Pilar M. Herr's Contested Nation takes the reader through the tumultuous years of early state formation in Chile following its independence from Spain in 1810 and the later violent annexation of Wallmapu, the homeland of Indigenous Mapuche people, who had successfully resisted Spanish colonisation since the seventeenth century. State formation in the Chilean borderlands involved simultaneous governmental efforts in colonisation of Indigenous territories and control over rebellions and banditry, which in most cases were animated by strategic loyalty to early Spanish rule. Based on archival sources and historiographic works from the nineteenth century, Herr's analysis of state formation is structured along two major lines: the first consisting of a chronological examination of the concatenated processes taking place in the twentieth century by which the Chilean government ensured colonial control over the borderland region of Araucanía, tellingly known also as La Frontera; the second concerns an analytical focus on the specific set of relations imbricating state actors, Spanish loyalist forces, Indigenous Mapuche groups, and bandits throughout the nineteenth century. The two dimensions are explored with a clear and synthetic language allowing the reader to comfortably navigate the complexities of the conflicts and alliances among multiple political actors. Herr's stylistic and analytical strategies make Contested Nation an appealing and accessible book to any non-specialised reader with an interest in the broader themes of state formation and settler colonialism in Latin America, but particularly those interested in Chilean and Mapuche historiography.

The novelty of Contested Nation within the growing body of literature on borderlands historiography in Latin America can be identified in the joint analysis of two themes traditionally examined in separation: banditry and control of borderlands as a key process within the nation-building process, and the colonial relationship between Indigenous people and state institutions. In Chilean historiography, these two processes have been generally treated within two bodies of literature, one focused on the emergence of a new social subject and class identity, the ethnically mixed borderland population known as fronterizos, and one centred on Indigenous history. The joint analysis of the two processes associated with state formation and expansion advanced by Herr is necessary for a historiographic understanding of Araucanía as ‘simultaneously a border, a frontier, and separate nation-state’ (p. 118). The comprehension of the multifaceted nature of this borderland region as a sovereign Indigenous territory and a resource frontier with uncertain state control requires a closer look at the conflicts and alliances linking Spanish loyalist forces, the new Chilean state institution, bandits, and Mapuche leaders. In this formative context, Herr discusses the legacy and impact of the most infamous criminal band in Chilean history, the Pincheira, by emphasising their nature as ‘political bandits’ (p. 42) holding territorial control over large parts of Chile through strategic alliances with loyalist forces and Mapuche groups.

In reading Contested Nation, my attention was drawn to two open questions inspired by its analytical focus, which, perhaps inevitably, lie beyond the scope of such a broad range of themes, but nonetheless point to future lines of enquiry. The first question concerns the role of settlers within the process of state formation and the capital accumulation it facilitated. Settlement by Chilean and European migrants began as a spontaneous project that soon appeared as a concern for public order to the Chilean state due to the continuous rise of land conflicts with Mapuche populations (p. 87). How was the securitisation of settlers’ expansion carried out by Chilean governments and how was it functional to novel processes of resource extraction and capital accumulation taking place since the mid-nineteenth century in the southern frontier?

The second question concerns a key debate within Mapuche historiography, namely, the role that treaties and negotiations between Mapuche representatives and state actors held in the colonial annexation of Mapuche territories, the restructuring of Indigenous political life, and cultural survival in the face of governmental projects of extermination and assimilation. As shown in Chapter 5, ‘Parlamentos’, large gatherings where Spanish and Mapuche representatives negotiated peace agreements and commercial exchanges were characterised by a strong ritualistic and festive component, whose main function was to reassert egalitarian relations between the two nations (p. 93). During the 1840s, prompted by aspirations of capital expansion and racist civilising discourses against Indigenous savagery, Chilean authorities transformed parlamentos, from diplomatic instances to meetings with compliant Mapuche leaders where treaties with conditions set by Chilean governments were signed. As Herr convincingly argues, the new treaties justified the military invasion of Wallmapu not as a war of conquest that would require peace agreements and future reparations, but as the appeasement of borderlands ideally followed by concessions to Indigenous people under the terms and conditions set by the state, such as the limited recognition of land ownership rights within the small space of reservations (reducciones). Rolf Foerster's ¿Pactos de sumisión o actos de rebelión? (Pehuén, 2018) and Fernando Pairican's Toqui: Guerra y tradición en el siglo XIX (Pehuén, 2020) − monographs on Indigenous-state relations not available at the time of writing of Contested Nation − focus on how Mapuche customary diplomacy was deployed in response to the increasingly aggressive and authoritarian stance of Chilean governments. These works open the possibility that, while the signing of treaties entailed an overall Mapuche submission to the Chilean state, negotiations with future conquerors provided the means through which the Mapuche population ensured its cultural survival, threatened by the prospect of extermination and animated claims of autonomy and self-governance that would later in the twentieth century inspire the consolidation of a large and diverse Mapuche social movement. Beyond the success of Chilean violent colonisation, can Mapuche diplomatic engagement with the Chilean state also reveal a possible failure of the nineteenth-century Chilean elite's project of complete assimilation and eradication of Mapuche anticolonial aspiration? (See Pairican, Toqui (2020), p. 281.) Herr's book points to the possibility of a new way of thinking about diplomacy and colonial violence in the nineteenth century that will continue to catch the attention of historians of state formation in Latin America.