Background

Clarence Henry Haring was born on February 9, 1885 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Henry Getman Haring and Amalia Stoneback.

Education

Haring graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia. He received his bachelor of arts degree in modern languages from Harvard University in 1907. Selected for a Rhodes Scholarship in 1907, he studied under Professor Sir Charles Harding Firth at Oxford University from 1907-1910, where he was a member of New College. Under Firth's guidance, Haring produced his first book on The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century. This research laid the groundwork for Haring's lifelong work on the history of the Spanish Empire and in Latin America. While at Oxford, Haring also studied briefly at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1909.

Career

Haring taught at Bryn Mawr (1912-1915), Clark University and Harvard (1915-1916), then Yale (1916-1923). In 1923 he accepted the Bliss chair in Latin American history and economics at Harvard, a post he held until his retirement in 1953.

Between 1933 and 1948 Haring was master of Dunster House at Harvard, which, as an "old Oxonian, " he found "a most congenial assignment. " In the 1930s Haring served as chairman of the Committee on Latin American Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and of the subsequent joint committee of the ACLS and the Social Science Research Council. He also helped organize the short-lived Bureau of Economic Research at Harvard that produced The Economic Literature of Latin America: A Tentative Bibliography (1935-1936); and played a major role on the advisory board of the Handbook of Latin American Studies (1936), the major research tool in the field.

Haring was drawn to the colonial history of Spanish America through his analysis of how English and French policy manipulated the buccaneers to attack the Spanish transatlantic commercial system at its Caribbean terminus in the late seventeenth century. For this work he relied primarily upon English and French sources. Trade and Navigation examines the Spanish commercial system from within, both as an aspect of colonial policy and because the system "made possible the creation of Spanish American civilization. " The study utilized an impressive body of Spanish printed and manuscript sources, especially the collections of the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. It covers the organizational elements of the Spanish colonial trade system, for Haring focused upon the structures of colonial monopoly rather than upon the volume and composition of trade flows, although he did include a chapter on Spanish gold and silver imports from America along with observations about their long-term effects.

One indication of the quality of his scholarship is that only Pierre and Huguette Chaunu's Seville et l'Atlantique (1955-1959) has added substantially to his institutional approach. Haring found the Spanish trade monopoly no more exclusive than that of the contemporaneous systems of England, France, or Holland. He concluded - in a vein reminiscent of modern structuralist historians - that the Spanish system was "peculiarly disastrous" because Spain was "industrially bankrupt, " a premise made explicit in his earlier Buccaneers. On the other hand, his explanation also incorporated an element of national temperament, in that he quoted Ehrenberg's Zeitalter der Fugger (1896) to the effect that precious metals imported by Spain served "to feed an impractical vanity. "

In the three decades after publication of Trade and Navigation, Haring's professional interest changed to what he termed "present politics. " The move was reflected in a book and several articles on South America in the 1920s and 1930s in which Haring tried to explain contemporary political turbulence in terms of social structure, economic fluctuations, and political traditions. He rejected then-current simplistic explanations based on the "supposed instability of the Latin temperament. "

Yet Haring did not abandon the early focus. His "Genesis of Royal Government in the Indies" (1927) reveals that he still cultivated his interests in the early Spanish colonial period although they were shifting from economic to institutional history. This new focus was sketched in lectures delivered at the University of Seville in 1934 and was given final form in The Spanish Empire in America (1947). Topically presented and lucidly written, The Spanish Empire is primarily concerned with colonial political structures, from the Council of the Indies in Spain to such aspects of the vice-royalties in America as their territorial bases, administration, and treasury operations. These topics are supplemented by sections on ecclesiastical organization, education, and fine arts. There is a brief but perceptive chapter on the eighteenth century, "The Last Phase. " As an early synthesis of Spanish colonial structures in America, The Spanish Empire displays thematic balance, bibliographical control, and insight. Its only peer in its genre is Charles Gibson's Spain in America (1966).

His major publications worked high-grade ores. The Buccaneers cultivated a popular genre but focused upon a moment of extraordinary change in northwestern Europe at the end of the seventeenth century. Similarly, Trade and Navigation - still a classic treatment - probed the relationship between imperialism and economic growth or stagnation, a theme that once attracted Roscher and still intrigues economic historians. In his choice of subjects for investigation, careful scholarship, and logic and felicity in exposition, Haring set high standards for the field of Latin American history.

He died in Cambridge, Massachussets.

Achievements

• Clarence Henry Haring was a pioneer in initiating the study of Latin American colonial institutions among scholars in the United States. In 1918, after completing extensive research in the archives at Seville, Haring published his doctoral dissertation, which had been awarded the David A. Wells Prize at Harvard for the best dissertation in economics. In 1953, he was awarded by the Academy of American Franciscan History their highest honor, the Junipero Serra Award. Following Haring's death in 1960, the American Historical Association established the Clarence H. Haring Prize in Latin American History, awarded every five years to the best book by a Latin American author.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century

    (Historical work from the historian of Latin America who i...)

  • Trade and Navigation Between Spain and the Indies in the Time of the Hapsburgs (Classic Reprint)

    (Portuguese route to the East, European trade expanded fro...)

  • The Spanish Empire in America

    (Reviews the institutional history of the colonies establi...)

  • Spanish Empire in America

    (Book by Haring, Clarence Henry)

  • South American Progress

Personality

Assessing the influence of a distinguished historian on his field is never easy. Haring had few graduate students.

His contemporary Arthur Whitaker called him "a cultivated moderate liberal gentleman, " and understated his scholarly interests when he wrote that his "few books published have not seriously deflected the course of historical scholarship. "

Connections

Haring married Helen Garnsey in 1913. They had two sons, Philip and Peter.

Father:

Henry Getman Haring

Mother:

Amelia (Stoneback) Haring

Spouse:

Helen (Garnsey) Haring

Son:

Peter Haring

Son:

Philip Haring

References

• Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900–1945 (American Encounters/Global Interactions)