This book contributes to historizing the social, intellectual, political, and technical process of fixing land property in what became Uruguay from 1754, when the Spanish Crown liberalized the land market, to 1912, when the country created its first national cadaster. The author introduces debates that were once central to understanding most Latin American countries’ economic and political history but from an original perspective. Duffau bases his survey on the venerable historiography of agrarian capitalism, where previous generations of scholars considered the fixation of land property rights as central to creating agrarian capitalist rent in the nineteenth century and leading to the transition to capitalism. Bringing another intellectual tradition, the author examines case studies about social conflict, nineteenth-century state-building, and the material construction of state power. The result is the intertwined, and many would say dialectic, history of fixing land property and constructing the national state.

The first chapter on the late-colonial era introduces some of the agents: occupants of land, urban elites claiming rural property, and the state in the form of colonial authorities. The cast of characters is more complex than the limited space given to a book review. For instance, note that elites with landed interests in Uruguay were regional, from merchants of colonial Buenos Aires to nineteenth-century ranchers from Rio Grande do Sul, which created jurisdictional issues.

Contrary to misconceptions, land was less important than commerce for colonial elites in the Río de la Plata. More central to the argument of this book, local elites were reluctant to fix land property on the terms the Spanish Crown wanted with the 1754 land market liberalization. Instead, the customs over land occupation, “usos y costumbres,” functioned as the status quo among those who held claims, those who worked the land, and the colonial authorities. Royal treasuries became more voracious because of the expenses of Atlantic wars and, later, the anti-colonial conflicts, which led loyalist authorities to turn the regularization of rural property into a source of revenue. The brief application of the “Reglamento de Tierras” by José Artigas, one of the few Latin American revolutionaries focused on rethinking land reform, reverted these last-minute colonial measures.

Chapters 2 and 3 form the core of the book. Duffau first explores how intellectual debates employed the concept of land property as a metaphor for social order. He then examines the legislative processes that sought to secure private land ownership, focusing on the war-torn nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, during the social reforms led by José Batlle y Ordóñez. These two chapters are tightly interconnected, featuring the same figures in both the intellectual discussions and the legislative practice. Readers follow the legacy of the land reform by Artigas and the uncertain beginnings of Uruguay as a country in the 1830s. The debates over private (and fiscal) land property were much more open than we may think, charting various possibilities for imagining futures at the time. The ideas towards the crystallization of land ownership were far from unidirectional or teleological. While Chapter 2 is more top-bottom in examining public debates, Chapter 3, on legislation, shows bottom-up strategies and the construction of local alliances to navigate the dangerous political waters of privatizing land. The menace and reality of civil war made the Uruguayan authorities prone to conciliate ideological concerns with traditional customs when legislating land ownership rights.

Chapter 4 examines the role of surveyors—technicians who played a key role in defining land rights—and their conflicts and alliances with the figures discussed in earlier chapters. These surveyors not only affirmed private land ownership but also contributed valuable data to debates on twentieth-century fiscal policy. Additionally, they expanded state administration into new territories, thereby extending state power. However, their work was not without contradictions and conflicts, as they navigated the tensions between securing land rights and consolidating state authority.

In this Uruguayan case, certain features typical of nineteenth-century changes in land ownership in most of Latin America are seemingly absent, such as the dispossession of Indigenous people’s communal lands, the secularization of the Catholic Church’s estates, and the persistence of coerced labor. Duffau mentions these issues as he notes the absences, inviting further research on these aspects within Uruguay to include them in the narrative about the privatization of land property and rethink their legacy for the present.