Panama to Patagonia: The Isthmian Canal and the West Coast Countries of South America

Written in the feverish years when the Panama Canal rose from the jungle, this book captures a pivotal moment in global history through the eyes of someone living it. Charles M. Pepper penned these pages as the United States undertook the greatest engineering feat of the age, and he asked a question that resonates across a century: what happens to the forgotten corners of the world when the maps are redrawn? Pepper turns his attention to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia, nations that would sit at the new crossroads of Pacific and Atlantic commerce. He challenges the cynical European notion that Spanish-American republics are doomed to stagnation, arguing instead that the canal could ignite industrial transformation and bind the continents in trade. Peppered with statistical sketches of Andean geography and population, with careful projections about shipping routes and commodity flows, this book reads as both a earnest policy argument and a time capsule. We see what an educated American Progressive believed about the future of a continent, and we can measure how right or wrong history proved him.