Academic Entrepreneurs,Public Policy,and the Growth of Latin American Studies in Britain during the Cold War

Precursors of the Parry Initiative

After a century of economic hegemony in Latin America, British officials began to express serious concern about the state of trade with the region at the end of the nineteenth century. This led to a series of commercial missions attempting to identify the problems: the Worthington Mission of 1899, the De Bunsen Mission immediately after World War I, the D’Abernon Mission to Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in 1929, and the Willingdon Mission of 1941. Most recently, a senior Bank of England official, Gordon J. McGillivray, had reported pessimistically about the state of British business following a six-month tour throughout Latin America in 1956–1957. Shortly afterwards, concern about Britain’s declining share of trade led the Foreign Office to propose that the government’s Economic Steering Committee should reappraise British policy toward the region (Sir Frederick Hoyer Millar to Sir Frank Lee, June 10, 1960, U.K. National Archives, T236/6379).

Early in 1962, the Duke of Edinburgh made a two-month visit to several Latin American countries in an effort to boost British commerce. Shortly after his return, he complained to a meeting of industrialists about the “modest” efforts British firms were making to develop trade and a feeling he detected among Latin Americans that the British had abandoned them (Times, April 12, 1962). His visit led to the establishment of a cabinet committee on Latin America (Sewell, 2015: 618–625). While the Foreign Office memorandum presented to the committee’s first meeting did note the “disturbing influence of the Castro Revolution,” its main thrust was the loss of British trade competitiveness and the problems of financing an increased presence in the region (Foreign Office, “The United Kingdom and Latin America,” March 3, 1962, U.K. National Archives, CAB134/2153). Shortly afterwards, the Foreign Office convened a meeting of senior academics and other interested groups. The memorandum it prepared for discussion commenced with the statement that “the decline in Britain’s stakes in Latin America [following the disinvestment of the postwar period] is an argument for more, rather than for less, informed interest to be taken in that area” and continued, “Latin America is probably the one major underdeveloped area for which no special provision exists in Britain for the promotion of academic studies and research.” Other European countries such as France had moved more quickly to build up specialist knowledge. In his introductory remarks at the meeting itself, the Foreign Office minister emphasized the need to protect Britain’s commercial interests in the region and the potential for aid and technical cooperation (FO minute, June 5, 1962, Humphreys MS825/6). ³

Participants at this meeting agreed unanimously that the government should establish a specialist committee to investigate the state of research and teaching on Latin America. Asian, African, and Eastern European studies had benefited from the Scarborough Report of 1947 and the Hayter Report of 1961, and specialist institutions and university centers now existed to promote scholarship on those areas. Interest in Latin America was scattered, however. “In the early 1960s,” Carmelo Mesa-Lago (1978: 131) commented 15 years later, “the study of Latin America in the U.K. was confined to about nine isolated chairs mainly in history and literature and the valiant efforts of a few individual scholars.” Outside the universities, Canning House, which had been founded in 1943 to stimulate public interest in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, had never been an academic or research institution (Bowen, 1979: 17–18). The interest of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (commonly known as Chatham House, established in 1920 and the British equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York) appeared sporadic and dependent upon its ability to attract research grants.

The Parry Committee’s deliberations coincided with a period of intense change in British universities. The Robbins Report, published in 1963 and immediately accepted by government, recommended significant growth in student numbers, in part because Robbins, along with many other commentators, viewed graduates as essential for the country’s economic prowess. ⁴ The government had already decided to increase the number of student maintenance grants it awarded (at the time the state also covered fees for U.K. undergraduates) and planned the construction of seven new universities. Robbins supported these decisions and also proposed a considerable expansion of taught postgraduate degrees (few before then) as well as investment in the social sciences (the U.K.’s Social Science Research Council was eventually established in 1965). Some of the new universities were intended to offer much greater opportunities for comparative and interdisciplinary degrees (King and Nash, 2001: 191–197): three of these (Essex, Warwick, and Sussex) all became important centers for research in social sciences and, later, institutional bases for Latin Americanists, though none of them were Parry centers. When the Parry Committee presented its report, therefore, in the winter of 1964–1965, the broader policy environment already favored the expansion of Latin American studies.

Simon Collier, a historian who completed his Ph.D. dissertation on Chilean independence at Cambridge in 1965, once described a member of the Parry Committee, R. A. Humphreys, as “undoubtedly the key figure in the story of the growth and development of Latin American studies in Great Britain,” a judgment that Humphreys’s personal archives go some way toward substantiating (Collier, 1982: 180). Certainly it was Humphreys rather than isolated predecessors like F. A. Kirkpatrick at Cambridge or Cecil Jane at Aberystwyth who led the institutional growth of Latin American history. Through his role on Chatham House’s research committee, he also promoted interest in contemporary issues, at least in the 1950s.

Originally appointed as a North American specialist at University College, London (UCL), in 1932, Humphreys developed an interest in Latin America before World War II. His secondment to the Foreign Office research staff during the war confirmed this focus (Humphreys, 1978: 13–14). He began teaching courses on Latin American history at UCL in 1946 and became professor in 1948. By the mid-1950s, three Ph.D. students, including John Lynch and Harold Blakemore, had completed theses with him (Humphreys to Provost of UCL, May 13, 1954, Humphreys MS 825/6). However, he faced serious obstacles in gaining acceptance, complaining in 1947 that his colleagues considered Latin America an “eccentric, not a recognized, branch of historical investigation” and contrasting this with its professionalization in the United States, where almost all major history departments possessed a Latin American specialist (Humphreys, 1947: 149). He identified three serious impediments to research on Latin America in Britain: limited library resources, difficulties in obtaining travel funding, and the scarcity of specialist faculty. He struggled to persuade U.S. and U.K. foundations and British companies to finance all these needs. Firms like Barings and Unilever, as well as the Rockefeller Foundation, provided sporadic and short-term funds for library purchases (Humphreys to Michael Lubbock, November 19, 1956, Humphreys MS825/5). Travel funding for research normally depended on Rockefeller and later the Astor Foundation (Humphreys to Lubbock, December 3, 1956, Humphreys MS825/5; Humphreys to Provost of UCL, November 5, 1962, Humphreys MS825/6).

