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The first work in English to discuss the social and political history of lawyers in a Latin American country, Honorable Lives presents a portrait of lawyers in late colonial and early modern Colombia. Uribe-Uran focuses on the social origins, education, and careers of those qualified to practice law before the highest colonial courts—Audiencias—and the republican courts after the 1820s. In the course of his study, Uribe-Uran answers many questions about this elite group of professionals. What were the social origins and families of lawyers? Their relation to the state? Their participation in political movements and parties, revolutions, civil wars, and other political processes? Their id...
"I simply cannot think of an example of recent scholarship on Latin America that I found as thoroughly rewarding and enjoyable as this study."—Charles Bergquist, University of Washington
This book analyzes a neglected but fascinating chapter in Anglo-Latin American relations, the disastrous 1822-25 investment boom. During this brief period, British investors lost £21 million in defaulted Latin America as an area for capital investment for a generation. Today Latin America owes its banking and other anxious international creditors over $400 billion, and amount that is unlikely to be repaid. Valuable lessons can be learned by studying the nineteenth-century antecedents of the current situation. Frank Griffith Dawson explores in depth the origins and consequences of the first Latin American debt crisis, interweaving economic details with the broader historical context of socie...
In 1822, the Mary departed Philadelphia and sailed in the direction of the Spanish colony of Puerto Rico. Like most vessels that navigated the Caribbean, the Mary brought together men who had served under a dozen different flags over the years. Unlike most crews, those aboard the Mary were in a different line of commerce: they exported revolution. In addition to rifles and pistols, the Mary transported a box filled with proclamations announcing the creation of the "Republic of Boricua." This imagined republic rested on one principle: equal rights for all, regardless of birthplace, race, or religion. The leaders of the expedition had never set foot in Puerto Rico. And they never would. When w...
Corruption is a preoccupation of governments and societies across place and time, from the 18th-19th Century British, Chinese, and Iberian empires to 20th Century Nazi Germany, Russia, the United States, and India. This study offers three different perspectives on corruption. The first chapters highlight corrupt practices, taking as a point of departure a technocratic definition of corruption. The second part of the book views corruption through the lens of discourses of corruption, revealing that accusations of corruption have been employed as tools, often in the context of contestations of power. The essays in the third part of the book treat corruption as a process, taking into account it...
A Fervent Crusade for the National Soul examines the implementation of cultural policies in relation to the contested configuration of citizenship in Colombia between 1930 and 1946. At a time when national identities were re-imagined all over the Americas, progressive artists and intellectuals affiliated with the liberal governments that ruled Colombia established an unprecedented bureaucratic apparatus for cultural intervention that celebrated so-called “popular culture” and rendered culture a social right. This book challenges pervasive narratives of state failure in Colombia, attending to the confrontations, negotiations, and entanglements of bureaucrats with everyday citizens that sh...
An exploration of Colombian maps in New Granada. During the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Chocó, was famed for its rich placer deposits. Gold mined here was central to New Granada’s economy yet this Pacific frontier in today’s Colombia was considered the “periphery of the periphery.” Infamous for its fierce, unconquered Indigenous inhabitants and its brutal tropical climate, it was rarely visited by Spanish administrators, engineers, or topographers and seldom appeared in detail on printed maps of the period. In this lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched volume, Juliet Wiersema uncovers little-known manuscript cartography and makes visible an unexamined corner of the Spanish empire. In concert with thousands of archival documents from Colombia, Spain, and the United States, she reveals how a "periphery" was imagined and projected, largely for political or economic reasons. Along the way, she unearths untold narratives about ephemeral settlements, African adaptation and autonomy, Indigenous strategies of resistance, and tenuous colonialisms on the margins of a beleaguered viceroyalty.