Nicola Miller offers an insightful, well-researched, and engaging addition to the body of literature on the emergence of nations and the republican tradition in Latin America. Miller argues that the creation of new nations and national identities is a project of generating and disseminating new knowledge. This project entails the building of communities (“republics”) and institutions that support this enterprise.
The book focuses on South American nations, particularly Argentina, Chile and Peru, although it speaks more broadly to trends in Latin America. The book features ten thematic chapters organized in two parts. The first part focuses on institutions and repertoires or landscapes of knowledge—libraries, book markets, teacher education, and others. The gist of this part is what made the canon of legitimate knowledge in the new Hispanic American nations. The second part focuses on discipline-based case studies featuring the inner dynamics of generating and transferring new knowledge. Although both parts are insightful and coherent, I found the second part more engaging, as it focuses on the specific transferring and production of different types of knowledge. Chapters range from the debates around linguistic norms, the production of national cartographies, the production and reception of political economy discourses, the formation of teacher cadres, and the development of a vernacular engineering profession and its impact on large infrastructure modernization. Each chapter is deployed over the long nineteenth century. The thematic organization implicitly suggests that behind the production of knowledge there were burgeoning communities and institutions that carved a space of autonomy from broader political, economic and social processes, rather than being their product.
I see Miller's book as a valuable contribution in the tradition of classics such as Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) and Doris Sommers's Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1993), which pinpoint the production of culture and an idea of community as the hallmarks of an intentional project of nation-making. Within this tradition, Miller shifts attention to the creation of communities that generate new knowledge that brings the new nations into a choir of admired peers, a global concert of nations, serving as a form of legitimation. Readers may benefit from comparing this book with its contemporary Republics of the New World: The Revolutionary Political Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Latin America by Hilda Sábato, which stems from a historiographical tradition that highlights the experimentation involved in the new political ideas of citizenship and popular sovereignty. Both books provide a sympathetic view of the post-Independence era as a new political order with its own logic and rules, rather than a period of instability, improvisation, and failed states.
Miller presents a story of progress in the establishment of libraries, book markets, and educational institutions, and the expansion of literacy in the population. The author hints at the limitations of this progress as well (perhaps more clearly in the case study of the role of local engineers in large infrastructure projects). Yet, the reader is left without much sense of how this progress was distributed across regions and social groups, or how it compared to progress in other regions in the world. Readers are rightfully reminded of how Latin American intellectuals sought to position their countries in the concert of civilized nations, but they are left without an understanding of why literacy, education, and patent creation lagged behind the levels reached in European countries or other European-settler countries.
Particularly of interest is that Latin American countries feature deep regional, ethnic, and gender gaps in educational attainment—gaps that did not disappear with the deployment of mass educational systems and integration in the global economy. The lack of attention to the inequities of knowledge production and transfer brings further focus to the question of whether indigenous people, plebeians, and women participated in the fields of knowledge production. Intersections of race, class, and gender make an appearance in the subject of education (Chapter 10), but readers are left without much insight as to their impact beyond the circles of the elites and the “lettered city.” These limitations constitute a lost opportunity to engage in a broader transdisciplinary dialogue, but they do not diminish the contribution of the book in placing the construction of knowledge communities at the center of the nation-making that took place in nineteenth-century Latin America.
I recommend the book for instructional use in a graduate seminar. As a well-researched, well-written, comprehensive, and original argument, it will inspire budding scholars and serve as a model for writing. It requires acquaintance with Latin American history, which makes it less viable as a whole-book assignment for an undergraduate course, but the chapters on languages and geography may be particularly appealing and relatively simple to couple with more introductory readings.
