There is a marked tendency to view Latin America’s twentieth-century international history through the lens of US hegemony, and Europe has been particularly impacted by this historiographical trend. On the basis of a review of 41 articles published in The Americas over the past 81 years, this essay explores The Americas’ important role in promoting scholarship on the variety of connections between Latin America and Europe. By bringing together two temporal currents—the chronology of history and the chronology of historiography—it traces how scholarship on Latin America’s twentieth-century relationship with the wider world has evolved. During the Cold War years, the majority of articles focused on Latin America as an arena for great power/superpower rivalry, but from the end of the previous century, scholars publishing in the journal made increasing use of different scales of analysis to uncover the multidimensional flows across the Atlantic. Ultimately, work published in The Americas on twentieth-century transnational relations has shown that Latin America and Latin Americans are important actors on the global stage with significant agency in drawing upon separate international influences and alliances to best suit their own domestic purposes, sometimes with significant consequences for the wider world.

This paper examines the gradual imposition of private property on agricultural land, mostly occupied by Indigenous communities, in the early nineteenth century by Andean republics’ ruling classes. The state’s weak authority and the Indigenous resistance to economic and political border advance impeded the immediate destruction of previous power structures, resulting in genuine statal formations in the region and clashes for the imposition of the newly adopted liberal ideas. This paper focuses on two early agricultural property privatization attempts in Bolivia, which have not been properly analyzed yet. First, José Ballivián’s governmental project, which resolved to dismantle the Indigenous communities through capitalist education, by placing “good examples” of white and mestizo colons between Indigenous lands using the legal formulation of emphyteusis, thus expanding the liberal conception of property and taxation and then making the existence of communal lands futile, achieving social homogeneity, enforcing capitalist production, and widening executive authority. Second, Jorge Mallo’s posterior pamphlet, which gave continuity to Ballivián’s policies through public opinion and linked them to the ones finally imposed in the second half of the century. Both initiatives were not successful but were remarkable steps in the process of Indigenous land usurpation by the state and white-mestizo colons.