In May 1938, Evelyn Waugh, already an established novelist, was approached by representatives of Clive Pearson, a son of the multimillionaire industrialist Lord Cowdray, to write a book on Mexico. Cowdray’s interest in sponsoring such a project was certainly not literary, anthropological, or touristic; rather, his holdings in that country, consisting of Mexican Eagle Oil Company, had been expropriated by President Lázaro Cárdenas, and he was looking for a distinguished writer to put his case before the world. Waugh was not asked to write an extended press release but rather a serious volume that would attract the attention of educated people in the United Kingdom and the United States, where the book—Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson—was also published.

In spite of the recent success of his novel Scoop, at the time Waugh was somewhat short of funds. Quite apart from a generous honorarium for writing the book, he and his wife would be treated to a first-class trip to a distant, exotic country, a prospect bound to appeal to someone who had already displayed a taste for travel in strange places, most notably Ethiopia, the Aden Protectorate, British Guiana, and Brazil. It was understood that the financial arrangement was to remain a deep secret, both from the publisher and the wider reading public, although this was probably a gratuitous exercise. Waugh could not write an uninteresting book, and anyone who reads Robbery Under Law might even skip over the subject of oil expropriation and