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By Root 1734 0

the hills otherwise. Then I look up what we said last time round, and put in a figure that looks plausible.’) I also acquired respect for the mountains and people of Kabylia and for the intelligence and erudition of the French Maghrebists and Islamic experts, even though most of them, like British African anthropology in those days, served the relevant empire. I met the leader of the small Algerian Communist Party, exiled into the Sahara after 1939 and killed, but not the then most important revolutionary, Messali Hadj. I have sometimes wondered whether I would have become a better historian if, after the war, I had returned to the research theme of ‘The Agrarian Problem in French North Africa’ which I brought back from my travels. People I admire – the great historian Braudel, my friend Pierre Bourdieu and the late Ernest Gellner – have been inspired by working in the Maghreb, and I can understand why. However, if I had, few would have noticed. Except, curiously enough, in sub-Saharan Africa, the end of empires led to a generation of amnesia about their history. Besides, the bloody Algerian war of the 1950s and the bitterly disappointing record of independent Algeria since would have rather marginalized the field. I note in passing that, while the future of Tunisia under its eventual president Habib Bourguiba was already identifiable in 1938, absolutely nothing discoverable about Algeria in that year would have led anyone to predict, or even to envisage, the force that eventually liberated the country, the FLN (National Liberation Front).

II

Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959 led to a sudden upsurge of interest in everything to do with Latin America, a region about which there was much rumour, but at that time little knowledge outside the Americas. With rare exceptions the locally resident Europeans, other than the Spanish war refugees and North Americans, lived in their own worlds like my non-intermarrying Chilean relatives, who still saw themselves as English expatriates or at least European refugees. (I think all my five cousins spent the Second World War serving their country in British uniforms.) Since the continent had been decolonized, it lacked the large, intelligent and documented literature provided by imperial administrators whose business it was to understand countries in order to rule them efficiently. Communities of expatriate businessmen, as the record shows, are almost completely useless as sources of information about the countries they operate in, although the British ones in their time founded the football clubs in which South American patriotism has found its most intense expression.

Latin America was then remoter from the Old World than any other part of the globe – though not, of course, from the imperial power in the north, overseeing its technically independent satellites. It experienced the two world wars only as bringers of prosperity. It passed through the most murderous of centuries without more than a single brief international war on its territory (the Chaco War of 1932–5 between Bolivia and Paraguay), though not, alas, without considerable domestic bloodshed. A continent of a single religion, it has so far escaped the world epidemic of linguistic, ethnic and confessional nationalism.

Latin America was not easy to come to grips with. When I first went there in 1962, the continent was in one of its periodic moods of expansive economic confidence, articulated by the Economic Commission for Latin America of the UN, an all-continental brains trust located in Santiago de Chile under an Argentine banker, which recommended a policy of planned, state-sponsored and largely state-owned industrialization and economic growth through import substitution. It seemed to work, at least for giant, inflation-plagued but booming Brazil. This was the time when Juscelino Kubitschek, a president of Czech origin, launched the conquest of Brazil’s vast interior by building a new capital in it, designed largely by the country’s most eminent architect, Oscar Niemeyer, a known member of the powerful but illegal