Worlds Unwound, Worlds Rewoven: Latin America’s Journey from Imperial Domains to Republican Experiments, and Shifting Legal Orders

This essay reviews the following works:

They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence. By Lauren Benton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024. Pp. 304. $39.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780691248479.

The Age of Dissent: Revolution and the Power of Communication in Chile, 1780–1833. By Martin Bowen. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2023. Pp. xiii + 327. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780826364814.

The Cambridge History of Latin American Law in Global Perspective. Edited by Thomas Duve and Tamar Herzog. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp. viii + 550. Open access e-book. ISBN: 9781009049450. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009049450.

The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence. Edited by Marcela Echeverri Muñoz and Cristina Soriano. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. xvi + 344. $31.25 paperback. ISBN: 1108729185.

The Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, Volume 3: The Iberian Empires. Edited by Wim Klooster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. xiii+ 612. £120.00 hardcover. ISBN: 1108475965.

Historia económica de Chile colonial. Edited by Manuel Llorca-Jaña and Juan José Martínez-Barraza. Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2023. Pp. 332. $226.98 paperback. ISBN: 9562893022.

A Companion to Latin American Legal History. Edited by M. C. Mirow and Victor Uribe-Uran. Leiden: Brill, 2024. Pp. xiv + 611. €160.00 e-book. ISBN: 9789004436091.

Re-imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780-1870. Edited by Eduardo Posada-Carbo, Joanna Innes, and Mark Philp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. xxv + 420. $57.00 hardcover. ISBN: 0197631576.

El gobierno de la incertidumbre: La política financiera en Buenos Aires desde el Virreinato a la Confederación. By Roberto Schmit and Martín Wasserman. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2022. Pp. 280. ARS 25,500.00. ISBN 9789878164397.

Overlooked Places and Peoples: Indigenous and African Resistance in Colonial Spanish America, 1500–1800. Edited by Dana Velasco Murillo and Robert C. Schwaller. New York: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 248. $168.12 hardcover. ISBN: 9781032721392.

The twenty-first century has seen a renaissance in research on Latin America’s “long nineteenth century” as scholars reimagine its multiple worlds, challenging long-held views on the forging of independent states, weaving in actors once silenced and perspectives once overlooked. However, the field’s expansion has also led to fragmentation, as the plethora of new, highly specialized studies often fails to make broader connections. This surge in specialized research has led to a notable shift in academic publishing, with an abundance of detailed articles supplanting broader monographs and overarching narratives. In this context, recent companion volumes have emerged as repositories of cutting-edge research, showcasing diverse approaches. While exciting, this expanding body of discoveries lacks a framework for recognizing “the plurality of interconnections among diverse worlds.” ¹ Ten groundbreaking works published in the past two years exemplify the field’s rich diversity and fragmentation; they offer fresh perspectives, revealing how the region was part of intertwined processes of world making, world taking, world unmaking, and world connecting. ² This era saw purposeful, creative acts by collectives and individuals striving to refashion societal spheres, resulting in complex, often competing worlds. ³ This review essay surveys diverse worlds, examining recent scholarship on colonial economies, imperial warfare, independence processes, democratic visions, and innovative legal history. It seeks to spark interdisciplinary dialogue and explore fruitful connections among the Latin American worlds under research.

Imperial economies

From the early sixteenth century onward, European attempts at making worlds overseas faced formidable challenges. Governing multiethnic societies, protecting settlers, spreading the gospel, ordering oceans, and securing profits with limited military powers was a daunting undertaking. ⁴ The most critical challenge, however, was financing these vast global empires, which were composed of multiple actors and networks that operated with considerable autonomy from European metropoles. ⁵ The Iberian imperial economies, long thought to be lumbering worlds characterized by fragmented jurisdictions, inconsistent policies, rampant smuggling, and inefficient bureaucracies, were in fact far more dynamic than previously believed. The latest research has painted a picture of vibrant economic sectors, sophisticated informal credit systems, and vital interregional financial transfers boosting these economic worlds. ⁶ This complements Alejandra Irigoin and Regina Grafe’s argument about Spanish America’s governance. Their work reveals how imperial agents employed a decentralized, flexible framework that facilitated local elites’ control and revenue redistribution, ultimately fostering the empire’s self-sustainability. ⁷ While this nuanced view of imperial control challenges notions of economic inefficiency, the analysis of regional variations remains crucial. ⁸ Against this backdrop, the examined studies on Chile and Buenos Aires illuminate these distinctive economic worlds.

