This book analyzes how developmental states contributed to economic prosperity, sometimes with spectacular success, and sometimes with less brilliant results.

The growth of institutional capacity in the developing world has become a central theme in twenty-first-century social science. Many studies have shown that public institutions are an important (some would argue the most important) determinant of long-run rates of economic growth. This book argues that to understand the difficulties and pitfalls of state building in the contemporary world, it is necessary to analyze previous efforts to create institutional capacity in conflictive contexts. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the process of state and nation building in Latin America and Spain from independence to the 1930s. The book examines how Latin American countries and Spain tried to build modern and efficient state institutions for more than a century without much success. The chapters discuss key processes and challenges of state building. To what extent do historical legacies determine the capacity and reach of states? What are the obstacles to and paths toward the effective consolidation of public authority? How can states best design and create the institutions meant to provide the basic services now associated with citizenship? How can we put together notions of community that include diverse groups and cultures within a single identity, while also respecting the integrity of particular traditions? The Spanish and Latin American experience of the nineteenth century was arguably the first regional stage on which the organizational and political dilemmas that still haunt states were faced. This book provides an unprecedented perspective on the development and contemporary outcome of those state and nation building projects.

Neoliberalism is often studied as a political ideology, a government program, and even as a pattern of cultural identities. However, less attention is paid to the specific institutional resources employed by neoliberal administrations, which have resulted in the configuration of a neoliberal state model. This accessible volume compiles original essays on the neoliberal era in Latin America and Spain, exploring subjects such as neoliberal public policies, power strategies, institutional resources, popular support, and social protest. The book focuses on neoliberalism as a state model: a configuration of public power designed to implement radical policy proposals. This is the third volume in the State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain series, which aims to complete and advance research and knowledge about national states in Latin America and Spain.

Neoliberalism is often studied as a political ideology, a government program, and even as a pattern of cultural identities. However, less attention is paid to the specific institutional resources employed by neoliberal administrations, which have resulted in the configuration of a neoliberal state model. This accessible volume compiles original essays on the neoliberal era in Latin America and Spain, exploring subjects such as neoliberal public policies, power strategies, institutional resources, popular support, and social protest. The book focuses on neoliberalism as a state model: a configuration of public power designed to implement radical policy proposals. This is the third volume in the State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain series, which aims to complete and advance research and knowledge about national states in Latin America and Spain.

State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure. First, Latin American state leaders chose to attempt concerted state-building only where they saw it as the means to political order and economic development. Fragmented regionalism led to the adoption of more laissez-faire ideas and the rejection of state-building. With dominant urban centers, developmentalist ideas and state-building efforts took hold, but not all state-building projects succeeded. The second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation. Filling administrative ranks with local elites caused even concerted state-building efforts to flounder, while appointing outsiders to serve as administrators underpinned success. Relying on extensive archival evidence, the book traces how these factors shaped the differential development of education, taxation, and conscription in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

No one in Latin American historiography has paid more attention to questions related to the emergence of nations than Jose Carlos Chiaramonte. Reflecting on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century uses of the concept of nation in Europe and the Americas, Chiaramonte argues that historical questions related to the term "nation" derive from its changing meaning in different contexts. The historian would be better advised to focus on the development of forms of state organization, and the emergence of national states, rather than the "nation" as a cultural community prior to independence.Nation and State in Latin America begins by examining the effects on historians of the ideological and methodological prejudice spread by contemporary nationalism on the historical studies of Latin America. Chiaramonte analyzes uses of concepts such as "nation" and "state" in both Europe and the Americas. Chiaramonte considers the prominence of sovereign "pueblos" (cities and townships) and their role during independence. He argues the non-existence of nationalities in the period and proves that feelings of collective identity at that time amounted mainly to local affections.He concludes with an analysis of major trends in federalism and the law of nature and nations, crucial to understanding the political concepts of the age of birth of modern Latin American nations. This book covers the whole of Latin America, making use of comparative viewpoints. The different national intonations of the concept of sovereignty and the nuances of the federal and confederate forms of the state are examined in detail.

This book offers the first interpretive synthesis of the history of Andean peasants and the challenges of nation-making in the four republics of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia during the turbulent nineteenth century. Nowhere in Latin America were postcolonial transitions more vexed or violent than in the Andes, where communal indigenous roots grew deep and where the 'Indian problem' seemed so daunting to liberalizing states. Brooke Larson paints vivid portraits of Creole ruling élites and native peasantries engaged in ongoing political and moral battles over the rightful place of the Indian majorities in these emerging nation-states. In this story, indigenous people emerge as crucial protagonists through their prosaic struggles for land, community, and 'ethnic' identity, as well as in the upheaval of war, rebellion, and repression in rural society. This book raises broader issues about the interplay of liberalism, racism, and ethnicity in the formation of exclusionary 'republics without citizens'.