Studies in the Formation of the Nation-state in Latin America

Studies in the Formation of the Nation-state in Latin America
Author: James Dunkerley
Publisher: University of London Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

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).

Blood and Debt

Blood and Debt
Author: Miguel Angel Centeno
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2015-08-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271074191

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.

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
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2019-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030278646

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.

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
Total Pages: 485
Release: 2013-03-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1107311306

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.

State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810-1900

State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810-1900
Author: Fernando López-Alves
Publisher:
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN:

A comparative study of state formation in 19th-century Latin America that examines the different social and political paths that have led to democracy or military rule.

Race and Nation in Modern Latin America

Race and Nation in Modern Latin America
Author: Nancy P. Appelbaum
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2003-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807862312

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.

State Building in Latin America

State Building in Latin America
Author: Hillel David Soifer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2015-06-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316301036

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.

Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-state

Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-state
Author: Aviva Chomsky
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822322184

A social history of Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean that illustrates the importance of workers' actions in shaping national history.

Beyond Imagined Communities

Beyond Imagined Communities
Author: John Charles Chasteen
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN:

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.

Nation and State in Latin America

Nation and State in Latin America
Author: Jose Carlos Chiaramonte
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351503804

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.