The sailors, port workers, police officers, physicians, and union leaders of the South American Pacific whose stories animate the pages of this book were not bound by their nation-states. Although they could not escape nation-based logics and processes, many facets of their work and life experiences revolved around a different set of elements. Living together on ships and laboring in similar conditions, they could face consecutive waves of an epidemic, keep up with the same literature, or share political goals. Rather than experiencing the world exclusively, or even primarily, as citizens of Chile or Peru, they did so along the lines of common class, gender, ideological, and professional cultures and material conditions.
Despite often writing about people like them, historians have for too long positioned their analytical lenses so as to study national frameworks almost solely and to read transnational processes in national terms. Unsurprisingly, this approach has tended reinforce nationalist discourses. Josh Savala's book about the maritime world of Peru and Chile between the 1850s and the 1920s is testimony to the transformative potential of transnational history. Beyond Patriotic Phobias argues that decentering narratives about the War of the Pacific (1879–84) can uncover connections and parallels, and generally open up a cosmopolitan vision “that emphasizes circulation as a foundation and cooperation as a possibility” (3).
Savala unpacks the argument in five thematic chapters. The first introduces the South American Pacific World through the everyday lives of maritime workers and the myriad of people who interacted with them. Though the focus is on Peru and Chile, other Pacific regions also constituted this space, not least through the exploitation of their peoples. Chapter 2 zooms into gender dynamics, probing the meanings of masculinity in predominantly homosocial spaces, including labor and political socialization in port cities like Valparaíso and Callao. This preoccupation with gender as an organizing category runs through the book. The third chapter studies responses to cholera along with unifying actors on both sides of the Chile-Peru border as examples of “science without a nation” (85) and intensifying material aspects of state-building. Chapter 4 is a histoire croisée of anarchist labor unionism in Mollendo and Valparaíso, which shows how they were linked by comparable conditions, deportations, the International Workers of the World, political literature, and good doses of solidarity. The final chapter studies policing in Callao and Valparaíso. Here too Savala describes parallel developments and collaborative connections: “floating populations” of potential criminals and transnational anarchists, but also new, “reproducible methods” in criminology, from photography and archives to jiu-jitsu and dogs.
Whereas transnational approaches can sometimes sacrifice local and subaltern perspectives in favor of mobile elites and bird's-eye views, this book explicitly engages the dynamics across scales, delves into microhistories and quotidian local conflicts involving those less obviously connected, and rejoices in the detailed scrutiny of rich but inevitably fragmentary archival material. A “suspicion of the nation” (12) may be a starting methodological gesture, but the nature of the transnational is not taken for granted either.
This is the rare book that is deeply researched but also compact and accessible. It is written in dialogue with global and local literatures, from Peruvian and Chilean national and regional historiographies to scholarship on anarchism, oceans, and state-formation, but it doesn't indulge in overly long theorizations.
The last of these will be much appreciated by readers, but it is also perhaps one of the book's few missed opportunities. Savala underlines the material and transnational aspects of state formation, but the book's narrative structure foregrounds another layer: chronologically overlapping, non-symmetric, patchwork-like, it paints a picture of the formation of the Peruvian and Chilean states as messy, interconnected archipelagoes. As this is a book that deserves a wide readership among scholars, it will be fascinating to see how insights like these will be taken up and absorbed by new studies.
