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Pierre Géal, Sebastián Martínez, Graziano Palamara, Daniel Rojas (Eds). Una modernidad política iberoamericana. Siglo XIX. Formación, relaciones internacionales y representaciones de la nación

Karla L. Escobar H
Référence(s) :

Pierre Géal, Sebastián Martínez, Graziano Palamara, Daniel Rojas (Eds). Una modernidad política iberoamericana. Siglo XIX. Formación, relaciones internacionales y representaciones de la nación, Marcial Pons, 2022.

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1"Una modernidad política iberoamericana. Siglo XIX. Formación, relaciones internacionales y representaciones de la nación" is an edited volume by the historians Pierre Géal, Sebastián Martínez, Graziano Palamara and Daniel Rojas. The text is part of the Contemporary History of America collection of Editorial Marcial Pons and the Institute of Historical Research of the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. The aim of the book collection – in its own words – is to "...contribute to the knowledge of the historical processes that have marked the development of Latin American societies, from their formation as independent nations to the present day" and to allow the dissemination of research among the scientific community of "renowned historians from different countries." We can say that this thirteenth volume of the collection fulfills these desires. It brings together works of historians and scholars from different countries – mostly European – and introduces discussions relevant to the historiography of Independence in recent years.

2The book consists of nine articles divided into two main sections: the first is titled "Nation Formation and International Relations in Iberoamerica" and comprises the works of six historians. All of them approach the Latin American context from different scales and interests.

3The article by Carla Pedicino is a historiographical review of the processes of Latin American national formation based on a reflection on the role of the Constitution of Cadiz. The article by Teresa Nunes reflects on Portuguese diplomacy and Portuguese-Spanish relations, paying particular attention to the part played by the economy in decision-making processes. The reflection on America, in both cases, is subordinated to the peninsular phenomena highlighted by the authors. This perspective is contrasted with the work of the historian Sebastián Martínez Botero who concentrates his analysis on the history of the political-administrative divisions of central western Colombia in the 19th century. In Martínez' case, the analysis of the imperial crisis plays a relatively marginal role in the narrative established by the author to describe the legal transformations that demarcated the territorial distribution in the country and highlight more local dynamics.

4The contributions of Manuel Chust and Joaquín Espinosa, and Daniel Rojas expand such local-centered views to different extents. Both pieces explore transnational readings; Chust and Espinosa analyze the birth of the Mexican state in relation to the doceañista liberalism and the Trienio Liberal in Spain. After a careful review of the historiographical debates of recent years on the subject, the authors highlight the local particularities, especially the role of war and the new model of political-military action that war imposed on political negotiations. The authors also highlight the relevance of looking at the specific forms of exercising local power to unlock a future research agenda.

5On the other hand, Daniel Rojas’ chapter, while focusing on the Brazilian context, mirrors the history of international relations in that period. This exercise allows him to make detailed transnational analyses. Based on exhaustive archival research, his contribution explores the Portuguese revolution and its consequences for Brazil and the Spanish-American republics. The author highlights the originality of the confederative project elaborated between Portugal, the Spanish-American republics, the United States, and Greece to confront the continental forces of Europe. Despite the legal approach of some of the articles in this section, I want to highlight the author's call to not reduce the liberal revolutions of the Atlantic world to a legalistic dimension and, in contrast, to emphasize the undeniable political vocation of independence movements. This desire to include less legal-centered views guides the book's second part, "The Representations of the Nation."

6This second section consists of four articles; all focused on local histories. Two papers focus on Spain, and two on Latin America, specifically the current territories of Chile and Colombia. In the case of Spain, we have the works of Giovanna Scocozza and Pierre Géal. Both authors study the processes of national construction in Spain in the first half of the 19th century. Scocozza, from the literary studies perspective, examines the work of the Spanish philosopher Juan Donoso Cortés, particularly his visions of history and the role of his scholarship in creating a Hispanic national identity. Her work is an appropriate gateway to understanding the actualization of conservatism and is an example of the different ways contemporaries thought of modernity. Geal's work, on the other hand, makes a comparative study of the Portraits of Notable Spaniards with an Epitome of their Lives (Retratos de españoles ilustres con un epítome de sus vidas) published between 1791 and 1819, the National Pantheon inaugurated in 1869 – and debated since 1822 –, and the Biographies of Illustrious Men (Biografías de hombres ilustres) circulating in the press between 1836 and 1848. According to the author, the transformation in the criteria for selecting these illustrious men accounts for the contested and problematic Spanish nationhood construction across the 19th century.