Humphreys’s vision for UCL extended beyond history to incorporate other disciplines. He persuaded the Leverhulme Foundation to finance a lectureship in Latin American geography and a second post in history in 1958, another in political economy in 1962, and UCL’s first lecturer in Spanish in 1964. He also, uniquely, promoted Brazilian history (Leslie Bethell, personal communication). Through his links with both the London business world and the Foreign Office, Humphreys played an essential part in the negotiations that led to the Parry Committee. Its composition—five historians including Humphreys and Parry, plus a professor of Spanish from Oxford, a senior official from the Department of Technical Co-operation, and the chairman of the Bank of London and South America—reflected both his own circle and the scarcity of senior social scientists concerned with contemporary Latin American issues. His own prejudices and preferences are evident throughout the committee’s minutes and final report (Humphreys MS825/9; UGC, 1965). He strongly opposed the introduction of undergraduate degrees in Latin American studies and the attempts of narrow-minded professors of Spanish language and literature to control the field. The final report reflected his persistent advocacy of adequate library provision, the training of postgraduate students and early-career researchers, and funding for extensive periods of fieldwork overseas. He strongly believed that the long-term growth of Latin American studies depended on the development of a solid intellectual foundation through traditional disciplines at the undergraduate level: “I do fear the dangers of indiscriminate enthusiasm,” he wrote in June 1963, “of the creation of area studies, as it were, in vacuo, without proper teachers, proper resources, proper disciplines. This, to borrow a phrase, is the danger of turning the uninformed into the misinformed” (Humphreys to D. L. B. Hamblin, June 4, 1963, Humphreys MS825/6). His motives appear to have been purely academic. Despite his Foreign Office experience, his political conservatism, and his connections with U.S. foundations, he never mentioned geopolitical issues such as Cuba or the Cold War, whether in public or in private correspondence, as a reason for developing Latin American studies in the United Kingdom.

When the Parry Committee convened in late 1962, Humphreys was no longer an isolated pioneer. Interest in Latin America had begun to develop, independently of his efforts in UCL, both in Cambridge and in other London university colleges, as well as among research staff in the Foreign Office and at Chatham House. The key movers in the so-called London Latin American Group, which first met in October 1962, immediately before the Cuban missile crisis, were Jean Franco, a literature specialist from Queen Mary College, John Metford, a professor of Spanish at Bristol, Peter Odell, a geographer from the London School of Economics (LSE), and Clifford Smith and Jack Street, a geographer and a historian respectively, who both held lectureships at Cambridge. ⁵ This group appears to have been the first to organize an interdisciplinary conference on Latin America, in October 1963. Sixty-four people, mainly academics and including such notable historians as Raymond Carr, John Lynch, Hugh Thomas, and Eric Hobsbawm, attended the following meeting, in February 1964, which resolved to form a “Society for Latin American Studies.” The society’s membership grew quickly, reaching 140 a year later and 180 by the end of 1965 (SLAS Committee minutes, February 28, 1964, February 13, 1965, and December 16, 1965, file D.782/4/1, SLAS archive). ⁶ Through the remainder of the decade, SLAS organized a succession of one- and two-day conferences on issues such as agricultural problems, race, and contemporary Mexico.

In contrast to London (Humphreys and his students, as well as Charles Boxer in King’s College and Odell at LSE) and Cambridge (first Parry, then Street, Smith, and David Joslin), Oxford came late to Latin American studies. St. Antony’s College, founded in 1950, became the focus there. Somewhat haphazardly, under its first warden, Bill Deakin, a contemporary historian and former intelligence officer in Egypt and Yugoslavia, the college developed an interest in global issues (Phillips, 2000: 15). Initially, it focused on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, then on Western Europe and the Far East. Funding the college’s growth presented Deakin with serious challenges, but both the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundation proved willing to finance area studies in the United Kingdom, thus pushing the college in that direction. Deakin established an especially close relationship with Shepard Stone, a former U.S. official in occupied Germany, who became head of Ford’s International Division in 1956 (Phillips, 2000: 47). Stone’s overall priorities for Ford were, first, to reinforce links between non-Marxist Western European academics and the liberal and internationalist foreign policy establishment of the Eastern United States and, second, to finance Western European academic institutions to study areas of the world that U.S. academics could not easily visit or that displayed strong nationalist antagonism toward the United States (Berghahn, 2001: 201–237; Popa, 2016: 138–142; Saunders, 1999: 143–145). This fit well with Deakin’s strategy for St. Antony’s.

During a visit to the United States in 1961, Deakin gained the impression from both Ford and Rockefeller that, in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, they would be interested in financing Latin American studies; coincidentally, a recent Ph.D. graduate of St. Antony’s, Robert Heussler, had become a director of Ford’s Latin America program (Phillips, 2000: 102–104; on Heussler, see Faught, 2012: 143–144). Ford Foundation officers, however, saw little on which to build in Britain. When Stanley Gordon, program officer in the International Division, visited the U.K. in March 1962, he appeared dismayed at the pronounced focus on history in London and the shortage of expertise on Latin American economies, especially when he learned that LSE had been unable to fill a lectureship in this field because of a lack of qualified applicants. ⁷ As Daphne Kirkpatrick of Chatham House commented after meeting him, “Mr. Gordon’s interest is in current events, and, because Professor Humphreys’ interest is almost exclusively historical, I would hazard a guess that Deakin will land a big fish from Ford waters and that Oxford may eventually outpace London and take the lead in Latin American studies in the academic field” (Kirkpatrick to Sir Kenneth Younger and Andrew Shonfield, March 15, 1962, file 9/79a, Chatham House archives).

