| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

James D. Henderson. Modernization in Colombia: The Laureano Gómez Years, 1889–1965. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2001. Pp. xvii, 508. $55.00.

This unusual book lies outside the main interpretive lines of Colombian historiography. James D. Henderson joins David Bushnell—whose latest book is titled The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation In Spite of Itself (1993)—and a small number of other scholars to argue that the nation's economic and political elites did not do too badly, after all, and that there is much about Colombia, its past, and its politics that ought not simply be thrown into the dustbin. Henderson convincingly demonstrates that "the nation's political elites were as much victims of their highly politicized system, as were humble Colombians" (p. xvii). These leaders came to understand themselves as responsible for the ills that befell their nation at mid-century, and they struggled, with checkered success, to set things right again. 1

Yet this book is far from an apologia of the elites. This is in no small measure the result of the author's own conflicted view of them. Henderson is both critical and empathetic. Felicitously, he appears to be caught, as are his historical actors, between a past that he does not want to see disappear completely and a present he cannot wholly embrace. Thus Henderson is able to evoke the story of a nation hurtling from a traditional social order that is not entirely deplorable to a modern one with features that are not always commendable. . . .

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