Pelham Horton Box

The Box family, which was to produce three distinguished academics, came from modest circumstances in the port of Gravesend, Kent, where his grandfather was a grocer's assistant[2] who set up a small discount hardware shop.

Somebody, perhaps his father, paid for him to attend the prestigious Merchant Taylors' School; there, benefactors had endowed scholarships to St John's College, Oxford which could be won by prowess in classical Hebrew.

[8] A nephew, George Edward Pelham Box, likewise climbed out of obscurity in Gravesend and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society for his innovations in the science of statistics.

It enabled him to do research at the University of Illinois where he was supervised by William Spence Robertson, professor of Latin American history — such a thing did not then exist in England[9] — and to travel in the United States; the stipend was generous.

[16] Lind, who wrote the most detailed memoir, and did so at the age of 91, recalled that Box was "brilliant and charming", would talk until dawn broke, thought the British Communist Party was manned by doctrinaire misfits, and was an admirer of Lenin, Trotsky ("genius") and the Marquis de Sade ("this great subversive thinker").

Wrote Lind:Russia continued to fascinate Pelham and to arouse perhaps his deepest political commitment to the society of the future which he perceived in its early devotion to Communism.

[37] He did not play down López's role in the disaster: It is therefore necessary to spend some time on the life and personality of Francisco Solano López, who was elected President of Paraguay in succession to his father in October, 1862, and whose fateful decisions in November, 1864, and March, 1865, precipitated a five-year struggle of desperate ferocity, ending, after unparalleled disasters, in his own violent death, the utter ruin of the Paraguayan Republic and the all but complete extermination of the Paraguayan people, the chief victims of a war in which, from first to last, perhaps half a million human beings perished by the sword, by famine and by disease.

[32] "What emerges most clearly is the fact that the war germinated in the political and economic instability of the states of the Río de la Plata at this period in the history of South America.

The Origins of the Paraguayan War — the complete work, not just the PhD thesis — was first published in two parts in 1930[42] in University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, a paperback quarterly.

In The Historiography of the Río de la Plata Area Since 1830, Joseph Barager writing in 1959 said Box's work was the most objective study of the origins of the conflict.

[44] Harris Gaylord Warren, the first American Paraguayanist, said Box "displayed extraordinary energy and skill in presenting the most reasonable explanation of the war's causes that has appeared in print".

[15] Pablo Max Ynsfrán, formerly chargé d'affaires of the Paraguayan legation in Washington DC, and afterwards professor of Latin American history at the University of Texas, who sought permission to translate the book into Spanish, wrote: This work is the first systematic effort to gather together the complex and multiple factors that, directly or indirectly, concurred to precipitate the war of the Triple Alliance.

For national or polemical motives, historians — mostly, sons of the countries involved in the conflict, and often direct participants themselves — have been more concerned with certain unilateral aspects of the struggle than with elaborating an organic work, in which the vast web of events leading to the catastrophe of 1865-70 can be appreciated in all its breadth.The merit of Dr. Pelham Horton Box consists precisely in trying to fill this gap in the literature of the war.

But having perceived that void, the young English academic already reveals a researcher's sharp eye, amply confirmed in the following pages (not a few traced by a master's hand), by his summing up, by the technique used in the deployment of the documentation and for the sagacity that prevails in them.

[34][46]Thomas L. Whigham, the doyen of present-day Paraguayanists, said Box's pioneering work should have inspired a whole generation of historians, but he died young and left few heirs, except Efraím Cardozo;[47] and "I find particularly impressive the thoroughness of his examination of official documents and pamphlets outlining changing state policies in Argentina and Uruguay.

After a series of coups and elections the pro-fascist Higinio Morínigo was first in an unbroken line of dictators that ruled Paraguay for fifty years and included Alfredo Stroessner.

At the height of the dictatorship, Harris Gaylord Warren of Miami University wrote an article describing how Paraguayans understood the war of the Triple Alliance.

Box did mention, as was the fact,[53][54] that the Paraguayan government itself had cited the attitude of the Buenos Aires press as one of the official grounds for declaring war on Argentina.

[55] That the Uruguayan government by secret manoeuvring tried to persuade Paraguay to make war on Buenos Aires, Box demonstrated in Chapter VI of his book.

He was remorseless in crushing his enemies, who were also the exploiters of the Guaraní peasantry, and with true revolutionary insight grasped the importance of the confiscation of property in overthrowing the dominance of a class.

The logical outcome of such control is the state socialism represented by the government monopoly of yerba under Francia, extended to tobacco under Carlos Antonio López, who thus excluded the two staple products of the country from the operations of laissez faire.

The growth of an independent trading and commercial middle class was thus prevented and a fascinating social evolution begun in that land that had already witnessed the rise and progress of the Jesuit Communist Empire.

With its weak landed class and insignificant church, its precocious railroads and incipient industrial economy, its disdain for foreign trade and drive toward economic self-sufficiency, Paraguay has been characterized as following a course toward a burst of nondependent development.

The war, however, cut short and destroyed these trends, dooming Paraguay to become an anarchic backwater, the prey of Brazilian and Argentine liberals and their imperialist backers in Europe".

Great Britain, France, and the USA — seeking unhindered access for their capital in Paraguay — furthered the unleashing of a war that had long been planned by Brazilian slaveowners and the Argentinian bourgeois landowning elite".

However, in Trade Contraction and Economic Decline: The Paraguayan Economy under Francia, 1810-1840, Mario Pastore pointed out that The bulk of government revenues, before and after the confiscations, were devoted to assuring the army's support...