The historiography of Latin American independence has been profoundly transformed in the past couple of decades. Most significantly, we now have rich, solid, and renewed interpretations of the years of the monarchical crisis starting in 1808 and, in particular, the rise of Hispanic liberalism with the Cadiz constitutional experiment and its impact in the Atlantic world.
This historiographical dynamism was, of course, linked to the bicentennial commemorations of the 1807 Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, the establishment of the first independent juntas across Spanish America around 1809-10, and the drafting and proclamation of the Cádiz charter in 1812. Studies from a variety of new perspectives have been fertile ground for scholars to reflect on the causes of Latin American independence. But now that we are getting closer to the bicentennials of dates of the final independence declarations, most of which took place in the early to mid 1820s, historians need to explore different questions around nation formation. Lina del Castillo's book contributes to that debate by substantially expanding the range of topics that such a rewriting of nation formation in Latin America might cover.
The book focuses on Colombia to study the opportunities and challenges of postcolonial political reinvention and territorial reorganization in Spanish America. Del Castillo begins with the first Colombian state, including three Spanish colonial jurisdictions (Venezuela, Quito, and New Granada). After Colombia's dissolution in 1830, she focuses on New Granada. She shows how state-building was a multi-sided process: it had major, spatial, infrastructural, and economic dimensions. But that materiality also intersected with revolutionary intellectual, constitutional, and cultural elements that were, in themselves, groundbreaking. To both demonstrate and historicize such originality, Del Castillo combines themes that are generally separated in the historiography of nineteenth-century Latin America. Corresponding roughly to the chapters in the book, the chapters can be summarized as follows: print culture, political economy, political ethnography, constitutions and political geography, and religion.
Two analytical elements tie together Del Castillo's narrative. One is the question about the construction of the notion of “colonial legacy” and its political uses as part of the independence project. The other is a reassessment of a general assumption in historical writings about Colombia's political history: that deeply engrained confrontations between liberals and conservatives were the motor of political transformation and, mostly, stagnation.
Historicizing the notion of colonial legacy, so central to the study of Latin American history and Latin America's alleged structural backwardness as a result of Spanish colonialism, Del Castillo shows us that the mechanisms with which the enlightened elites of New Granada repudiated Spain and erased their own intellectual and institutional links to Spanish science. In doing so, they made science central to the independence process and instrumentalized it as a tool of legitimation. These elites also put science—particularly cartography—into the service of state formation. The concept of the public sphere is therefore central to the book. It gives Del Castillo the possibility of tracing the material intersection between knowledge production, circulation of information within the new state's bureaucracy, and the project of educating the larger populations in both republican values and the literal contours of the Colombian political geography.
In this book, geography and cartography have two other important connections to the economy. Aside from enabling the spatial apprehension of the Colombian territory, the political economy of elites was directly positioned against the Spanish legacies of economic stagnation, fragmentation, and exploitation. Colombian state-makers developed an economy of circulation that envisioned global engagement as well as internal connectedness. Land, particularly that owned communally by indigenous people, came to be at the center of the project of both dismantling colonial legacies and fostering economic dynamism through circulation. This book offers a detailed study of the division of resguardos, a fundamental process that produced social and economic structural changes in the rural areas.
At another crucial level, Del Castillo shows how in Colombia space came to be connected to the creation of political rights. The book traces, from the local to the national, how political rights were produced and constantly transformed in the struggles between spaces (cities, provinces, departments, states) and between individuals as carriers of rights. Showing how this process took place in conjunction with constitution-writing, this is a study of the history of democracy—of the politics of creating a democratic state—in nineteenth-century Latin America.
It is precisely here that the other central argument in the book is clearly significant: Del Castillo says that historians have overestimated the antagonism between liberals and conservatives in Colombia, and in Latin America more broadly. She unshackles her narrative from that assumption and provides fascinating, nuanced insights into the tensions between visions of development, morality, citizenship, and regional identity that underlay state-making. These are themes that she explores through Church-state relations and the rise of what she calls political ethnography: the elites’ approach to popular culture. Through focusing a single lens—rather than a fractured or divided one—on the elites’ commitment to republicanism, Del Castillo's book offers rich evidence and interesting discussions for understanding the different and sometimes conflicting visions of history, the state, and society in nineteenth-century Colombia. Indeed, in a refreshing new interpretation, she highlights compromises instead of incompatibility.
Colombia, as much as Latin America more broadly, was a pioneer in republican state formation. In this important book, Lina del Castillo traces the centrality of knowledge to state-building in the nineteenth century. The book illustrates how politics and science were enmeshed and how their interrelation was not simple or linear; instead, they gave way to new challenges, cycles of war, and, ultimately, the constitutional creations of republican Colombia. We can expect that this book will inspire interesting debates and frame the dialogue within the new historiography on state formation across the Americas.