Historia económica de Chile decisively dispels the myth of stagnation, revealing a bouyant economic region. This perspective resonates with Eduardo Cavieres’s final scholarly contribution, which reframed colonial Chile not as a peripheral outpost but as a vital hub within a thriving transregional network, intricately connected by the dynamic flow of people, goods, ideas, and information. ⁹ As Antonio Ibarra notes in the prologue, this volume marks a shift from state-centric narratives to a focus on the dynamic interplay of power, institutions, and economic forces. This approach reveals a colonial landscape in which diverse actors navigated pluralistic, decentralized frameworks, illuminating “the multiple colonial pasts and shared economic conditions of the Americas” (10). The thirteen essays unearth the economic dynamism of the captaincy general of Chile, highlighting how “taxes, rates, collection methods, and number of employees” were all “subject to continuous review and change” (191). Juan José Martinez Barraza’s two contributions paint a particularly vivid picture of colonial Chile’s economic vitality. He portrays a region with a burgeoning population, robust monetary circulation, and diverse markets resilient to global economic fluctuations. Barraza also traces the evolution of the captaincy’s fiscal administration, revealing how, by 1808, it had developed into a sophisticated, self-governing bureaucracy, largely independent from both Lima’s and Madrid’s oversight. Manuel Llorca-Jaña’s analysis adds an optimistic sociological layer to this collective X-ray of late colonial Chile. Real wages for both skilled and unskilled workers exceeded subsistence levels, and the population enjoyed relatively good physical well-being, as evidenced by their height compared to the rest of the region and Spain. Consumption of meat, tobacco, sugar, and other products was high by international standards, and education improved. Even the Mapuche world showed signs of economic success, with innovations and diversification leading to improvements in diet, transportation, communication, and military power. The authors, while acknowledging the shadows of inequality, reveal a complex chiaroscuro of colonial life. Ultimately, they suggest that Chile’s postindependence stability sprouted from financial seeds sown in colonial times, whereas the Mapuche’s hardships emerged from the Republican era.

In El gobierno de la incertidumbre, Schmit and Wasserman combine macro- and microperspectives to illuminate the financial worlds of Río de la Plata. Their work traces the colonial threads that shaped Buenos Aires’s early attempts to weave order into its credit fabric. The book is structured into two distinct sections. The first addresses the late colonial period following 1763, and the second explores the critical years from the 1820s to the 1850s. After the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), Buenos Aires became a strategic military point, thus increasing its military expenses far beyond the region’s financial capacity and making it reliant on transregional transfers known as situados. Wasserman reveals how delayed situado payments spawned a diverse local credit network, sustaining both military and civilian economies. Key players in this credit system were supply contractors (asentistas de víveres), who skillfully leveraged their resources and connections to negotiate favorable lending terms and secure profits. Overall, asentistas were “large merchants who obtained monopolistic contracts for supplying the large garrisons and crews” (36). By financing the local Royal Treasury, they transformed it into a lucrative investment opportunity and a key tool for negotiating. Wasserman suggests that Buenos Aires’ local elites retained significant bargaining power and fiscal sovereignty despite their reliance on external funding. Wasserman also notes that while imperial authorities attempted to curb discretionary debt payments and tighten control over this credit system, they recognized that preserving the existing arrangement was more cost-effective than pushing for reform. After the ending of royal subsidies in 1811, the newly independent treasury struggled to assert control over Buenos Aires’ financial system, ultimately yielding to debtholders who exercised monetary sovereignty through various financial mechanisms amid a scarcity of metal currency. Wasserman, echoing Joseph Huber, argues that currency management was crucial to sovereign authority. ¹⁰ In Buenos Aires, creditors wielded the power of a sovereign, but this led to misrule, crippling state capacity. The creditors’ exploitation of their financial power exposed the structural flaws, constricting credit to insider networks and ultimately undermining both their interests and the nation’s credit.

