These three studies superbly integrate material from the Archivo General de la Nación, local provincial and regional archives, and specialised collections as well as relevant archival data from Spain and the United States. They reinforce the importance of the local in constructing powerfully persuasive accounts of political culture and state formation with singular originality. In addition, both Peguero and Turits have relied on numerous personal interviews – in the case of Turits, more than 130 – scattered across the country. The bibliographies are extraordinarily impressive and up-to-date. In general the writing in all three books is delightfully clear, jargon-free and accessible. The arguments are logically presented and well substantiated. The authors are keenly interested in the process of modernity and modernisation and their works neatly complement one another. Turits and Peguero examine the process under the three decades of the Rafael Trujillo regime while Martínez-Vergne focuses on the period from the accession of Ulises Heureaux to the occupation of the armed forces of the United States.

Foundations of Despotism and the Militarization of Culture essentially ask similar questions and cover much the same ground but their approaches are distinctly different. Both deal with the nature of despotism and agree that the case of Trujillo was an especially paradoxical one. Turits, while not neglecting the exceptional brutality of Trujillo, thinks that his political success was closely linked to the consolidation of a social base that remained strongly supportive of the regime for decades. In eight copiously documented chapters the author skilfully takes the reader through the entire history of the Dominican Republic from colonial times to the abrupt termination of the Trujillo administration in 1961. Until the beginning of the twentieth century the Dominican Republic represented a sharp variation from the conventional Caribbean patterns of economic and social development. Three distinct patterns, although by no means unadulterated, characterised the long European colonial experience in the Caribbean. One pattern was the fortified urban concentrations as in Cuba and Puerto Rico with an agricultural hinterland largely given to pasture or truck and market farming that eventually succumbed to the sugar revolutions. Another, typical of the French and English colonies, began as congregations of yeoman farmers and then rapidly became transformed by the sugar revolutions. The third pattern, represented by the Dutch and Danish Antilles, were largely trading outposts. For these three patterns, peasants were a late development.

This was not the case in the Dominican Republic, as Turits carefully outlines. The economy initially depended on gold production as well as sugarcane cultivation. Success, however, was elusive. Gold was scarce. Labour was scarcer, especially after the rapid and disastrous demise of the indigenous population; and the island could not compete with the attractions of the mainland. When the centre of gravity of the Spanish American empire moved to Mexico and Peru with their enormous deposits of silver, local society in Hispaniola became marginalised. The response over time was the gradual development of a dual society of semi-isolated small towns effectively connected to the empire and an ill-defined interior, the Cibao, with a majority of semi-independent peasants largely beyond the administered enclaves literally as well as figuratively. During the nineteenth century the Haitian occupation of the Dominican Republic and the unsettled state of politics accentuated the pattern of peasant development. At the beginning of the twentieth century Dominican peasants still had a loose connection to the land coupled with a high degree of mobility as well as independence.

When Trujillo came to power in the early 1930s it could be stated that there were three Dominican Republics. One was the urban and urbane culture of the cities, dominated by Santo Domingo but also adequately represented in Santiago and a few small towns. In this zone colour, genealogy and wealth were important indices of status. The other Dominican Republic comprised the vast interior provinces of the Cibao and the surrounding mountains. In this zone local petty caudillos operated along with peasants eking out a precarious existence. Turits notes, ‘an independent peasantry of color … comprised most of the population at the same time that legal systems of slavery and racial hierarchy prevailed. The autonomy of the peasantry was sustained through casual land tenure arrangements and customary forms of property together with the seemingly endless expanse of uncleared land, or el monte, across the large island’ (p. 27). The third Dominican Republic was the ill-defined frontier zone with Haiti, notable for its fluidity of occupation, nationality, race, colour and family. ‘There was no significant labor competition; in fact, there was relatively little recourse to wage labor at all’ (p. 148), writes Turits, and with regards to nationality, race and colour, ‘(t)hey constituted notions of difference but not necessarily otherness or marginality’ (p. 149).

