make History has neither turned his own local knowledge to good use in a limited monograph, as Strandes did, nor written an interpretive essay in the manner of, say, Ashton’s Industrial Revolution, nor yet compiled a full chronological account of his chosen subject. What he has done, is give an anecdotal, albeit pleasantly illustrated, account, verging toward completeness in the history of John Parish of Hamburg in the 1790’s (10 pages), but dismissing Mesopotamian and Anatolian trade in the pre-Phoenician period in one dubious sentence, neglecting the expansion of mediaeval English Icelandic trade (with its important effect on Anglo-Hanseatic relations), neglecting Dark Age trade, skirting the issue of the Newfoundland fisheries through four pages, overlooking intra-American commerce, and so on. There are some highly misleading statements that have very little to do with trade (i.e., that the Western provinces of the Roman Empire were more important than the Eastern provinces in the 2d Century A.D.) ; and there is, at the end, as though to make up for the lack of interpretation before, a highly partisan attempt to make history the handmaid of dogma (“The merchant, now as ever, stands for freedom”) —which, as Maitland pointed out, means she will soon cease to be history. J. c. lobdell