In the second part of the book, Schmit examines how financial problems and negotiations evolved and changed in the face of wars. Before 1826, state-funded, privately managed banking institutions were set up but failed, prompting the government to resort to loans, mainly from local creditors, and fiduciary currency as tools to consolidate state building and support Buenos Aires’ livestock expansion. Behind the innovative institutional measures, local business and public authorities were constantly negotiating and sharing financial sovereignty. In the last chapter of the second section, Schmit summarizes all financial developments, highlighting their interrelations with other aspects of the economy like price dynamics. Schmit poses new questions for rethinking how Juan Manuel de Rosas (1835–1852) addressed the financial challenges of the age through state-backed fiduciary currency, moving away from the idea of banks as the engines of credit and monetary policies. Ultimately, this survey of various financial tools reveals how, despite wars, imbalances, and diverse contexts in the Río de la Plata, the interplay of credit, political power, and economic interests engaged in a captivating tango that began in the colonial era, seriously undermining postindependence state-building processes.

Worlds of violence

Studies of imperial wars have revealed immeasurable human suffering, private fortunes, and systematic violence bordering on genocide. The more we scrutinize imperial wars, the more they reveal themselves as historical black holes—inescapable vortexes where life and understanding are crushed under the gravity of violence. ¹¹ In this context, Lauren Benton’s They Called It Peace represents a daring force of light penetrating the black hole of imperial history to reveal the interplay between war making, lawmaking, and peacekeeping. Benton’s contribution aligns with wider efforts to decolonize the concept of war, compelling us to examine forms of violence beyond traditional nation-state warfare and their misleading binaries, such as war-peace, legal-illegal violence, and regular-irregular forces. ¹² Benton structures her analysis around the concept of “small wars,” examining conflicts on the fringes of empires. Her global study spans the Iberian Peninsula, North America, South America, Central Asia, North Africa, and Indochina, weaving patterns of violence across diverse regions and featuring a diverse cast of imperial agents and Indigenous voices from 1400 to 1900. Her analysis is divided into two sections: the workings of worlds of plunder and the dynamics of worlds of armed peace. This model reveals how imperial warfare frequently escalated from low-scale violence into full-blown atrocities, often paradoxically at peacemaking junctures.

Benton identifies two distinct sequences of imperial violence. The first sequence, prevalent in the early stages of European expansion to the eighteenth century, focused on raids and captive taking, which fueled early modern warfare by providing resources, soldiers, and fear. These extensive raids often led to precarious truces, which in turn frequently catalyzed further violence under the guise of betrayal. As Benton notes, “Truces invited paranoia, recriminations, accusations of betrayal and frantic mass murder” (60), perversely legitimizing subsequent violence. This cycle of raids, truces, and reprisals, supported by household making that facilitated plunder and justified imperial protection, formed the first sequence of imperial violence.

The second sequence of imperial violence that Benton identifies emerged and evolved from the mid-eighteenth century through the late nineteenth century. During this period, legal attempts to regulate war began to take shape. Notably, these norms originated primarily from military commanders, not jurists, and were often shaped by interactions with Indigenous groups. Benton emphasizes the agency of Indigenous groups in shaping this legal order, highlighting how they acted as members of sovereign polities or rightful subjects, aiming to build and preserve spaces for peace. However, this armed peace regime became uncontrollable, leading to fringe commanders authorizing violence under the guise of protection. Ultimately, Europeans established a legal framework for violent peace based on unilateral intervention and impunity for peacetime violence. This second sequence of imperial violence thus involved lawmaking, peacekeeping, protection claims, and, paradoxically, atrocities.

