Acosta opens his study asking: ‘Another book about coffee and the dominant minority?’ Indeed, the study of nineteenth-century El Salvador is defined by two paradoxical traits that make asking such a question necessary. The first trait is a shortage of evidence, caused largely by the tragic burning of the national archive in 1889. The second trait is ironic: despite a paucity of evidence, the historiographic field of nineteenth-century El Salvador is rather crowded. Scholars have long located the roots of the twentieth-century authoritarian state in the nineteenth century, and so many of them have focused their attention on it. What does Acosta offer that is new? The answer is, quite a bit.

In regard to sources, Acosta does what many scholars of nineteenth-century El Salvador have done; rely heavily on published sources, like newspapers. Indeed Acosta makes ample use of the official government newspaper, La Gaceta, and others, like El Constitucional. What sets Acosta apart is his unparalleled dive into those sources. He read the newspapers comprehensively and he extracted a tremendous rage of details. Additionally, Acosta introduces new evidence, namely court records from the Fondo Judicial, the judicial collection in the national archive, which had been stored elsewhere prior to 1889. Acosta employs records in unique ways in Salvadorean historiography, using documents of civil proceedings, like probate and private debt, to discover such things as the value of land, the nature of credit relationships and the enforcement of labour contracts.

In regard to the extant historiography, Acosta sets revisionist sights on works by a handful of predecessors, including Héctor Lindo Fuentes, Aldo Lauria, Brad Burns and me, among others. Acosta is not seeking to radically overturn received wisdom, and, indeed, anyone familiar with the story of nineteenth-century El Salvador will find much familiar in this work, including the coffee economy, landed elites, stark social inequalities and a hierarchical political system. Rather, Acosta's succession of challenges has the effect of amplifying the current narrative(s) in new ways.

Acosta challenges three inter-related claims that he attributes to his predecessors: 1) the Salvadorean state was weak; 2) the oligarchy did not come into existence until the late nineteenth century, mainly with the emergence of the coffee economy; and 3) El Salvador was a poor country prior to the economic boom of coffee. Whether his predecessors advance those claims as emphatically as he says they do is a matter of debate, but for the sake of the current review, I shall assume they do.

Acosta's overarching revisionist claim is to push back the chronology of the creation of the oligarchy and the modernisation of the state. Instead of these processes occurring in the late nineteenth century, after the privatisation of the communal lands in the early 1880s and the corresponding surge in coffee production, Acosta claims that El Salvador was dominated by an elite minority from the earliest days of the Republic, and that this minority demonstrated a firm command over the levers of the state and that they used the state to promote their interests. Thus, he claims that not only was the state stronger than has been presumed, but also that the oligarchy used it more actively to intervene in the economy than has been argued previously.

The bulk of Acosta's book is dedicated to showing, in one topic after another, the ways in which the state operated as a functional entity in defence of elite interests more or less throughout the entirety of the nineteenth century. In highly detailed descriptions, Acosta looks at currency circulation, credit, land tenure, public finance, public debt and infrastructural projects, among others. In order to portray the state as a functional entity, Acosta looks beyond the various traumas and chaos that tend to typify descriptions of the nineteenth century. He disregards the constant changeovers in office as secondary, insisting that political rivalries between elites were insignificant compared to elites’ common goals. He says that over time state actors advanced similar policies and that the personnel of the state tended to remain in place despite the repeated changeovers in office. Finally, Acosta insists that El Salvador was not poor, but rather was wealthy, or that at least it demonstrated the capacity to allow a small core of the population to accumulate impressive amounts of private capital.

I find Acosta's arguments compelling and convincing to a degree, and, once again, his research is deep and profound. A few things concern me, such as working and poor people being mostly passive actors in the story, ‘reacting’ (reaccionaban, p. xv) to elite policies and decision-making. Acosta's narrative is inevitably disjointed owing to the nature of the evidence, and I wonder if his highly coherent claims are as fully supported by it as he asserts. To show that economic policies were being debated and made does not necessarily mean that the state was as functional or as powerful as he says it was, and he fails to provide a specific definition of the state and thus a standard by which to measure its relative strengths or weaknesses. It is difficult to imagine that the succession of earthquakes, wars and political chaos throughout the nineteenth century were as innocuous as he claims. Even if political rivals shared common goals, changeovers in office had patronage consequences and thus disruptive effects on the state bureaucracy.

One of the compelling consequences of Acosta's study is the way it creates odd historiographic bedfellows. It implicitly unites laissez-faire economic elites with progressive-leaning historians. Acosta is highly critical of the former and sees their claims about their beneficent role in Salvadorean history as unfounded and morally repugnant. Acosta's fellow historians tend to agree with him, but he sees them as promoting a similarly flawed story, a weak state and a poor nation until the coffee elites came along in the late nineteenth century and changed everything.