7The section closes with the works of Gabriel Cid and Mariarosaria Colucciello. Cid's work dialogues with Geal's insofar as both are concerned with understanding the construction process of national imaginaries based on the symbolic referents used to represent the entire nation and the disputes and tensions involved in establishing these discourses. The author describes in detail the progressive disappearance of Chilean indigenous populations as a symbolic referent of the anti-Spanish struggle and shows how the indigenist trope was progressively replaced by archetypes of the "war hero" and the "patriotic politician." The author shows how the disappearance of indigenous peoples as a symbol of anti-Spanish rebellion was linked to their disappearance from Chilean national history narratives. Colucciello's, on the other hand, distanced her work from that aim and – from the literary studies perspective –delves into reviewing the writings of Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1913) in terms of the social transformations that had taken place during the period in which Acosta lived and her ideas about previous historical times from her perspective of a woman belonging to the capital's elite.

8The works are all interesting, well documented and written, and provide a wide variety of localized descriptions that help the reader approach various historical contexts from different perspectives. It is also pertinent to highlight this publication's effort to establish interdisciplinary dialogues with literary studies and the importance of setting up dialogue between scholars from different backgrounds and intellectual traditions. Scholarly literature is the ideal space for exploring the interdisciplinary production of knowledge, particularly when we aim to understand histories that cover a vast and diverse territory such as the one encompased by the Iberian empires.

9However, despite these qualities, the work still lacks a richer reflection on "modernity" as an experience lived in diverse ways across the territory and as a concept. Even though the editors established the book's aim as "to explore the diverse meanings of political modernity in 19th century Ibero-American history" (p. 12), this objective is not completely fulfilled across the pages because of the overfocus on the Peninsular perspective. This issue is related to the theoretical and historiographical selections made by the authors to approach political modernity.

10The first problem is the decision to initiate the reflection on political modernity in the imperial crisis. Although the work of François Xavier Guerra – more than 30 years ago – allowed us to interpret the Latin American independence processes in a new light by locating the historical problem in a Euro-American dimension and highlighting the simultaneity and similarity of these processes throughout an imperial space, it is also true that the model has been subject to various critiques. The most important of these are related to how the narratives derived from this perspective of analysis subordinate the history of Latin America to the evolution of the discussions and transformations taking place in the metropolis. Although I am sure most of the authors are far from defending the idea of Latin America as a mere receptor of ideas beyond the seas (including Guerra), the narrative product of this collective work gives that impression. The fact that a good part of the papers focus mainly on Spain and Portugal is an example of that. This is striking, considering the book belongs to the Contemporary History of the Americas collection.

11Unfortunately, only two of the nine contributions seek to make analyses of the transnational nature of the historical processes without locating Latin American history as a simple consequence of the political transformations in the peninsula. The chapters that focus on the local histories, as a counterpart, do not go beyond the national dimension and do not reflect enough on regional political modernities. In most cases, the authors locate the events analyzed in the historical period in which the events took place without going beyond a mere description of context. Although readers can make plural abstractions of the ideas of modernity that emerge in each case, which are named by the editors as "polycentric modernities" or "multiple modernities," little is made clear in the works about the dimensions of such multiplicity or the axes around which these enunciated modernities would revolve.

12Related to this is the complete absence in the book of the history of indigenous and enslaved people, freemen, and the popular classes in a more general way. That absence is problematic since these issues have been at the core of the historiographical debate in recent years. Take, for example, the studies of the participation of indigenous and enslaved people in the wars on both royalist and patriots' sides, or of the visions of the popular classes regarding the newly established order and the uses that diverse sectors made of the tools that the new juridical orders granted them, or of the political role of wars in allowing people to negotiate these orders, or of the part played by the clergy and their diverse ideological positions, as well as many other works that have been addressing the history of popular political agency. These works are crucial to understanding modernity from a plural perspective and should have been included in the book. Of course, a work cannot discuss everything. Still, if the central purpose of the text is to reflect on Latin American political modernity in the 19th century in a plural and pluricentric way and from a non-teleological perspective, as suggested in the introduction, it would have been desirable to bring up these historiographical debates.

13Unfortunately, despite the great work of the scholars that participated in the book, the vision of modernity I am left with after reading the text is a political modernity much too focused on legal aspects, and somewhat monolithic. Although the articles in the second part show the tensions and debates on which national discourses were built, it limits those tensions to ideological differences. I hope the collection can fill up this space in the near future to enrich this very relevant discussion about modernity.

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Karla L. Escobar H, « Pierre Géal, Sebastián Martínez, Graziano Palamara, Daniel Rojas (Eds). Una modernidad política iberoamericana. Siglo XIX. Formación, relaciones internacionales y representaciones de la nación »Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [En ligne], Comptes rendus et essais historiographiques, mis en ligne le 16 juin 2023, consulté le 08 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/93210 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.93210

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Auteur

Karla L. Escobar H

Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal TheoryDepartment “Historical Regimes of Normativity”

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