It took some time, however, for St. Antony’s to respond to the opportunity. “St. Antony’s is not at present thinking big and has no major project in view,” Sir Kenneth Younger, director of Chatham House, commented after the Foreign Office meeting that led to the Parry Committee (Younger, memo on “Latin America,” file 9/79a, Chatham House archives). Deakin told a meeting in UCL the same day that Oxford would be able to make only a “modest contribution” to the development of Latin American studies, although there was some interest in economics and geography (UCL Advisory Committee on Latin American Studies, minutes, June 5, 1962, Humphreys MS825/8).

The first part of Kirkpatrick’s prediction proved accurate (some might argue that the second did too). In December 1963 Ford approved a grant of US$225,000 (just over £80,000) over five years for St. Antony’s to establish a Latin American center. ⁸ This money was particularly important, a college historian claims, for funding Latin American academics and students to visit the United Kingdom (Phillips, 2000: 105–106). Within the Parry Committee, the Ford money strengthened the case for locating a center at Oxford, so it eventually received British government funding as well (Parry Committee, minutes, February 24, 1964, Humphreys MS825/9). This helped to finance new appointments, including a professorship in Latin American history held first by Raymond Carr and then by Tulio Halperín Donghi. In 1967, Oxford successfully introduced a two-year interdisciplinary postgraduate degree. Later in the decade, Carr, now warden of the college, negotiated a further US$160,000 (£75,000) over five years from Ford, and the Latin American Centre at St. Antony’s also administered Ford’s Foreign Area Fellowship Program when it was extended to the United Kingdom (Phillips, 2000: 108–110).

In London, Chatham House had shown an early interest in South America, publishing an extensive survey of the region in 1937 (Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1937). Humphreys chaired a study group there between 1948 and 1956 that made an expensive but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to update this volume, although one useful by-product was a series of short books on individual Latin American countries published by Oxford University Press (file 9/49a, Chatham House archives). This commenced in 1951–1952, with volumes by Gilbert Butland on Chile and George Pendle on Uruguay (Humphreys, 1978: 21). ⁹

Despite the costly failure of its study group, the lack of knowledge in Britain about contemporary issues in Latin America remained a concern to Younger, who became director-general of Chatham House in 1959, and its head of research, Andrew Shonfield, an economic journalist who arrived there in 1961. While recognizing Humphreys’s contribution, both argued that historians whose work did not extend far beyond 1825 had little to say on contemporary issues and believed that Chatham House might therefore take the initiative. In particular, they criticized the United Kingdom’s lack of expertise in economics. As Younger explained to the Parry Committee in 1963 (Parry Committee, Paper 33/LA/63, Humphreys MS825/11),

[There is] a marked paucity of scholarly work of high quality on strictly contemporary problems in Latin America. There are a few individual economists, historians and political scientists who take an intermittent interest in current developments. . . . But they usually work in isolation and very often concentrate on the affairs of one or two countries without any ready means of placing their material in a wider context.

Despite his earlier reservations about the lack of real interest in St. Antony’s, Younger, who was working closely with Deakin and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations on other projects, discussed bids with them in the second half of 1963, after Deakin had returned from New York with “the clear impression that Ford Foundation are dead set on securing cooperation between Chatham House and St. Antony’s in Latin American Studies” (Shonfield to Younger, June 25, 1963, file 9/79a, Chatham House archives).

Under Younger and Shonfield, Chatham House became the leading organization driving Latin American studies in Britain, at least until the foundation of the Parry centers. In 1962, it appointed a young Chilean economic historian, Claudio Véliz, as a research fellow, and a grant of US$125,000 (almost £45,000) from Ford the following year allowed it to retain him on its staff (Younger to Deakin, February 5, 1964, file 9/79a, Chatham House archive). Véliz organized a well-attended series of seminars on contemporary Latin American issues, as well as a major international conference in February 1965, the basis for the publication of two influential edited volumes (Véliz, 1965 and 1967). ¹⁰ He also hosted meetings of the London/Cambridge Latin American Group at Chatham House, taking an active part in the formation of SLAS and serving on its committee. His networks proved important to other academics commencing work on Latin America; Eric Hobsbawm (2002: 380), who visited Brazil, Chile, and Colombia in 1962–1963 on a Rockefeller Foundation grant, explicitly acknowledges Véliz’s help. After Véliz returned to Chile in 1966, two junior research fellows, Emanuel de Kadt and Alan Angell, continued to organize the seminars. The Chatham House program focused on understanding and explaining contemporary developments in comparative context, in contrast to Humphreys’s historical predilections. The seminar attendance lists show an impressive range of speakers and attendees from different communities in London (business, government, academics, and media); apart from the academics and Bank of England and Foreign Office staff one might expect to see there, the seminars attracted left-wing politicians such as Denis Healey, Richard Crossman, and Tony Benn, journalists from the Observer and the Financial Times, and executives from Shell, Rio Tinto, and the Bank of London and South America (file 9/79d, Chatham House archive).

Conferences and seminars may be one way of building capacity and disseminating knowledge to academic and lay audiences, but in the longer term British scholars commencing work on Latin America would need more permanent outlets for their research, especially when, as Humphreys noted, they worked on the margins rather than in the mainstream of their individual disciplines. However, publishers and potential editors remained unsure about the extent to which research in Britain could provide an adequate flow of good articles on contemporary Latin America (London Group, minutes, January 23, 1963; SLAS Committee, minutes, October 17, 1964, February 13, 1965, September 29, 1965, December 16, 1965, January 17, 1966, file D.782/4/1, SLAS archive). While Oxford University Press had successfully published the books that Chatham House commissioned on individual countries, as well as Véliz’s edited volumes, it was Cambridge University Press that showed the greater commitment to the region, possibly reflecting the history faculty’s developing interest in the non-European world during the 1960s. Having introduced the Journal of African History (in 1960) and the Journal of Modern African Studies (in 1963) and with plans for Modern Asian Studies (eventually inaugurated in 1967), the press talked with Jack Street in 1964 about the possibility of establishing a journal of Latin American studies and invited him and David Joslin, another Cambridge historian who had recently completed a history of the Bank of London and South America, to serve on the editorial board (SLAS Committee, minutes, October 17, 1964, file D.782/4/1, SLAS archive). The first issue of the Journal of Latin American Studies eventually appeared in 1969, with Joslin and Harold Blakemore, secretary of the London Institute of Latin American Studies, as coeditors and an editorial board made up of the directors of the five Parry centers. Alongside this, Cambridge planned a Latin American monographs series with Street and Joslin as editors (SLAS Committee, minutes, March 18, 1965, D.782/4/1, SLAS archive). The early volumes in this series drew on Ph.D. theses that Street had supervised at Cambridge, including those by Simon Collier (1967) and Peter Calvert (1968).

