Greg Grandin

It’s the most intimate of relationships, since Latin America is where the United States learned how to build an empire. In some ways the peculiar nature of the relationship goes back even earlier than the Jamestown and Plymouth Bay settlements, to when England was developing its sense of a rights tradition projected against Spanish Catholicism, which it considered backward, obscurantist, and cultlike. The emerging distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism — the first understood as modern, the second as backward — plays out in the competing Anglo and Spanish colonial projects.

At the same time, however, by the American revolutions — the United States in 1776, Spanish America in the early 1800s — Spanish-American republicans broadly share what we now call “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the New World represents a world-rejuvenating force. For example, both Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson believe that the Americas offer the world a chance to start history anew; Bolívar even proposes that Panama should be the seat of a new world government based on republican principles.