Studies In The Formation Of The Nation State In Latin America

This book adopts a variety of disciplinary, thematic, and country-based approaches to the complex and contested issues around the character of the nation-state in Latin America. In recent years there has been a great deal of scholarly interest in this topic from the viewpoint of cultural and literary studies, but Latin America remains under-represented in general historical and sociological theories of nationhood. The authors seek to develop debate and research on the topic through case-studies (including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Spain), historiographical review, and themes such as the role of violence, military conscription and pensions, money and the role of finance, early notions of development, the ambiguous role of liberalism, and how to evaluate the reach and qualities of the nation-state. Contributors include Miguel Angel Centeno (Princeton University), Malcolm Deas (St Antony's College, Oxford), James Dunkerley (Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London), Paul Gootenberg (State University of New York at Stony Brook), Alan Knight (St Antony's College, Oxford), Colin Lewis (London School of Economics), Fernando López Alves (University of California, Santa Barbara), David McCreery (Georgia State University), Florencia Mallon (University of Wisconsin), Seemin Qayum (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Guy Thomson (University of Warwick), and Steven Topik (University of California, Irvine). James Dunkerley is director of the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, and also professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London. He is coeditor of the Journal of Latin American Studies. His most recent books are Americana: The Americas in the World, around 1850 (or 'Seeing the Elephant' as the Theme for an Imaginary Western) (2000) and Warriors and Scribes: Essays in the History and Politics of Latin America (2000).

This book traces the impact of exile in the formation of independent republics in Chile and the Río de la Plata in the decades after independence. Exile was central to state and nation formation, playing a role in the emergence of territorial borders and Romantic notions of national difference, while creating a transnational political culture that spanned the new independent nations. Analyzing the mobility of a large cohort of largely elite political émigrés from Chile and the Río de la Plata across much of South America before 1862, Edward Blumenthal reinterprets the political thought of well-known figures in a transnational context of exile. As Blumenthal shows, exile was part of a reflexive process in which elites imagined the nation from abroad while gaining experience building the same state and civil society institutions they considered integral to their republican nation-building projects.

This collection brings together innovative historical work on race and national identity in Latin America and the Caribbean and places this scholarship in the context of interdisciplinary and transnational discussions regarding race and nation in the Americas. Moving beyond debates about whether ideologies of racial democracy have actually served to obscure discrimination, the book shows how notions of race and nationhood have varied over time across Latin America's political landscapes. Framing the themes and questions explored in the volume, the editors' introduction also provides an overview of the current state of the interdisciplinary literature on race and nation-state formation. Essays on the postindependence period in Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Peru consider how popular and elite racial constructs have developed in relation to one another and to processes of nation building. Contributors also examine how ideas regarding racial and national identities have been gendered and ask how racialized constructions of nationhood have shaped and limited the citizenship rights of subordinated groups. The contributors are Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, Lillian Guerra, Anne S. Macpherson, Aims McGuinness, Gerardo Renique, James Sanders, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Barbara Weinstein.

Review: "Predictable postmodernist analysis of Ecuador's national identity. Examines gender, race, ethnicity, and religion. Case study of nation's development out of inchoate space"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

The growth of institutional capacity in the developing world has become a central theme in twenty-first-century social science. Many studies have shown that public institutions are an important determinant of long-run rates of economic growth. This book argues that to understand the difficulties and pitfalls of state building in the contemporary world, it is necessary to analyze previous efforts to create institutional capacity in conflictive contexts. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the process of state and nation building in Latin America and Spain from independence to the 1930s. The book examines how Latin American countries and Spain tried to build modern and efficient state institutions for more than a century - without much success. The Spanish and Latin American experience of the nineteenth century was arguably the first regional stage on which the organizational and political dilemmas that still haunt states were faced. This book provides an unprecedented perspective on the development and contemporary outcome of those state and nation-building projects.

No one in Latin American historiography has paid more attention to questions related to the emergence of nations than Jose Carlos Chiaramonte. Reflecting on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century uses of the concept of nation in Europe and the Americas, Chiaramonte argues that historical questions related to the term "nation" derive from its changing meaning in different contexts. The historian would be better advised to focus on the development of forms of state organization, and the emergence of national states, rather than the "nation" as a cultural community prior to independence.Nation and State in Latin America begins by examining the effects on historians of the ideological and methodological prejudice spread by contemporary nationalism on the historical studies of Latin America. Chiaramonte analyzes uses of concepts such as "nation" and "state" in both Europe and the Americas. Chiaramonte considers the prominence of sovereign "pueblos" (cities and townships) and their role during independence. He argues the non-existence of nationalities in the period and proves that feelings of collective identity at that time amounted mainly to local affections.He concludes with an analysis of major trends in federalism and the law of nature and nations, crucial to understanding the political concepts of the age of birth of modern Latin American nations. This book covers the whole of Latin America, making use of comparative viewpoints. The different national intonations of the concept of sovereignty and the nuances of the federal and confederate forms of the state are examined in detail.

What role does war play in political development? Our understanding of the rise of the nation-state is based heavily on the Western European experience of war. Challenging the dominance of this model, Blood and Debt looks at Latin America's much different experience as more relevant to politics today in regions as varied as the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa. The book's illuminating review of the relatively peaceful history of Latin America from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries reveals the lack of two critical prerequisites needed for war: a political and military culture oriented toward international violence, and the state institutional capacity to carry it out. Using innovative new data such as tax receipts, naming of streets and public monuments, and conscription records, the author carefully examines how war affected the fiscal development of the state, the creation of national identity, and claims to citizenship. Rather than building nation-states and fostering democratic citizenship, he shows, war in Latin America destroyed institutions, confirmed internal divisions, and killed many without purpose or glory.

Challenging much received wisdom about nation-states - how they form, what sustains them, why they fail - this study of subaltern social groups in the Chachapoyas region of Peru analyses the emergence of the modern nation-state 'from below.' By approaching nation-state formation from the perspective of the subaltern, the book offers a critique of scholarship that sees coercion and the imposition of social and cultural forms as the core of nation-state expansion. Based on extensive interviews with subaltern political activists and a detailed study of a previously neglected documentary record, the book offers a compelling new perspective on the drive toward modernity, the formation of the nation-state, and the participation of subaltern groups in these processes.--Publisher description.