The growing visibility, confidence, and interest of a new generation of British academics also became evident in the print media, just as the changes recommended by the Parry Committee began to take effect in the academic year of 1965–1966. In September 1965, Encounter, a leading literary and cultural magazine, published a special issue on Latin America, including articles by J. H. Elliott, Julian Pitt-Rivers, Alastair Hennessy, Emanuel de Kadt, and Samuel Finer. ¹¹ In the same month the Economist also published a special survey on Latin America. Véliz described this as “without any doubt the finest piece of reporting and analysis of the Latin American situation that I have seen in the British press for a very long time” and convened a special seminar at Chatham House to discuss it (Véliz to Norman Macrae, September 27, 1965, file 9/79d, Chatham House archive). Magazines like New Statesman, Labour Monthly, and New Left Review began to publish occasional articles on Latin America, although they tended to focus more on the problems of decolonization and independence in Africa, at least until the advent of Unidad Popular in Chile in 1970. Many of these articles, even including those in the Economist, took the line that the enormous problems that British journalists and academics observed in Latin America were due to a combination of First World policies, especially those of the United States, and the unwillingness of wealthy elites to institute reforms (epitomized in the title of Véliz’s first Chatham House volume, Obstacles to Change in Latin America).

The Outcome of the Parry Report

The Parry Committee recommended that the government concentrate earmarked funding for Latin American studies in five universities. It expected these all to establish centers or institutes, inaugurate taught postgraduate degrees, and build up faculty and library resources over the next 12 years. The committee’s fears about the scarcity of competent academics who might fill new posts lay behind this cautious, long-term approach, although it did recommend that the five universities it selected should commence work quickly, asking them immediately for detailed plans to cover the following 7 years. To counteract the perceived shortage of well-qualified scholars, especially on contemporary issues, it expected the new centers to establish research fellowships to encourage early-career academics with other interests to direct their future research toward Latin America and undertake fieldwork there. It also recommended that the government should earmark 10 Ph.D. scholarships annually for students commencing research on Latin America, as the Hayter Committee had for African and Asian studies a few years earlier. It expected the centers to cooperate over library acquisitions, aided by a grant to establish a national union catalogue at the London Institute, which it also designated as the national coordination and information center. Having initially expressed doubts about the need for investment in “bricks and mortar,” it changed its views, perhaps because of evidence it heard about the positive effects of the establishment of a Japanese center at Sheffield and its members’ visits to institutions such as the Land Tenure Center and the Population Research Center in the United States in spring 1963. However, it anticipated that the universities selected would provide and pay for the necessary buildings while using the earmarked funds from the government to appoint new faculty.

The committee based its choice of universities on criteria developed only as its meetings progressed and it visited individual universities. Given their existing faculty and library resources, as well as the membership of the committee (Parry had supervised Street’s Ph.D. at Cambridge), the selection of London and Cambridge might be expected. By the time the Parry Committee drafted its report, St. Antony’s had secured its Ford Foundation grant and committed itself to establishing a center under the leadership of Raymond Carr. Despite the “overwhelming impression of muddle” that Parry had received on his visit there, he concluded that it did have “a range of good people and fairly good library resources.” His committee agreed that the Ford Foundation grant strengthened St. Antony’s case for government funding (Parry to Bolton, February 13, 1964, Humphreys MS825/11; Parry Committee Minutes, February 24, 1964, Humphreys MS825/9). ¹² Of the other possible locations in “redbrick” or newer universities, Liverpool offered a much stronger case than Birmingham or Manchester, both of which, along with Nottingham and Keele, wished to establish undergraduate area studies degrees, contrary to the preferences of Humphreys and other committee members. The committee also decided, presumably for political reasons, to locate one center in Scotland. Glasgow, which had already received Rockefeller Foundation money for its Spanish department and recently established a promising department of international economics under Alec Nove, seemed to offer better opportunities than Edinburgh, despite the reluctance of W. C. Atkinson, the professor of Spanish, to meet the committee. The original Foreign Office paper of 1962 stated bluntly that, despite the Rockefeller grant, Glasgow had “so far produced no research or publications of substance,” and nothing had changed in this respect by the time the committee reported (FO, minutes, June 5, 1962, Humphreys MS825/6). Nevertheless, Glasgow was selected for funding.

The process inevitably provoked criticism and complaints from those excluded, most vociferously from Essex, since the timing of the committee and its criteria for establishing centers effectively marginalized new universities (Paul Russell-Gebbutt to UGC, December 31, 1964, Humphreys MS825/16). Parry had, however, expressed the view privately that “it would be sensible to pick on places where staff and library resources are already concentrated to some extent, and where there is a lively interest spread over a range of disciplines” and “uneconomic and silly to urge the U.G.C. to finance the development of more than a small number of Centres” (Parry to Bolton, February 13, 1964, Humphreys MS825/11). As a new university, Essex could not fulfill these criteria. However, it did succeed later in attracting Nuffield Foundation funding to establish a multidisciplinary Latin American center in 1968. Others publicly criticized the dominance of historians on the committee (Metford, 1962): this probably reflected a shortage of senior social scientists with an interest in Latin America and Humphreys’s deliberate sidelining of professors of Spanish who regarded the region as an appendage to the Iberian Peninsula. The reproach would have had more justification if it had come from someone like Samuel Finer, a political scientist who was making somewhat unrealistic attempts to build up contemporary Latin American studies at Keele University.

