This book addresses an important but little-explored aspect of Latin America’s response to the Great War. It features an engaging narrative based on an extensive bibliography gathered from the national archives of both the United States and Venezuela and a large selection of secondary sources. One of the very few books to appear on this topic since Percy Alvin Martin’s Latin America and the War published in 1921, it will be an appropriate and rewarding assignment in undergraduate and graduate courses dealing with diplomacy, Latin America in general, and World War I.

Jane Rausch, University of Massachusetts

Tarver's work delves into the key issue, little explored until now, of the process of transformation of the ties between Venezuela and the United States during the First World War—a fundamental juncture at the dawn of the twentieth century. This global conflict provoked transcendent changes in the political, economic, and diplomatic developments of the hemisphere, creating new relationships that the author presents in great detail. This work focuses on the positions, decisions, and agenda of Juan Vicente Gómez and Woodrow Wilson, two dissimilar personalities that led them to have policies with periods of both confluence and disagreement, but where the defense of national sovereignty and the maintenance of the European conflagration far from the American continent prevailed. Tarver’s research is based on a rigorous and meticulous use of historical and historiographic discourse and treatment of the various key sources. This work will be a significant contribution to the study of the relations between these two nations.

Francisco Soto Oráa, Universidad de Los Andes

Students of Venezuelan–US relations will welcome this fresh analysis of the countries’ diplomatic relations during the Great War. Abundantly documented, it draws on a wealth of information, much not seen in previous, similar studies. Students of US diplomatic history will find new information on US wartime policy toward both Venezuela and Britain—and Germany as well. The work’s scope is broader than that of others wedded to strict binational analysis of Venezuelan–US relations. Specialists in Venezuelan history will appreciate Tarver’s analysis of that country’s authoritarian president Juan Vicente Gómez, who is revealed here as walking a tightwire of neutrality between Germany—which he admired—and the United States, whose power and influence he respected. Gómez’s skill in not threatening US interests during wartime had the effect of insuring benign relations between his country and the United States in decades following the war.

James Henderson, Coastal Carolina University

In this thoroughly researched and richly detailed history, Tarver narrates a fascinating slice of Venezuelan history. On one level the book engages important things familiar to Latin American historiography—the influence of the rise of liberalism moving into the twentieth century and subsequent developing relationships with the United States in one of the historical periods characterized by mutual respect more so than before or afterwards. But what really sets this book apart is its engagement with world history on a more thorough level than is typical of the traditional area studies approach in our field. Thus, Tarver’s work is on the cutting edge of the increasing interest shown by Latin American historians in a broader global narrative, which will without doubt exert a powerful influence on world historiography more generally.

Richard Warner, Wabash College