Studies of political exile lead to the recognition that, beyond the logic of its territorial nation-states, Latin America has long-standing transnational dynamics. Yet can we speak of transnationalism when analysing a historical stage when states were in formation and had not yet acquired a real presence in the lives and minds of citizens? And conversely, can we project the notion of nation-states on to the period of early political independence, a time when fuzzy boundaries and porous territorial frontiers enabled movement beyond state borders when needed? And when those leaving could easily assume a transnational voice as they established residence in host countries?
Edward Blumenthal, based at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle of Paris, tackles these analytical challenges brilliantly as he traces the constitutive impact of exile on two South American societies. Focusing on the founding generations of Argentine and Chilean politics and correspondence networks, he makes a valuable contribution towards understanding territorial displacement as an independent variable, highlighting its constitutive effects of transnational order on the political systems, the culture and the collective imagination of these societies.
Analysing the private letters, public writings and organisational efforts of South American émigrés, Blumenthal recreates the large-scale mobility networks established across the lightly controlled borders of these emergent republics. He successfully recreates the ties and bonds of the exiles in a multiplicity of contexts: their societies of origin; their life, work and activism in the places of relocation; and the virtual spaces and concrete networks with co-‘nationals’ and others in a diaspora.
Analytically, the book stands at the interface of social and intellectual history. It goes beyond the genre of personal biography and the texts produced by exiles and émigrés, refugees and outlaws. The book uncovers personal life stories, yet identifies the collective networks that enabled those individuals to play a central role in nation-building from their places of relocation, and especially upon returning to their home country. It analyses the encounters between ‘nationals’ and ‘foreigners’ as part of the construction of mental borders between South American republics during a transitional period, one in which local citizenship practices allowed newcomers to join the host societies and find work there, as long as they refrained from activism against those in power or their allies in neighbouring countries.
The author follows rigorous methodological provisions, relying on extensive primary and secondary sources, building a dense prosopography database and relating his historical analysis to major theoretical debates in the literature of both history and the social sciences. In the first three chapters, Blumenthal explores the social history of exile in Chile and the Río de la Plata, tracing exile to the framework of colonial patterns of mobility as well as Spanish social practices, all the while portraying how émigrés participated in the public debates and republican institution-building in their host countries. He accomplishes this by reconstructing the correspondence networks that exiles used to engage in political struggles, find work, sell books and circulate news and newspapers in seven countries during the 1830–60 period, as these countries were emerging from devastating civil wars. In an era in which the nation-state was a project in the making rather than a concrete reality, analysis reveals that the exiled men of words and action followed commercial routes across South America to pursue their agenda. Through their use of those routes and evolving networks, they contributed to the formation of a transnational public sphere, through which they projected national projects back to the societies of origin, while also integrating into host societies.
Chapter 4 complements this analysis by examining exile labour markets, showing how émigrés made a living, forming labour niches, for instance in journalism and the law, yet often in a context of relative poverty. It underscores the dynamics of survival and integration in the exile experience, while also explaining the relevance of path dependency in explaining differences between émigrés with different backgrounds and occupational skills.
In Chapter 5, Blumenthal argues that exile was both a state practice to deal with opposition as well as a strategy used by the exiles themselves, who adopted it as a republican political practice with Romantic connotations. The chapter also claims that there were key differences between Chilean and rioplatense exile. The former exhibited a greater institutionalisation of cycles of banishment and of return following amnesties, whereas the latter was more heavily militarised. Beyond the differences, the two exile networks created associations that were incubators of nationality and organised transnational oppositions to those in power in the home countries. At the same time, exiles engaged in local politics (e.g. with Argentines), participating through their associations and militias in the revolutions and conflicts of Chile, Bolivia and Peru, thus intervening in international relations.
The following two chapters elaborate how the experience of living in exile shaped political ideas, with lasting representations and self-representations. Thus, through their experience and participation in political debates in Chile, exiles from the Argentine Confederation conceived Chile as an alternative model of political order that provided guidelines for the foundational texts that they elaborated for their home country after the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas, in 1852. Likewise, exile coloured Chilean political, historiographical and literary writing of the 1850s and 1860s. Exiled in the 1850s in Peru and the Argentine Confederation, as well as England, France and Spain, Chilean émigrés interpreted their experience in light of a global republican struggle shaped by the 1848 revolutions in Europe and the Argentine struggle against Rosas. Blumenthal describes how Romantic notions of utopian socialism mixed with discourses about tyranny to produce narratives of cultural distinctiveness that would pervade Chilean historiography.
In the conclusion, the author reflects on the non-exclusive nature of nationality in the early republican period. Furthermore, Blumenthal sums up the crucial transformational role of exile both in imagining the nations of South America and in providing meaning to the practice of escaping repression and crossing over territorial borders, which became increasingly defined as national.
By following the detail of the evolving interface of national and transnational processes operated by political exiles in nineteenth-century independent South America, Blumenthal's book makes an important empirical and theoretical contribution to comparative historical and cross-national studies.
