This book offers an original comparative approach to state building in South America in the mid-nineteenth century. As the author, noted Chilean historian Julio Pinto Vallejos, points out in the introduction, comparative research has seldom been practiced by Latin American historians, largely due to the material conditions in which they carry out their work. The methodological effort undertaken by the author is praiseworthy. He systematically compares the state-building process in three well-differentiated South American cases: Chile under the centralized political system created by Diego Portales, Buenos Aires province (rather than Argentina as a whole) under Juan Manuel de Rosas, and Peru ruled by General Ramón Castilla.
Pinto Vallejos focuses on the political interaction between the popular classes and the elites in the problematic postindependence creation of a republican order. As he puts it, in Spanish America this process “also had an unequivocal social dimension, or rather a ‘social and popular’...