Benton’s book presents violence as a continuum, with traditional wars as just its most visible form. It also reveals how international law and imperial conflicts have mutually shaped each other. Ultimately, Benton’s book invites us to scrutinize violence in its myriad forms, transcending conventional war categorizations based on casualty statistics. Even leading scholars like Michael Mann still resort to these metrics, underscoring the persistent challenge of developing alternative approaches to researching war making. ¹³ Benton’s approach offers a more nuanced framework, compelling us to reconsider how we conceptualize imperial violence beyond traditional criteria to measure wars. Behind this statistical veil lies a multiplicity of violence forms, revealing the messy, dangerous, and often obscured dynamics of imperialism. Thus, Benton’s book responds to scholars’ call to pay “closer attention to the structural relationship between colonialism, empire and violence beyond spectacular moments in imperial history.” ¹⁴

Benton’s framework not only reshapes our understanding of war but also prompts a revaluation of the concept of peace itself. This dual reconsideration offers a valuable framework for examining both colonial and postcolonial histories of Latin America. After all, in no other region do narratives of peace so perversely coexist with pervasive violence. ¹⁵ Indeed, a persuasive historiographical paradigm highlights how the Spaniards negotiated, accommodated, and interacted with Indigenous peoples in complex ways rather than relying on overt violence for imperial control. ¹⁶ Although scholars have noted low-intensity violence throughout the entire period, most have argued that peace generally prevailed, as incidents of large-scale collective violence remained scarce, with the region instead experiencing a mosaic of disturbances, riots, and rebellions. ¹⁷ Yet as Overlooked Places and Peoples: Indigenous and African Resistance in Colonial Spanish America, 1500–1800 robustly affirms, violence was thriving and expanding to unexpected places. This edited collection uncovers a persistent undercurrent of previously obscured violence and resistance on the empire’s fringes, revealing a recurring sequence “of armed conflict, flight, and reoccupation” (8). This pattern spans diverse regions, including “the jungles of Yucatan, the mountains of Cartagena, the waterways of Central America, and the sierras of New Spain’s northern central highlands” (8). Robert C. Schwaller’s chapter on the conquest of Panama investigates imperial war patterns in the Americas, emphasizing the role of Maroons (runaway slaves). The sequence starts with the systematic extermination of the native Cueva people (1513–1520s) through slave raids, leading to widespread depopulation and creating vacant spaces. These areas were then occupied by Maroon communities, unconquered Indigenous groups, and foreign interlopers. The final stage of the conquest (1550s–1590) involved subsequent warfare between these new occupants and the Spanish colonizers, illustrating a cycle of violence, displacement, and reoccupation. While Schwaller’s portrayal of the conquest of Panama is captivating, applying Benton’s framework of imperial violence could yield deeper insights. For instance, did the Spanish failure to establish stable communities of households, given their constantly moving populations and cities, hinder their imperial control? Does this suggest that effective plundering required orderly settlements, as Benton suggests? While the rest of the volume, composed of eight research chapters and an introduction, offers similarly stimulating contributions to understanding imperial dynamics, it circles back to this original premise: negotiation was a tool strategically employed by subaltern groups to unravel structural cracks in the imperial edifice.

Revolutionary worlds

The wars of independence (1809–1825) unleashed a wave of collective violence, laying to rest the so-called Pax Hispanica. ¹⁸ The revolutionary upheavals that shaped Latin America are among the most explored subjects. The volume of research mirrors the period’s complexity, as the region emerged as a labyrinth of sovereignties, marked by proliferating armies, shifting loyalties, republican experiments, evolving cultural institutions, and a diverse array of constitutional visions. ¹⁹

