“We believe,” the editors of this volume declare in their preface, “that in general, Latin America needs more state rather than less, and that Spain’s experience shows that without strong, stable, and efficient public institutions, peace, justice, and the possibility of plenty become unattainable.” In this way, Centeno and Ferraro clearly indicate the contemporary relevance of the methodologically diverse and geographically wide-ranging historical studies that follow, which together explore—more comprehensively than has ever been done before—why Spain struggled for so long to build strong, stable, and efficient public institutions, and why many countries in Latin America continue to suffer the ill effects of having much less state than they need. The editors also provide a useful framework for explaining the (under-)development of state capacity, defining four different dimensions of power that reinforce one another and that, when exerted in concert, allow the state to work its positive effects upon society. They begin with concepts of “territorial” and “economic” power drawn from the influential work of Charles Tilly, describing the capacity of a state to impose order, repulse attackers, extract resources, and promote economic development within its borders. To these two standard dimensions of state capacity the editors add a third and fourth: “infrastructural power,” which captures the state’s ability to “process information, build organizational structures, and maintain transportation and communication systems,” and which depends most critically on the creation of a professional bureaucracy insulated as far as possible from the corrosive influence of partisan politics; and “symbolic power,” the inherently nebulous but nonetheless crucial capacity of a state to be “taken for granted,” or viewed by both its functionaries and its subjects as both legitimate and inevitable. The most important contribution of the volume is to suggest that Spain and Latin America’s often-observed deficits of territorial and economic power reflect less well-studied shortfalls of infrastructural and symbolic power.

The individual chapters, all written by leading figures and many reporting original research unpublished elsewhere, are organized not according to the academic discipline or area specialty of their authors, but according to the dimension of state capacity that forms their focus. As a result, the reader is treated to truly interdisciplinary discussions of territorial, economic, infrastructural, and symbolic power, as each has functioned or failed to function throughout Spain and Latin America. A particular strength of the collection is its authors’ attention to cross-national variations within a region that is too often treated as homogenous. A broad survey by Frank Safford of nineteenth century state-building in five major Latin American states sets the stage, identifying Chile and Brazil as outliers that fortune favored with relative success in their efforts to consolidate control over territory after independence. Two chapters, by Jeffrey Needell and Joseph Love, examine imperial and republican Brazilian, respectively, in greater depth. Needell argues, convincingly, that monarchical government conveyed considerable advantages in the post-colonial conjuncture, allowing the Brazilian state to appease regional elites jealous of their autonomy and thus avoid or suppress the civil wars and secessions that ripped apart its republican neighbors. A fascinating chapter by Iván Jaksić illuminates Chilean exceptionalism by focusing on the contributions of a single figure: the Venezuelan polymath Andrés Bello, who spent the latter half of his life in Chile, overseeing the new nation’s educational systems and writing a Code of Civil Law—both of which helped the state project influence, and each of which inspired the creation of expert bureaucracies that operated with relative autonomy from partisan politics. Employing the historical and comparative methods that he has done so much to develop in other work, James Mahoney describes a set of “permissive conditions” and “generative causes” that aligned to cause Costa Rica to depart from the rest of Central America’s path to “militarization without bureaucratization,” and thus achieve relative political stability and economic prosperity in a sub-region generally characterized by endemic unrest and poverty.

Another significant contribution of the volume are its efforts not only to document how Spain and Latin America’s political institutions changed over time, but also to highlight the inevitably partial nature of these changes, and to demonstrate how the interaction of old and new institutional orders—which scholars of (North) American Political Development have called “intercurrence”—at times thwarted the realization of the aims that new institutions were adopted to achieve. In a comparative analysis of Argentina and Spain, Claudia Herrera and Agustin Ferraro show that in both countries, the persistence of “traditional patron-client political practices” after liberal reforms subverted the latter, turning efforts to systematize and nationalize tax-collection and government spending into “massive spoils systems.” Similarly, Ricardo Salvatore and Hillel Soifer, in studies of Argentina and Peru respectively, describe the frustrating advance and then retreat of educational experts empowered by reformers only to be overcome by partisan machines at the center or regional power brokers. Soifer’s study is particularly notable, using an original analysis of archival data to show that, despite the positivists’ famous slogan, the demands of establishing order actually undermined progress when educational reformers were forced to surrender to regional elites capable of suppressing threats of civil war. Separate chapters by Mara Loveman, Sarah Chambers, and Nancy Appelbaum offer additional insights into specific institutions, tracing the contributions of censuses, courts, and cartographic commissions respectively, to the shaping of national imaginaries and state capacities.

There are some weaknesses in this collection. The essays (with the single exception of Salvador Martí’s informative study of Nicaragua and the chimera of an interoceanic canal) focus exclusively on domestic political, economic, and cultural developments. Though one of the editors, Miguel Centeno, has made important contributions elsewhere to our understanding of how international conflict and its idiosyncrasies in Latin America affected state-building in the region, he does not revise or elaborate his earlier arguments here in light of the volume’s new insights into infrastructural and symbolic power.

More broadly, it never became quite clear to this reviewer what advantages were derived from considering Spain, specifically, alongside Latin America in this collection. Though the volume as a whole is critical of received wisdom, this editorial decision implicitly reinforced outdated beliefs about the negative political and economic correlates of Hispanic culture and the Catholic religion. Roberto Breña’s account of the peculiarities of Spanish and Spanish American liberalism in the early nineteenth century is a formidable challenge to our understanding of the ideological origins of the independence movements, but Breña does not suggest that intellectual idiosyncrasies can explain similarities in Spain and Latin America’s subsequent political and economic development. Fernando López-Alvez and José Álvarez both manage to show that Latin American and Spanish nationalisms respectively, have always been distinctive, but they also show that they have been distinctive in different ways, with different consequences for state capacity in countries on either side of the Atlantic. Most problematically, Wolfgang Knöbl’s essay argues that the strength of Western Europe’s classically “strong” states has often been overestimated, and that many of the institutional reforms and investments in infrastructure that account for the region’s present-day state capacity actually occurred in the twentieth century. If this is true, then Spain does not actually represent an outlier within the European context, and it would be a mistake to try to treat its “failures” as analogous to those of Latin America.

Finally, to the extent that the editors aimed to inform contemporary efforts to build more effective states, it is surprising that the essays examined only the “long” nineteenth century’s “liberal” reforms, and devoted no attention to Latin America’s twentieth century experiments with socialism. Alan Knight’s magisterial overview of Mexican history argues that the post-Revolutionary state was able to achieve a stability and duration that eluded Porfirio Díaz and his científicos in large part because it dedicated itself to ameliorating, if only modestly, the country’s longstanding economic inequalities and political exclusions. Can similar effects be seen to have followed from egalitarian policies in other countries? Cuba gets a mention only on the volume’s very last page, where the editors ascribe its revolutionary regime’s extraordinary longevity to nationalist anti-yanquismo, but Knight’s account of Mexico suggests an alternative explanation that should be more systematically explored.

Despite some small shortcomings, this is an important, agenda-setting collection, sure to be of great interest not only to historians and social scientists researching Spain and Latin America, but also to any of their colleagues who wish to better understand the formation of states and the development of state capacities throughout the world.