Although the Foreign Office had initially proposed the Parry project as a means of rebuilding British economic interests in Latin America, the business world showed no enthusiasm whatsoever. Sir George Bolton, chairman of the Bank of London and South America and a member of the committee, told his colleagues bluntly in March 1963 that there would be no demand for postgraduates with academic expertise in Latin America, since firms preferred to recruit school-leavers straight into management career pathways (Parry Committee Minutes, March 13, 1963, Humphreys MS825/9). The heads of the Cambridge and Oxford appointments boards both endorsed this view, seeing few opportunities in the British business world for postgraduates in Latin American studies (Parry Committee Minutes, February 16, 1963, and Paper 29/LA/63, Humphreys MS825/12). Bolton later modified his views, but firms like British American Tobacco still pointed to the decreasing use of expatriates in many British multinationals operating in Latin America, which were attempting to recruit and promote local managers both to assuage nationalism and to reduce costs (Parry Committee, Paper 37/LA/63, Humphreys MS825/14; also see Miller, 2015). The short courses for business that the London Institute established after its inauguration disappeared fairly quickly because of lack of demand. The initial hopes that increased academic interest in Latin America would help technical cooperation and development aid programs also dissipated, with the result that the final report simply emphasized growth in the humanities and social sciences.

Human resources remained a difficult issue through the 1960s. Some of the best historians, whose discipline, along with geography and literature, had developed Ph.D. research early in the decade, left for the United States (examples include Peter Bakewell, David Brading, A. J. R. Russell-Wood, and Brian Hamnett). Others obtained some of the early posts advertised in Latin American government and politics, at Liverpool and Oxford, for example, since only at the very end of the decade did sufficient Ph.D.s in disciplines such as political science and sociology become available (UGC Sub-Committee on Latin American Studies, minutes, May 19, 1967, Humphreys MS825/16). Two years later, a UGC subcommittee neatly summarized the recruitment problems: “There was a more than adequate flow of research in Latin American literature, for which there would be little demand, and an adequate cover in Latin American history. On the other hand, there was a dearth of research in Latin American sociology and economics and other Social Studies” (UGC Latin American Sub-Committee, minutes, October 6, 1969, Humphreys MS825/16).

Two universities with government-funded centers or institutes did not fulfill the expectations of the Parry Report, and the subcommittee decided, at the end of 1969, to exclude them from the second phase of funding commencing in 1972. It criticized Cambridge for its failure to use its earmarked grant to establish research fellowships or a taught postgraduate course. In fact, Cambridge had appointed its first research fellow in 1967, but it did not introduce a postgraduate degree for at least another five years. The problems there arose to some extent from the university’s collegiate and faculty structure, coupled with the loss of key personnel (Street, Smith, and Joslin) and a weakness in core social sciences other than anthropology and economics, which the university did not address until the inauguration of the faculty of social and political sciences in 1972. Glasgow lost its funding because of serious failings in the management of its institute, for example, the lack of research support and travel funding for junior faculty (UGC Latin American Sub-Committee, minutes, October 6, 1969, Humphreys MS825/16; Humphreys, 1978: 47). The other centers and institutes secured continued Parry funding until 1977. By then, there were over 300 Ph.D.s on Latin American topics in progress in British universities, of which only just over one-third were in history and literature (Bulmer-Thomas, 1996: 5).

The Shift to the Left

By the end of the 1960s, therefore, government funding and contributions from philanthropic foundations, Ford and Nuffield especially, had built up Latin American studies in a few universities in Britain, with generally positive results for the quantity and quality of teaching and research. The apparent emphasis on history and literature remained a problem, though; a decade later, Mesa-Lago (1978: 133) could still describe “a vicious circle,” in which “professors are abundant in traditional fields which generate very few job opportunities, but they are scarce where most job openings occur or could be created.” As the Parry Committee had anticipated, it would take time to redress the shortage of faculty working on contemporary issues, which might have made the centers and institutes more relevant to government, while the business world showed little interest in hiring managers with Latin American expertise or seconding executives to acquire it through postgraduate courses. The academic world of Latin American studies thus became something of an academic silo except for the significant links that developed with third-sector and activist groups. Other changes in the late 1960s and early 1970s also undermined the original assumption of the Foreign Office that greater academic interest would help to rebuild British business in the region, partly because the impact of the Cold War in Latin America finally had a somewhat greater, though indirect, influence on the way the field developed.

One sign of this was the growth of interest during the 1960s in both Cuba and problems of inequality. In 1961 Encounter, a leading British intellectual magazine, published two 20-page articles by Theodore Draper, a U.S. historian, the first an analysis of foreign reactions to the Revolution and the second on the Bay of Pigs failure (Draper, 1961a and 1961b). A further article by William Clark in May 1963 summarized his impressions of travel in four Latin American countries, concluding that all the aid and investment of the previous decade had simply produced “a wealthy class (surprisingly large) . . . leaving the poverty of the majority almost untouched” (Clark, 1963: 57). Two months later, in an article in Labour Monthly, Eric Hobsbawm provided his own impressions of his first visit to South America, commenting, as had Clark, on the striking disparities of wealth that he had observed in Brazil and Peru and concluding: “All over Latin America the poor and oppressed are stirring” (Hobsbawm, 1963: 332). New Left Review also published short articles on Cuba in 1961 (Fruchter and Hall, 1961; Landau, 1961), followed by longer pieces by Robin Blackburn (1963a; 1963b), who had worked on the island between 1960 and 1962, and a handful on other Latin American issues written by foreign radicals: Octavio Ianni (1964a; 1964b), Régis Debray (1965), and James Petras (1965). While none of the British contributors specialized in Latin America, both Hobsbawm and Blackburn were influential academic figures on the left. Cuba also captured the attention of a leading British development economist, Dudley Seers, who had worked with Raúl Prebisch at the UN Economic Commission for Latin America in Santiago and produced an influential book on the economic changes that had occurred since 1959 (Seers, 1964). ¹³

