The product of a doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Oxford, Juan Luis Ossa's book is a welcome addition to the study of the Chilean independence process, especially considering the limited debate that was generated in the country about this topic when the bicentennial of Chile's independence from the Spanish Empire was celebrated in 2010.
This book covers the period between 1808 and 1826, focusing on the influence that the Chilean army had on the politics of the period, arguing that warfare affected all aspects of people's lives, at the same it allowed the army's high ranking officers to concentrate more power and hold more influence over politics than other members of the local elite that did not belong to the army. The significance of what the author calls revolutionary warfare in Chile manifested itself with greater clarity from 1813 onward with the arrival of the counter-revolutionary army sent from Peru, impeding a political solution to the conflict and opening a period of violence that resembled a civil war. As a consequence, the author concludes that the majority of the ‘ruling groups accepted the intervention of the military in politics’, which lasted from that moment until the end of the 1820s. According to the author the intervention of the military also had a lasting effect over Chilean society and the formation of the national state.
The book is divided into six chapters and includes an introduction and a conclusion. The chapters follow a chronological order starting with the imperial crisis triggered by Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 and the installation of an autonomous government in Chile in 1810, until the conquest of Chiloe by the Chilean army in 1826, the last territory that remained under Spanish rule in Chile. The middle chapters of the book focus on episodes that were decisive to the army's organisation and on conflicts that strengthened the political position of high officers, events that led to the establishment of a military regime conducted in an authoritarian manner by Bernardo O'Higgins. What stands out is the detailed and well written narration of events through which the author seeks to avoid overly simplistic explanations of the period such as the excessive repression during the Spanish reconquest of the territory that took place between 1814 and 1817 or the little attention paid to the differences between Santiago and Concepción in understanding the internal conflicts of the period.
The book is well documented in both primary and secondary sources and reflects the research the author conducted in archives throughout Chile, Peru, Argentina, Spain and England. Regarding the bibliography the author gives ample space to the analysis of historiographical debates about independence following the arguments of classic authors such as John Lynch, Simon Collier, Diego Barros Arana and Mario Góngora. What is also interesting is the permanent dialogue that the author establishes between works related to other Latin American countries, contextualising Chilean events in a broader continental revolutionary space, highlighting both similarities and differences. Regarding this Ossa gives significant space to events such as the organisation of the Army of the Andes in Mendoza and the Ejército libertador del Perú to explain the impact both events had on political decisions made in Chile and the formation of an army that was effectively national.
My main critique of Juan Luis Ossa's book is that his argument, although ambitious, lacks originality as the author himself states that one of his main purposes is to reinforce what Mario Góngora proposed 30 years ago in his Ensayo histórico sobre la noción de estado en Chile, which argues the centrality of war to the construction of the Chilean state. Although it is true that Ossa's work gives some depth to Góngora's ideas through adequate research and by analysing the role of the army's high ranking officers in relation to war and to politics, the author misses the opportunity to present a comprehensive and multidimensional study of the independence period. This would have allowed the author to give more credit to the ideas that social historians such as Julio Pinto, Gabriel Salazar and Leonard León have argued in recent years in relation to social diversity and the different motivations behind the decision of participating in the war; or to incorporate new approaches that have demonstrated the significance that elite family ties had on local politics and state formation during the transition from the Colonial to the Republican period such as the one by Sara Chambers in her recent book Families in War and Peace. Chile from Colony to Nation.
It also seems necessary to take the argument a bit further and enlarge the time period analysed in the book to fulfil the objective of proving Mario Góngora's thesis. If it is true that war had a lasting impact on the construction of what Góngora calls the ‘notion of the state in Chile’ it is necessary to know how this influence manifested after the revolutionary period. In other words, how did the militarisation of politics presented by Ossa during the independence period affect what Mario Góngora refers to in the long term as the matrix of nationality?
Although these are still questions to be answered, Juan Luis Ossa book is certainly a contribution that allows us to understand the political role played by the military during independence in greater detail and without a doubt will contribute to promoting necessary debate about the particularities of the Chilean national state and the impact of the military in its construction. This is a book that will be of much interest to historians of political history and for those interested in the history of the army during the nineteenth century in Chile.
