Jacob Blanc and Frederico Freitas (eds.), Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay (Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2018), pp. xii + 329, $55.00, hb.
might mean, rather than the other way around. The argument would also have been strengthened had Preuss engaged more extensively with Leslie Bethell’s article, ‘Brazil and “Latin America”’ ( Journal of Latin American Studies, 42: 3, 2010, pp. 457–85), which is mentioned only briefly. Bethell argued that for most of Brazil’s history the country’s intellectuals and politicians compared themselves first with Europe and then, after becoming a republic in 1889, with the United States, so Preuss is right that the main thrust of Bethell’s article was to reinforce the view of Brazil as isolated from its Spanish American neighbours (p. 127). But Bethell did note a strong interest in the Río de la Plata during the late nineteenth century, which is compatible with Preuss’s evidence. I would have liked to hear Preuss’s views on whether this period was unusual and if so, why. Although Preuss concludes, perhaps overstating the case, that there was a ‘high level of transnational connectedness [...] in the southwestern Atlantic’ by 1905 (p. 157), he acknowledged that the project cited to symbolise that connectedness was never completed. The reader is left wondering about chronological shifts in the significance of transnationalism in the dynamics of nation-making. Although short, this book is bursting with ideas. It reads as a bigger book than it is, which is why more was needed at the end to pull it all together. The Conclusion, at just three pages, does not do full justice to the comparative possibilities raised earlier. A longer, stronger finale would have created scope for Preuss to draw out the ramifications of his approach for a wider rethinking of the histories of Latin America. I also felt the lack of an index, which would have helped readers to make their own connections and comparisons. Even so, Preuss’s study offers plenty to inspire other historians to think about the relevance of his ideas to other contexts in the Americas and perhaps even beyond.