Before we talk about your five choices can you tell me what got you interested in Latin America and its history?

Two people – Che Guevara and my history professor at York, Gwyn Williams, who taught a module on guerrillas in the early 1970s. So it was a fusion of political inspiration and academic interest.

Your first book explores the similarities between the Latin and Anglo-American colonisation in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s book. This is Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic.

I think it is a very enterprising history because it challenges the thesis of American exceptionalism – the idea that the Puritan tradition is so singular that it determines North America in contrast to Catholic and Spanish Latin America. What Cañizares does is look very closely at particularly religious texts from the time – which of course are now very much in the news again with all the discussion about Hitchens and Dawkins and so on. And he finds a greater convergence than mainstream belief normally recognises.

What parallels does he find between the two?

He is deconstructing the languages used by the divines of both Christian traditions and he finds some remarkable similarities in terms of the signifiers. One of these, for example, is the concept of wilderness, which of course is biblical but can also relate to how one approaches nature, settlement and the native populations that don’t cultivate.

Your next book is Andrès Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in 19th-Century Latin America by Ivan Jaksic. Andres Bello is one of Latin America’s great intellectuals.

Yes, Bello was born in Caracas in the 1780s. He was Simon Bolivar’s tutor. He then came to London in 1810 as part of a diplomatic mission to try and persuade the British to support the Venezuelans in their recent struggle with Spain for independence or at least self-government. He then stayed for nearly 20 years in London, living in Euston in conditions of some penury, working with James Mill and Jeremy Bentham After that he went to Chile where he lived the rest of his life. He died in 1865. While he was in Chile he effectively ran the Foreign Ministry single-handed and established the University of Chile. So he is generally considered the intellectual founding father of the Chilean Republic.

This excellent biography shows – not unlike the Cañizares volume – how ideas were shared to an appreciable degree across North and South Atlantic worlds. Bello’s inaugural speech in Santiago, for instance, is very similar in approach to that of Cardinal Newman’s ‘Idea of a University’.

Latin America is this powerhouse in many ways and yet it never seems to have achieved the same status as some other continents. Why do you think that is?

I think that Latin America is a sort of ‘in between’ continent in that it has always been partially European since 1492. Much of the present profile was built from white European settlers. So it still seems to be something of a shadow of Spain and Portugal particularly, with the suppressed indigenous Aztec and Inca Empires continuing to play a subordinate part in the profile. The independence struggle was really led by European settlers, even if it was largely won by subaltern social forces. Secondly, independent Latin America did not display a consistently successful pattern of economic development, in contrast, say, to the USA and Canada.

Why not?

There are a number of different explanations for that. One of which is institutional. The colonial institutions left by the Spanish and the Portuguese did not favour individual entrepreneurship or initiative. They preferred more collective forms of economic organisation, which often barred real growth and capitalist development. But there are times, as is happening now, when the Latin American performs really rather well. The other argument is that, often for reasons of geography and natural resources, Latin America has relied on primary exports, which means that it has become prey to the lottery of primary export prices. And that might be true even today because Latin America’s growth rates today are very much dependent on the Chinese markets.

Your next book takes us to the Dominican Republic with The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo by Lauren Derby.

This is a wonderful cultural history that digs beneath the surface of the public record. The Dominican Republic is one of the less well known countries and, of course, it is overshadowed very often as the second part of Hispaniola by Haiti, which has lived a truly tragic life, even today. On the other hand, the Dominican Republic has always attracted fiction writers. People like Miguel Angel Asturias, Garcia Marquez and, perhaps best known, this year’s Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, whose Feast of the Goat is exactly about the same subject. This is the dictatorship of Generalissimo Trujillo.

What Lauren Derby does is not the obvious thing of tracing the viciousness, the repression and the one-sidedness of a 30-year dictatorship. What she does much more is a cultural history of what she calls ‘vernacular politics’. She looks at how that regime used modes of civil society to gain compliance. And sometimes it is a compliance which looks like consensus but is in fact coerced. She looks at how Trujillo used custom and practice at the street level, like gaining intelligence through gossip. She shows how the State sought to make people somewhat complicit in their own oppression. 

The narrative and interpretation are very interesting, and although it is a prizewinning book I think it should be more influential.