With this book two prominent historians at the top of their game seek nothing less than ‘to provide a new agenda for the study of revolutionary change and political violence in twentieth-century Latin America’ (p. 397). In other words, they propose to revise a big chunk of what historians of Latin America have been doing in the past few decades.

The need for the new agenda stems from the editors' feeling that political violence should be at the centre of the discussion and from their dissatisfaction with current historiography. In his introduction Greg Grandin regrets that studies that do focus on political violence tend to be uprooted from history. To him, some of the recent work represents ‘a shift away from trying to understand the historical causes and social consequences of violence’ towards a ‘focus on how violence is experienced’ (p. 7). In his conclusion Gilbert Joseph reinforces the point, taking aim at a triumphalist post-Cold War rewriting of history that frames political violence as ‘senseless, a mirror onto the dark side of the human soul’ (p. 398), rather than as a deeply historical, socially embedded process. Both the editors and the authors of some of the case studies, particularly Carlota McAllister on Guatemala, show the basic flaws of the ‘theory of two demons’ (p. 10). This way of thinking, exemplified by the work of David Stoll, claims that violence was used in equal doses by the state and revolutionary movements, leaving a helpless ‘real people’, apparently incapable of exercising agency, trapped in the middle of violent bands.

The book's goal of proposing a new agenda explains a rather unusual feature: fully one-third of the book (one introduction, two reflections, one interview and the conclusion) is devoted to telling the reader how to think about the case studies. The centrepiece of this component is Greg Grandin's introduction, which has at its core his brilliant and provocative reading of Arno Mayer's work. Grandin ends his introduction with five suggestions for resetting the research agenda. He encourages historians of Latin America to historicise political violence, to explore the relationship between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence, to acknowledge the dynamic nature of counter-revolution, to pay attention to the international dimension of conflicts, and to define the twentieth century as a distinct period in Latin American history. The two ‘reflections’ at the end of the volume help to hammer down the suggestions. Corey Robin discusses the importance of paying attention to counter-revolution, while Neil Larsen talks about the relationship between violence and modernity. An insightful conversation between Grandin and Arno Mayer offers a suitable complement to the introduction.

The selection of case studies is not intended to cover every country or every major attempt at revolutionary change; this is not a ‘chapter-a-week’, undergraduate-ready textbook. It is aimed at engaging historians in a discussion on new ways of thinking about one of the most important issues in Latin American history. The editors have selected pieces that illustrate the approach to the study of political violence that they advocate. The collection includes two articles each on Mexico, Central America, Chile and Cuba, one article on Peru and another one on Colombia. In fact, the chapters do a particularly good job of showing why it is worthwhile to focus on political violence as the key category of analysis, and the multiple ways in which revolution and counter-revolution shape each other – perhaps the two most innovative items in Grandin's five suggestions.

In a tacit nod to the precursors of their approach, the editors chose to begin the initial section, entitled ‘The First Cold War’, with a piece by the late Friedrich Katz, the wise elder statesman of historians of the Mexican Revolution. This is only fair. One can think of a number of recent and not so recent works that do some of the things that Grandin's introduction proposes. Katz, for example, spent decades writing masterful pieces that analysed the international context of the Mexican Revolution. The section also includes another work on Mexico, by Jocelyn Olcott, a piece by Jeff Gould on El Salvador and Nicaragua, and one by Thomas Klubock on violence on Chile's southern frontier. Paying such close attention to the period that preceded the epic superpower rivalry commonly associated with the Cold War brings home some of the editors' main points. Most obviously, it extends the idea of the Cold War to the beginning of the century. It also serves as a strong reminder of the deep historical roots of most political violence in Latin America. The cases of Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Chile show the connection between the ‘first Cold War’ and nineteenth-century processes of state formation, expansion of the export economy and the growing influence of Smithian ideas. Understanding the two sides in the grand confrontations of this period is indispensable if one is to comprehend the drama of the ‘real’ Cold War. On one side were the ascending white and mestizo elites, most often enriched by the export economy, expanding their economic and political power, changing land tenure systems, taking advantage of labourers, imposing their world view and ruthlessly advancing their own interests. On the other side, men and women, indigenous groups, campesinos and urban workers organised to defend their way of life and their right to be treated fairly and with respect, and to claim a space in the political system. They creatively used their limited resources, their valour, organisation, vision and weapons, to advance their causes. Putting the story of the clashes between these groups in the same package as the tale that includes McCarthyites and bearded Cubans forces the reader to ask what, besides access to resources, was fundamentally different about the nature of the latest versions of the drama.

The focus on violence as a subject of rigorous inquiry throws into sharp relief one of the most insidious lies that has taken root in the popular imagination: that revolutionary movements have been bloody affairs that produced countless victims (imprecision is essential here) among law-abiding citizens. In fact, as the case studies in this volume clearly show, both at the beginning and at the end of the century the great asymmetry of power between the main groups in conflict was matched by a similar asymmetry in their inclination to deadly violence. Jeffrey Gould discusses the matanza in El Salvador in 1932, where government repression claimed about 10,000 victims after an uprising that accounted for no more than 100 dead. Michelle Chase's fascinating chapter on the trials and subsequent execution of Batista's henchmen in Cuba in 1959 compares the disproportion between the relatively small number of people executed, the huge and long-lasting international indignation, and the far larger number of victims of the Batista regime. Peter Winn's spirited piece on the Allende regime analyses in painstaking detail the ‘climate of violence’ during the Popular Unity government and conclusively shows ‘how limited the political violence was’, certainly on a completely different scale than the repression under General Pinochet. Yet, contrary to all historical evidence, the socially constructed memory of the horrors of revolutionary violence is alive and well among conservative Salvadoreans, Cubans and Chileans.

The narrative of revolutionary violence on a grand scale has been essential to fuelling the virulence of counter-revolution, an essential component of the story. This collection is particularly successful in showing how, in case after case, counter-revolutionary violence has played a crucial role in shaping and even adding fuel to revolution. The short space available makes it impossible to comment on the numerous insights contained in the individual pieces. Suffice it to say that this rich collection is more than the sum of its parts. It helps us to think in fresh ways about one of the most important issues in Latin American history.