Academic figures like Hobsbawm, Blackburn, and Seers were important in drawing attention to Latin America, but except for a brief period it was not their sole interest. Nonetheless, their potential audience was growing. Student protest in Britain became more common after 1967, with sit-ins and occupations at LSE in 1967 and 1969, at Essex in 1968, and even at more conservative institutions like Liverpool and Cambridge in 1970 (Hoefferle, 2013). Several factors stimulated this: events in the United States and opposition to the Vietnam War (an infamous battle between protesters and police occurred outside the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square in March 1968); the May 1968 student revolts in continental Europe; and resentment of the paternalism and hierarchical power relations characteristic of most British universities then as now. This helped to create a more radical audience prepared to question inequality, repression, and the U.S. role in Latin America. The growth of the social sciences and the influence of Marxist thinkers, such as Blackburn and Perry Anderson at New Left Review, also changed the university environment. ¹⁴ Apart from literature specialists and colonial historians, those who now chose to undertake Ph.D. research on Latin American topics were often politically left-of-center and sympathetic to the urgent need for radical change. Moreover, in the late 1960s and early 1970s many quickly fell under the influence of dependency theories emanating from Latin America, especially once Penguin had published André Gunder Frank’s (1971) key text.

Several disciplines thus took a turn toward the left. Within history, the colonial period retained its interest for conservative Catholic historians, but most students who received Parry grants and other awards turned to twentieth-century topics and showed much more interest in economic and social change than in the political, diplomatic, or intellectual history that still dominated the disciplinary mainstream. Examples would include Alan Knight, Barry Carr, and Roger Brew at Oxford and David Rock at Cambridge, all of whom received Parry scholarships for doctoral research. ¹⁵ The growth of development economics, epitomized in the interest the Oxford Institute of Economics and Statistics now showed in Latin America, the influence of scholars like Joan Robinson at Cambridge, and the foundation of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University by Seers in 1966, stimulated several Ph.D. students in economics and political economy, some financed by Parry awards. In sociology, anthropology, and geography, research students and younger faculty undertook dissertations on issues of rural change (such as agrarian reform) and urbanization (particularly migration and the growth of informal settlements). In the case of anthropology, African specialists trained in the British tradition such as Norman Long and Peter Lloyd turned their attention to Latin America. Much of this research depended on travel funding provided as a result of the Parry Report and international grants from bodies such as the Ford Foundation, which expanded its Foreign Area Fellowship Program to Britain in 1969–1970; the shift from sea to air travel that occurred at the end of the 1960s also made research visits easier and more economical. The experience of living in Latin America at a time when the influence of Marxist approaches, dependency theories, and independent research institutes was growing, at least in those countries not under military rule, further radicalized scholars in a way that their predecessors had not experienced.

The outcome was much greater interest in the social sciences, which grew rapidly in Britain following the Robbins Report and more radical, theoretically driven approaches among students discovering Marxist and dependency perspectives. Reviewing developments in 1971, Harold Blakemore (1971: 11) observed that the number of postgraduate theses in progress in anthropology, sociology, politics, economics, and geography had risen from 50 in 1966–1967 to 113 in 1969–1970 while history remained static. A few years later, David Stansfield (1974: 99–102) noted the continuation of this trend and drew attention to the importance of Essex in promoting research in Latin American politics (as opposed to recent political history), with a particular focus on Chile, Cuba, and Argentina.

Two other influences, significant for individual students, are also evident. First, more Latin American scholars arrived in Britain, in some cases thanks to Parry and Ford funding for visiting researchers but also because of repression in their home countries. Oxford’s Ford grant covered expenditure on visiting research fellows such as Ezequiel Gallo and Ernesto Laclau (later appointed lecturer in politics at Essex). The military clampdown on universities in Argentina in 1966 brought a first wave of exiles to Cambridge—Tulio Halperín Donghi, for example, as well as Ph.D. students like Jorge Fodor and Arturo O’Connell—who influenced research students there (David Rock, personal communication). The unexpected appearance of a “radical” military government in Peru in 1968 and the election of President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970 stimulated interest in those countries. Although the 1973 coup curtailed research in Chile, by the mid-1970s a substantial group of contemporary historians and social scientists working on Peru had developed in Britain, including Rosemary Thorp, George Philip, and Valpy Fitzgerald. British research on Cuba would certainly have advanced further but for difficulties in obtaining visas in the 1960s. Second, individual journalists began to develop specialist expertise on Latin America, writing especially for the Guardian and the Observer, the liberal newspapers that more radical students preferred. Richard Gott of the Guardian and Christopher Roper, then working for Reuters, were both among the journalists who viewed Che Guevara’s body immediately after his death in Bolivia (Guardian, October 11, 1967; Roper, 2010). Hugh O’Shaughnessy, who later moved to the Financial Times, published his first article in the Observer in 1968, beginning a 40-year career as one of the most respected and best-informed British journalists writing on the region. The greater media interest became evident when the Economist began to publish a Latin American edition and Roper joined the small team that had established Latin American Weekly Report in London in 1967. A desire for social change drew Latin America to the attention of journalists and young academics in those years. Taken together, the growth of the social sciences, opportunities to travel for research, personal observation of the nature of inequalities, oppression and protest in Latin American societies, political events in the region, and the growth of media interest created a much more questioning and radical approach than members of the Parry Committee had anticipated. This further alienated the academic world from business and government, as well as creating generational and ideological differences within academia.