The successful longevity of Trujillo then rested on creating a political discourse, institutions and political procedures that established acceptable resonance across all sectors of society. ‘During his thirty-one-year reign, Trujillo oversaw virtually every key aspect of modern state formation. For the first time the Dominican state effectively established direct taxes, a national currency, and full customs operations, the last returning to Dominican control in 1940 after more than three decades of US receivership. The Trujillo regime also extinguished the extant control of the local caudillos … established and policed a clear and continuous border with Haiti and diffused an official monoethnic nationalism’ (p. 9). When Trujillo abandoned the ideas, ideals and practices that accounted for his success, he lost much of his popular support and eventually his life.

Valentina Peguero explains the success of Trujillo within a culture of the militarisation brought to the New World with the Spanish explorers and extended thereafter. Recounting the history, as does Turits, Peguero treats the period before 1697 in nine cryptic paragraphs that fail to do justice to the complex changes that took place within the Caribbean over that period of time. She is, however, correct in the ways in which the frontier society that developed in the Dominican Republic resembled the southern military Reconquest in Iberia. During the nineteenth century when the quest for an independent state was important, military attributes comprised an important element of political and social success. The United States occupation of 1916 to 1924 accentuated this tendency and facilitated the rise of Trujillo by extensively disarming the population. From chapter three onward the book is about Trujillo and the multiple ways in which he inserted the military across all levels of the society.

The Militarization of Culture is extremely rich on biographical details about Trujillo, especially his excesses. It is informative about the recruitment, education and civic activities of the military and concords with Turits with regard to the importance of peasants for Trujillo as well as on his political management style. Both authors differ on agency, on the Haitian massacres of 1937, and on the reasons for the decline of the dictatorship. Peguero makes a very good case that Trujillo militarised the Dominican state but is less convincing with regard to the society. More important, Turits emphatically refutes the suggestion that ‘the history of the Dominican Republic, for the most part, may be written based on a men-at-arms story’ (Peguero, p. 44).

Like Turits and Peguero, Martínez-Vergne is also strongly interested in political culture, especially about the location of political power. Borrowing heavily from the literature on critical race theory, on subaltern studies, and on the evolution of postcolonial societies, she correctly assumes that in the case of the Dominican Republic modernity and modernisation were intricately related with notions of the state, the nation and citizenship. Moreover, she insists, these notions were not fixed but responded to location, time and prevailing circumstances. In the Dominican Republic each class developed a separate notion and by exploring two urban locations, the capital city of Santo Domingo and the small town of San Pedro de Macorís, she is able to capture the fascinating symbiotic interplay of race, gender, class and occupation in the changing concepts of state, nationality and citizenship.

Nation and Citizen traces the prevailing nineteenth-century Liberal concepts of nation and modernity from Europe to the Americas where local elites articulated similar concepts of a homogeneous state predicated on an industrious, educated citizenry devoted to individual private property and democratic electoral procedures. In the Dominican Republic the reality was not propitious, as Martínez-Vergne describes with appealing understated humour: ‘As Dominicans themselves were well aware, they had a less than illustrious political and economic trajectory, a circumstance that did not reflect well on their aspirations … ’ (p. 169) The intelligentsia's notions of the requirements to belong to the nation might have been dictated by Liberal ideas that travelled from Europe to the Americas and sometimes comfortably settled here. Its recipients, however, did not conform to these ‘superior’ forms of political participation, economic progress and social uplifting and, in fact, found their own ways to construct their own notions of citizenship on a daily basis (p. 170). The reality of the plural society could not be avoided.

Individually and collectively these three studies constitute monumental contributions to the historical literature. Although most pertinent to the history of the Dominican Republic, they offer highly sophisticated insights into the complex process of state formation and nation-building. Turits demolishes the concept of Sultanistic regimes based on the case study of Rafael Trujillo. Peguero illustrates how Trujillo effectively blended military culture with civilian popular culture to reconstruct society. Martínez-Vergne demonstrates that the discourse of state and nation had roots way back in the nineteenth century and that Dominican nationhood and culture resulted from the unstable dynamic reciprocity of class, race, colour, condition and international circumstances.