As researchers delve deeper into the Atlantic world, they relentlessly uncover “other worlds impinging,” ²⁰ raising the question, as Manuel Barcia aptly notes, of how to maintain a fruitful dialogue among increasingly diverse Atlantic historiographies. ²¹ In this arena, the historian Wim Klooster stands out as a figure uniting voices across the Atlantic worlds and their revolutions through groundbreaking comparative research, prolific editorial work, and global collaborations. The pinnacle of his efforts is the monumental three-volume Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Solely edited by Klooster and featuring contributions by eighty scholars, this magnum opus exemplifies the interconnectedness and depth of the world it explores. Klooster’s previous monograph, Revolutions in the Atlantic World (2009), had served as a worthy successor to R. R. Palmer’s seminal The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959–1964). ²² Klooster broke new ground by interlinking the French, American, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions. In particular, Klooster has made significant strides in connecting Spanish American revolutions within a broader Atlantic framework while also unfolding the contours of the Dutch Atlantic world. ²³

Volume 3, The Iberian Empires, provides various perspectives on the changes leading to the dissolution of the Iberian empires. The first section illuminates the unraveling of the Spanish empire, weaving together diverse regional developments, evolving political ideologies, colonial continuities, international politics, and the ripple effects of Spanish American revolutions. The volume’s twenty-two contributions synthesize the existing scholarship while also offering fresh insights, serving as both a comprehensive reference and a source of emerging perspectives. In essence, the volume portrays an Atlantic world where inherent interconnectedness ran counter to autonomist movements, compelling many revolutionary leaders to seek new forms of connection among neighbors, regions, and the broader world. This work serves as a vital nexus for the long-overdue exploration of the intersections and shared trajectories linking Spanish America, Portuguese America, and Africa. For instance, while recognizing differences in political developments, the historian João Paulo Pimenta excels in balancing the unique aspects of Brazil’s independence with its commonalities with Spanish America. He details the “entangled mesh of relationships” (565) that existed before and persisted after the colonial era, highlighting, for instance, the role of the press in connecting readers and revolutionaries and spreading fears. Roquinaldo Ferreira’s exploration of the echoes and fears surrounding Brazilian independence in Angola provides a compelling glimpse into often-overlooked Atlantic African worlds. This volume maps the currents of revolution across the Atlantic, revealing not isolated upheavals but an interconnected process that, as Stefan Rike points out, ended the colonial status of the region while forging new dependencies.

While Klooster’s volume includes the term revolution in its title, it is the ten essays in The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence that truly embody the revolutionary spirit of the age. In his chapter, Sinclair Thomson argues that the empire’s final collapse was foreshadowed by sweeping social transformations and interethnic coalitions, fueled by anticolonial sentiment and Indigenous concepts of sovereignty. While not direct precursors to national revolutions, these uprisings, Thomson contends, reshaped the strategies and choices of key actors within the imperial framework. In fact, he argues that an alternate world where Túpac Amaru became the king of Peru, governing a vast realm including Santa Fe, Quito, Chile, and Buenos Aires, where Indians, Creoles, and other Peru-born peoples coexisted, was not beyond the realm of possibility. In her chapter, Marcela Ternavasio examines European constitutional efforts, particularly the Cádiz Constitution of 1812, which attempted to reconcile diverse claims of autonomy and self-rule within the Spanish Empire. Her analysis reveals how these endeavors, while aiming to maintain imperial unity, paradoxically “encouraged the struggle for definitive independence” (72) due to technical and electoral challenges in representing diverse populations. Ternavasio argues that subsequent postcolonial constitutions in Latin America encountered similar limitations regarding representation when creating cohesive political units. Brazil, however, maintained imperial unity for decades. Drawing on Andréa Slemian’s work, Ternavasio explains this through Brazil’s constitutional design, which was based on monarchical legitimacy and the creation of administrative institutions capable of addressing regional conflicts, thus channeling local demands into a framework of collective interests. In contrast, in most postcolonial Spanish American states, such monarchical projects failed, so they increasingly relied on elections and other forms of popular mobilization as primary means of binding their emerging political entities. In this context, Alejandro Rabinovich and Cristina Soriano demonstrate how the process of militarization became intimately entwined with electoral processes. Their analysis reveals how soldiers, generals, intellectuals, newspapers, and proclamations came to occupy a central role in public debates, blurring the lines between military and civic worlds. Karen Racine’s contribution further illustrates this interconnectedness at a transregional level, highlighting how Masonic lodges were crucial in linking various independence struggles. The lodges primarily promoted new constitutions, spread information, and supplied military resources, viewing their efforts as a continental crusade for liberty and reason. Ernesto Bassi and Fabricio Prado masterfully map out another front in this continental battle: foreign relations. They present a comprehensive view of the geopolitical context, featuring a diverse cast of international actors and commercial networks in Spanish and Portuguese America after 1808. Their work vividly illustrates how the emerging political orders were intricately interwoven with broader Atlantic processes. Alvaro Caso Bello and Gabriel Paquete chart the shifting political landscapes of Spain and Portugal as they navigated the twilight of their empires. Their chapter traces how these European powers recalibrated both their domestic politics and imperial remnants in response to the independence movements. By highlighting key reactions at pivotal moments, they map the political adaptations of postimperial Iberia amid colonial dissolution.

