Although there has been a surge in Colombian regional histories in recent years, it has not been so noticeable for marginal regions such as the Llanos Orientales. This region has not merited the same level of attention from Colombian social scientists, reaffirming its long-standing political and symbolic marginality in the national order. There are even fewer works in English about the Llanos. For that reason, this new book from Jane Rausch is an event in itself. Rausch is well known in Colombia for her work dealing with the history of the Llanos from the sixteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century. These books are notable for their thematic and chronological coverage, their systematic deployment of a great range of archival sources and their frontier studies approach. It is not only Rausch's work but also her knowledge, participation and interest in the regional academy that have been fundamental to the recent development of regional historiography, especially that of Miguel García on the Metan grasslands.

This book about the city of Villavicencio is a very good synthesis, from a local history perspective, of the history of the Llanos; it also has the aim of furthering the discussion of the concept of frontier and takes as its starting point the recognition of, and engagement with, regional historiography. As Rausch herself indicates, her book aims at filling a void in the English-language literature on this subject, using as its basis recent studies published in Colombia. This book will thus enable English-speaking readers to have a fuller sense of Colombia from the perspective of the history of Villavicencio, a small frontier town founded in 1842 that had become a regional metropolis by the end of the twentieth century. Villavicencio is located less than 65 miles from Bogotá and has a population made up of incomers from different parts of the centre of the country. Over the course of the twentieth century it became ‘La Puerta del Llano’ and the region's most important centre of trade.

The purpose and themes of the book should be understood in light of Rausch's view of the frontier. This approach has its roots in the perspective and projects of the central state with regard to territories and populations that have not been integrated into its political, economic or moral order. Consequently in this book the history of Villavicencio is principally narrated from the perspective of central government intervention in the region, following the conventional chronological stages of Colombian historiography, such as federalism, regeneration, the Liberal Republic and the National Front (seven of the eleven chapters have titles that reflect this structure). From this stance the central and recurrent themes in every chapter are politics and territorial administration, land-use planning, the agro-export and cattle economies, state population projects, internal migration, communication, the civilisation of the indigenous peoples, particularly relating to religious missions, and public administration.

From these vantage points the book complements existing explanations of how Villavicencio became the most important urban centre in the Llanos. These hark back to a time before the establishment of the township, the decline of the grasslands and the Casanare plains from the end of colonial times, the central importance of Bogotá and its influence within the agro-export economy from the mid-nineteenth century, the incentives to colonise the region and the appropriation of unworked land, along with transport improvements. Villavicencio became, then, a colonising and commercial enclave for the San Martín plains, a township surrounded by large mixed-economy haciendas, in which rice farming and, later on, towards the centre of the region, the transport of livestock to Bogotá became significant. Thus, in common with García, Rausch shows how the centrality of Villavicencio cannot be explained exclusively in terms of developments since the 1930s, when it began its main period of growth (though she does acknowledge the significance of the opening of the main road to Bogotá in 1936 and the policies of López Pumarejo). This takes up the bulk of the first part of the book, in which Rausch synthesises various aspects of her two previous books, while the second part deals with the second half of the twentieth century. Here, from a social science perspective, Rausch engages with complex and less studied phenomena of the Meta, such as the period of La Violencia, recent campesino colonisation, the development of cattle farming and agro-industry, illegal cultivars, the armed conflict, forced displacement, extraction of hydrocarbons and the untrammelled growth of the city, all of which reconfigured the frontier and the place of Llanos within it. This latter aspect, and its relationship to the definition of a collective Villavicencian identity, provides the two central themes of the final chapters.

Although some of these aspects are beyond the scope of the book and require regional research, I want to draw attention to themes of frontier and identity. Although, for Rausch, it is clear that the frontier as an empty space is being questioned, there is a need for a perspective that looks beyond the state or ecclesiastical arena to analyse the multiple territorialities to be found in the region – for instance, the indigenous populations so clearly absent from this study. By the same token, the whole picture of regions as being clearly defined, self-contained and homogeneous needs to be questioned. The case of Villavicencio shows the need to historicise local and regional interconnections beyond the straightforward picture of the central Andes looming over the Llanos, and to problematise the ways in which these two regions have been defined. This concentration on the search for a Villavicencian identity by Rausch and the majority of regional specialists becomes related to a naturalised image of the frontier. It is complicated for them to define a collective identity encompassing the llanero, the andino and the bogotano in Villavicencio. Rather than focusing on this notional difficulty, it is necessary to analyse and study the ways in which diverse collective identities associated with the city have been constructed and articulated in the context of specific political and economic projects.

It is certainly true that for the general reader this book is a very good introduction to Rausch's oeuvre, to the history of Colombia and to the Llanos. Nevertheless, for students of the region, it is above all a reminder of the need to broaden perspectives and engage in dialogue with disciplines other than history, such as sociology and anthropology, which are even more noticeably absent from the Llanos. This can only lead to a fuller understanding and, above all, a deeper perception of the complexity of the problem underlying the marginal condition of the region with respect to the Colombian nation.