State Building in Latin America
State Building in Latin America

Author: Hillel David Soifer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-06-09

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1316301036

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State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure. First, Latin American state leaders chose to attempt concerted state-building only where they saw it as the means to political order and economic development. Fragmented regionalism led to the adoption of more laissez-faire ideas and the rejection of state-building. With dominant urban centers, developmentalist ideas and state-building efforts took hold, but not all state-building projects succeeded. The second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation. Filling administrative ranks with local elites caused even concerted state-building efforts to flounder, while appointing outsiders to serve as administrators underpinned success. Relying on extensive archival evidence, the book traces how these factors shaped the differential development of education, taxation, and conscription in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

Exile and Nation-State Formation in Argentina and Chile, 1810–1862
Exile and Nation-State Formation in Argentina and Chile, 1810–1862

Author: Edward Blumenthal

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-10-23

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 3030278646

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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.

Institution Building and State Formation in Nineteenth-century Latin America
Institution Building and State Formation in Nineteenth-century Latin America

Author: Blake D. Pattridge

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780820467757

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The major issues addressed include the relationships between institution-building and state formation; between the university and the development of a national and regional identity; and between modernism and Catholicism (still a central tension in the region's culture), including the discursive process of constructing an ideology that fused elements from the Enlightenment and the tradition of scholasticism.

Blood and Debt
Blood and Debt

Author: Miguel Angel Centeno

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-08-26

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 0271074191

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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.

Beyond Imagined Communities
Beyond Imagined Communities

Author: John Charles Chasteen

Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13:

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How did the nationalisms of Latin America's many countries - elaborated in everything from history and fiction to cookery - arise from their common backgrounds in the Spanish and Portuguese empires and their similar populations of mixed European, native and African origins? This book discards one answer and provides a rich collection of others. highly influential book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Anderson traces Latin American nationalisms to local circulation of colonial newspapers and tours of duty of colonial administrators, but this book shows the limited validity of these arguments. influences shaped Latin American nationalisms. Four historians examine social situations: Francois-Xavier Guerra studies various forms of political communication; Tulio Halperin Doghi, political parties; Sarah C. Chambers, the feminine world of salons; and Andrew Kirkendall, the institutions of higher education that trained the new administrators. Next, four critics examine production of cultural objects: Fernando Unzueta investigates novels; Sara Castro Klaren, archeology and folklore; Gustavo Verdesio, suppression of unwanted archeological evidence; and Beatriz Gonzalez Stephan, national literary histories and international expositions.

State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Volume 1
State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Volume 1

Author: Miguel A. Centeno

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-03-29

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 1107311306

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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.

From the Grounds Up
From the Grounds Up

Author: Casey Marina Lurtz

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1503608476

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In the late nineteenth century, Latin American exports boomed. From Chihuahua to Patagonia, producers sent industrial fibers, tropical fruits, and staple goods across oceans to satisfy the ever-increasing demand from foreign markets. In southern Mexico's Soconusco district, the coffee trade would transform rural life. A regional history of the Soconusco as well as a study in commodity capitalism, From the Grounds Up places indigenous and mestizo villagers, migrant workers, and local politicians at the center of our understanding of the export boom. An isolated, impoverished backwater for most of the nineteenth century, by 1920, the Soconusco had transformed into a small but vibrant node in the web of global commerce. Alongside plantation owners and foreign investors, a dense but little-explored web of small-time producers, shopowners, and laborers played key roles in the rapid expansion of export production. Their deep engagement with rural development challenges the standard top-down narrative of market integration led by economic elites allied with a strong state. Here, Casey Marina Lurtz argues that the export boom owed its success to a diverse body of players whose choices had profound impacts on Latin America's export-driven economy during the first era of globalization.

The Vanguard of the Atlantic World
The Vanguard of the Atlantic World

Author: James E. Sanders

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2014-10-03

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 082237613X

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In the nineteenth century, Latin America was home to the majority of the world's democratic republics. Many historians have dismissed these political experiments as corrupt pantomimes of governments of Western Europe and the United States. Challenging that perspective, James E. Sanders contends that Latin America in this period was a site of genuine political innovation and popular debate reflecting Latin Americans' visions of modernity. Drawing on archival sources in Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay, Sanders traces the circulation of political discourse and democratic practice among urban elites, rural peasants, European immigrants, slaves, and freed blacks to show how and why ideas of liberty, democracy, and universalism gained widespread purchase across the region, mobilizing political consciousness and solidarity among diverse constituencies. In doing so, Sanders reframes the locus and meaning of political and cultural modernity.

Latecomer State Formation
Latecomer State Formation

Author: Sebastián Mazzuca

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 0300248954

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A major contribution to the field of comparative state formation and the scholarship on long-term political development of Latin America "Ambitious and rich. . . . A sweeping and general theory of state formation and detailed historical reconstruction of essential events in Latin American political development. It combines structural elements with a novel emphasis on the political incentives and bargaining that shaped the map we have today."--Hillel David Soifer, Governance Latin American governments systematically fail to provide the key public goods for their societies to prosper. Sebastián Mazzuca argues that the secret of Latin America's failure is that its states were "born weak," in contrast to states in western Europe, North America, and Japan. State formation in post-Independence Latin America occurred in a period when capitalism, rather than war, was the key driver forging countries. In pursuing the short-term benefits of international trade, Latin American leaders created states with chronic weaknesses, notably patrimonial administrations and dysfunctional regional combinations. Mazzuca analyzes pathways leading to variations in country size and level of pacification: "port-led" state formation in Argentina and Brazil; "party-led" in Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay; and "lord-led" in Central America, Venezuela, and Peru.