The volume further expands its cartography of independence by mapping the terrain of gender, labor, and science. These insightful essays maintain a comparative lens, juxtaposing developments in Spanish and Portuguese America to reveal both shared patterns and distinctive features across these emerging worlds. What truly unifies the chapters, however, is the theme of a dynamic public sphere that shaped and connected the movements for independence. While the concept of the public sphere in Latin American history is not novel, this volume significantly expands its scope, featuring a wider array of social actors and tracing its origins to earlier periods than previously recognized.

Democratic worlds

It is unsurprising that the public sphere continues to be a compelling topic of study, given its invaluable role in uniting diverse voices and offering the potential to explore gender, class, and cultural difference. ²⁴ As Leonardo Avritzer has demonstrated, the concept of the public sphere encompasses a more inclusive concept of democracy, illuminating the trajectory of Latin American politics by revealing an expanded array of spaces for deliberative and participatory processes beyond government structures. ²⁵ Ultimately, this approach helps connect the region’s past with alternative concepts of modernity, thus aligning it with the democratic narratives of the Atlantic world. ²⁶ While these conceptual advances have reshaped our understanding of Latin American democracy, the historiographical landscape continues to evolve. The publication of Re-imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780–1870 marks a significant milestone in the study of democracy during the Age of Revolutions. This volume enhances our understanding of how Latin Americans engaged in envisioning new democratic worlds after achieving independence. It is part of a monumental editorial project unpacking how the ancient concept of democracy evolved in meaning and usage across various regions, including the United States, France, Britain, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the remnants of the Ottoman Empire from 1750 to 1870. ²⁷

The project’s online meeting notes reveal the daunting complexities of studying a hypercontested concept like democracy, perhaps more effectively than any specialized methodological essay. They highlight the challenges in addressing the shortcomings of R. R. Palmer’s early approach, particularly its regional omissions and democracy-centric narrative. After all, labeling the age of revolutions as “democratic” is akin to calling a caterpillar a butterfly; it acknowledges the potential but ignores the messy, complex metamorphosis and, more importantly, its regressions. This point is particularly salient for Latin America, where, as Marcela Echeverri and Roquinaldo Ferreira demonstrate in the previously discussed companion, unfree labor practices expanded in the wake of independence.

However, the allure of democracy proves irresistible not only for scholars but also for many historical actors who, as Eduardo Posada-Carbó demonstrates in Re-imagining Democracy, gradually endorsed democracy. The fourteen essays primarily function as lexical excavations, unearthing the myriad meanings concealed within the word “democracy,” juxtaposing ideological aspirations against historical realities. The interplay of race, slavery, and democracy is explored, with particular focus given to the Greater Caribbean and spotlights on Haiti and Venezuela. The historian Nancy P. Appelbaum examines how Latin America’s racially diverse demographics influenced mobilization for the independence wars, compelling Creole elites to embrace a more inclusive concept of citizenship. The chapters on emerging Latin American states and their constitutions reveal a nuanced reality: while governments increasingly claimed to rule for the people and constitutional conventions amplified whispers of popular sovereignty, “democracy” remained more a rhetorical invocation than an institutional reality.