One sign of the growing tension came in 1974 with the publication of the Latin American Review of Books, edited by Roper and Colin Harding, then a research fellow at Cambridge but later a journalist with the Times and the Independent. The contributors to the one issue that appeared included Eric Hobsbawm, Richard Gott, James Petras, Teresa Hayter, and Ernesto Laclau; an article by Gott defending his selections for the Penguin series on Latin America, which had commenced publication in 1971 and included not only Frank’s Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America but also Marcel Niedergang’s Twenty Latin Americas and Carlos Marighela’s handbook on urban guerrilla warfare, underlined the tensions between radicals and traditionalists. Gott complained that when he began planning the series in 1968, there were few British writers able to contribute because of “the elitism of British universities which [had] been transmitted to the new Centres for Latin American Studies and . . . produced a marked distaste for anything which smacks of communicating with the masses” (Gott, 1974: 217–218). He contrasted the Penguin books with what he considered the staid and unattractive volumes in the Cambridge University Press series and complained bitterly about the adverse reviews Penguin had received from senior academics such as Carr, Blakemore, and H. S. Ferns of Birmingham University.

Two further examples illustrate how the tone of Latin American studies in Britain changed between the publication of the Parry Report in 1965 and the end of the 1970s, when Parry and Ford Foundation funding came to an end. First, a series of conferences at Cambridge became increasingly radical. The initial one on twentieth-century Argentina, organized by David Rock in 1971, showed that a new generation of historians had moved toward contemporary topics (Rock, 1975). A conference the following year resulted in a volume containing several important essays on agrarian capitalism and rural inequalities (Duncan and Rutledge, 1977). A third conference in 1974 explored foreign investment, which inevitably stimulated some intense debates over imperialism and dependency both historically and in the contemporary era. A 1976 meeting on the state and economic development in Latin America, which included papers from leading Latin American social scientists such as Guillermo O’Donnell and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Latin Americans working in the United Kingdom such as Laclau, and a new generation of British political economists and sociologists such as Philip O’Brien, Valpy Fitzgerald, and David Lehmann, attracted a vociferous and committed audience of over 150 (Fitzgerald, Floto, and Lehmann, 1977; James Dunkerley, personal communication). Second, the Chilean coup of 1973 ended the vision of a “peaceful road to socialism” and brought to the fore the practical problems of human rights, repression, and exile. Almost immediately, on the initiative of Alan Angell from St. Antony’s, Academics for Chile was formed. It successfully pressured university administrations and then the incoming Labor government of 1974 to offer scholarships and posts to Chilean scholars who found themselves without money in the United Kingdom or forced into exile like Alejandro Foxley or Carlos Fortín, both of whom had been attending a conference at Sussex when the coup occurred. World University Service quickly raised £39,000 (about US$94,000 at the time; approximately US$500,000 at 2016 prices) and instituted a scholarship program that lasted throughout the 1970s under the chairmanship of Dudley Seers (Alan Angell, personal communication; see also Jolly, 2008). ¹⁶

In London the Catholic Institute of International Relations (CIIR), whose education program was coordinated by Julian Filochowski, provided a base for new organizations that sprang up on the left in the mid-1970s and reflected the radicalization of Latin American studies: it housed the Chile Solidarity Campaign, the Contemporary Archive on Latin America, and the Latin America Bureau (see O’Shaughnessy, 2012). The latter’s early publications, commencing in 1978, focused on the repression of the left in Central America, the Andes, and the Southern Cone and the interventionism of the United States (Dunkerley, 1980; Pearce, 1980 and 1982; Plant, 1978). Two of its early contributors, Roger Plant and James Dunkerley, were products of the Oxford postgraduate program, while others connected with organizations based at the CIIR, such as Richard Lapper (later Latin America editor of the Financial Times) and Mike Reid (later Latin America editor of the Economist), had also studied at universities with Parry centers. The CIIR welcomed other solidarity groups when they began to appear as a result of the Central American conflicts in the late 1970s. By now, both the political orientation of Latin American studies in Britain and the balance between the supply of and the demand for specialists in universities had changed significantly. While Parry funding lasted, social scientists had normally been able to obtain academic posts after completing their degrees, whether in the centers and institutes or elsewhere in the British university system. Once the Parry funding ceased, there were fewer new academic opportunities, especially after the Thatcher government imposed further cuts on universities in 1981. This pushed many later graduates from the Parry centers and institutes toward journalism or third-sector organizations such as Oxfam, which recruited several graduates from the centers for its Latin America programs (John Crabtree, personal communication).

Concluding Comments

The quotations at the beginning of this paper raise questions about the reasons for the early growth of Latin American studies in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s and the coincidence of this expansion with a new phase of the Cold War following the Cuban Revolution and the construction of the Berlin Wall. How important were Cuba and the Cold War to the growth of Latin American studies in the United Kingdom? It seems clear that university teaching and research on the area were already developing, albeit slowly, before the Cuban Revolution, especially in London and among historians, geographers, and literature specialists. The persistent academic entrepreneurship of R. A. Humphreys stimulated growth in history and geography at UCL. Elsewhere in London, after Chatham House’s aborted attempts to update its publications on the region, a new director-general and head of research at Chatham House appointed Claudio Véliz, another effective entrepreneur, to a research fellowship and encouraged him to organize a seminar and conference program to counteract British ignorance of the contemporary Latin American world, especially with regard to politics and economics. While Cuba undoubtedly played a role here, the real concern of the Chatham House senior management, judging from its internal correspondence, seems to have been the woeful shortage of contemporary political and economic analysis of the South American republics. The Foreign Office also played an important part in the initial moves to stimulate research because of its concern about the decline of Britain’s trade and influence in Latin America.

With its report in 1965, the Parry Committee laid the institutional foundations for the academic growth of Latin American studies. However, although it needed the support of the Foreign Office to be formed and that of the government to have its recommendations implemented, the motives behind these decisions were not Cuba and the Cold War but a desire to boost commercial links and remedy British ignorance of a region that seemed to be growing in political and economic importance. The committee’s minutes and reports of its visits to universities display almost no concern with geopolitical issues, focusing instead on the general state of knowledge of the region in the United Kingdom and the shortage of scholarly resources and expertise, especially in the social sciences. These factors favored a focus on postgraduate studies and the development of qualified faculty, together with the concentration of library funding in a few centers, in line with the recommendations of earlier committees on other area studies (for example, on Eastern Europe or Africa). Developing undergraduate programs would have foundered in the conditions of the mid-1960s. Only just over 1,000 students in England and Wales took Spanish A-level in 1963 (UGC, 1965: 34), and very few university language departments wished to teach Spanish, let alone Portuguese, ab initio. When universities such as Liverpool did introduce undergraduate programs in Latin American studies 20 years later, they often struggled to find good candidates. The new universities, which had a more open attitude toward interdisciplinary degrees, appeared, in the words of Humphreys (1978: 28), “too late, too ambitious or too imprecise in their plans,” although three of them (Essex, Warwick, Sussex) did eventually develop significant Latin American interests. While specialists in other locations may have felt isolated, excluded, and resentful, the students who undertook Ph.D.s in the Parry centers in the late 1960s and early 1970s found young, generally enthusiastic faculty and a vibrant intellectual atmosphere as opposed to struggling in isolation with difficult, nonspecialist supervisors.

This leaves open the question of the role of U.S. philanthropic foundations in supporting the growth and the extent to which Cold War considerations may explain it. Rockefeller financed much of the early travel and library expenditure in London, and Ford provided substantial grants to both the Oxford center and Chatham House. Rockefeller’s support preceded the intensification of the Cold War. It gave Humphreys his first travel grant to visit Latin America in 1949 and later financed the creation of posts at UCL (Collier, 1982). It also supported Eric Hobsbawm’s first visit to South America, seemingly in ignorance of his membership of the Communist Party, a previous visit he had made to Cuba with two prominent U.S. Marxists (Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy), and the attention British intelligence services were paying to him (Bethell, 2016: 2–4; Hobsbawm, 2002: 254–258).

Ford supported a number of significant projects: teaching by British economists at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in the early 1960s; the Parry Committee’s tour of U.S. universities in 1963; a 1963 meeting at the British government’s Ditchley Park conference center that agreed on measures for coordinating Latin American studies in Europe; research fellowships and important events at Chatham House for almost the whole of the 1960s; the establishment of the Latin American program at St. Antony’s; and later the extension of its fellowships program for Latin America to candidates from British universities, including early-career researchers who wished to specialize in the region (Paper 13/LA/63, Humphreys MS825/11; Parry Committee minutes, December 18, 1963, Humphreys MS825/9; Blakemore, 1971: 21; Alan Angell, personal communication). There is no doubt that through Shepard Stone the foundation had close relations with the U.S. government. There is also no doubt that developing the social sciences and area studies in Europe fit well with a strategy, embodied in Stone, of building up the non-Marxist left in Europe and using European scholars to develop both knowledge and networks in areas of the world where U.S. scholars faced antagonism (Berghahn, 2001; Saunders, 1999). At the same time as it financed Chatham House and Oxford to establish their programs on Latin America, Ford was also funding research centers in Latin America, such as the Colegio de México, the Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, and the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP) in Lima, as well as business schools such as the Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo (EAESP) in Brazil (Cooke and Alcadipani, 2015; Levy, 1996).

However, it is also clear that financing research did not mean controlling the agenda in the interest of the U.S. government. Cooke and Alcadipani’s research into the EAESP’s history shows how little control Ford had over the use of funds, and a study of Ford’s support for the Marginality Project in Argentina in the late 1960s, for which Hobsbawm was a member of the supervisory committee, would suggest a similar conclusion there (Plotkin, 2015). In the early 1970s, research at the IEP in Lima was dominated by three Marxist academics, Heraclio Bonilla, Aníbal Quijano, and Julio Cotler. In the case of Britain, Alan Angell states (personal communication) that Ford never intervened in the selection of topics for support under its fellowships program and that it provided around £7,000 in seed money for Academics for Chile following the 1973 coup. ¹⁷ Thus the end result of Ford’s significant support for Latin American studies in Britain was hardly a body of specialists sympathetic to U.S. policy or willing to supply U.S. officials with intelligence and information but rather the reverse, as criticism of the U.S.-backed military regimes that enveloped the region during the Cold War mounted.

The activities of a few academic pioneers and entrepreneurs, especially in London, Cambridge, and Oxford, coupled with government and foundation funding, thus established a base for the successful growth of Latin American studies in Britain. It was not until the late 1990s that any of the Parry centers and institutes disappeared, Glasgow being the first to go. By then, Latin American studies had spread through British higher education, with other important concentrations of specialists in universities such as Essex and Manchester. In 1992 the London Institute listed 318 faculty in Britain with research and/or teaching interests in Latin America, located in 63 different universities (Institute of Latin American Studies, 1992a). In the previous four years 440 students either had completed postgraduate theses in the humanities and social sciences, usually at the Ph.D. level, or had theses in progress (Institute of Latin American Studies, 1992b). Compared with the situation 30 years earlier, when the Parry Committee first met, this indicates massive growth.

However, the field had not expanded in the directions that either the Parry Committee or the Foreign Office, which backed its formation, had anticipated. There was little connection between the academic world and business, and academics’ influence on policy making was very limited. Mesa-Lago (1978: 133) commented in the late 1970s that there were no specialists in business, education, or health and welfare, and this has hardly changed. The focus of the research remained very much on the mainstream humanities and social sciences, and there is little evidence that engineers, scientists, or business school academics involved themselves with the work of the centers. Instead, the influence of political events and global and regional intellectual trends in the late 1960s and early 1970s led to an academic world that was rather more radical and critical of the British and U.S. roles in Latin America than the professors of history who made up the majority of the Parry Committee would have expected, and its external links with activist and nongovernmental organizations in areas such as human rights and environmental issues became much stronger than those with multinational corporations or government departments.