While democracy appeared to slumber in much of Latin America’s revolutionary world, some historians argue that it stirred in Chile’s soil. Contrary to its reputation as a bastion of stable authoritarianism, historians of Chile have discovered a more vibrant democratic landscape than previously assumed, full of multiple democratic worlds, practices, and radical ideas that agitate the country’s sober historical image. ²⁸ This approach unveils local democratic experiments often at odds with Santiago’s state-building efforts. However, as Juan Luis Ossa highlights in his contribution, the ruling elite did not so much seek to advance democracy as to moderate it. This juxtaposition of perspectives raises a pertinent question: was the Chilean elite’s fear of democracy justified? In other words, was there a tangible democratic world to be concerned about?

Martin Bowen’s The Age of Dissent suggests that the fears of the elite were not unfounded, demonstrating that public challenges to traditional authorities were commonplace from 1780 to 1833. Yet these challenges targeted not the political order itself but political discourse, culture, and even fashion norms. However, Bowen argues that by creating a public sphere open to radical political dissension—profane and pluralistic—Chileans advanced democracy as a form of life, even without changing governmental structures. The most innovative aspect of The Age of Dissent is Bowen’s theoretical pivot from Jürgen Habermas to Bruno Latour, revealing how Chileans forged and contested shared worlds. The revolution Bowen portrays was less about framing a government for the people and more about seizing the means of communication to facilitate the free flow of diverse ideas. From Bowen’s perspective, we can see that even before independence, the authority of the king was slowly being replaced by the power of public opinions (in plural). As a result, the counterrevolution occurred not with the 1833 constitution but with prior restrictions on press freedom. By highlighting the role of women and free Afro-descendants in the struggle for visibility, Bowen offers a fresh perspective and sets his work apart from most narratives that focus solely on universal male suffrage. However, one might wonder whether those challenges to public authorities were the cause of elite despair over democracy. What made the elites nervous about democracy was something more concrete: the potential role of the popular sectors in the making of the republic. ²⁹ Elite concerns centered less on how subaltern groups communicated or dressed and more on their ability to vote. Consequently, electoral and citizenship laws became critical tools for controlling democracy. ³⁰ While Bowen’s focus on speech and visibility illuminates a fascinating, understudied aspect of nineteenth-century Chilean power dynamics, a comprehensive understanding of democracy necessitates the examination of voting practices, judicial application of rights, and their impact on marginalized groups, as exemplified in Morelli and Roffe’s work. ³¹

The concept of the public sphere has become a powerful lens for historians exploring how people struggle for rights beyond state structures, revolutionizing political culture through education, communication, and public engagement. ³² Yet can this vibrant social and political culture truly be a substitute for a formal democratic system with protected rights? Maybe we should recognize, as Re-imagining Democracy suggests, that democracy was not the central issue of the age. Historians of the American Revolution have already largely accepted this, yet many still succumb to this founding myth’s allure. ³³ Even the best attempts to construct a democratic narrative for this period must ground it as a social phenomenon, often portraying it as a struggle against the US Constitution. ³⁴ Despite revolutionary rhetoric, democratic institutions failed to meaningfully materialize anywhere in the world during this period, not only in Latin America. This perspective compels us to reconceptualize the age of revolutions’ legal frameworks not as harbingers of democracy but as state projects with different aims.

Legal worlds

Law is a technology that forges worlds from words. It molds empires, defines subjects, establishes citizenship, gives birth to nations, erects institutions, constructs races, and weaves global rules. Law simultaneously links and unravels worlds, and it binds and liberates people as well, while also wielding the power to enslave them. Law constitutes the architectural foundation of all worlds discussed in this review, as they were part of a global cartography of legal regimes and cultures. ³⁵

The Cambridge History of Latin American Law in Global Perspective unveils a crucial yet often overlooked chapter in world legal history. The editors Thomas Duve and Tamar Herzog have marshaled top experts to illuminate Latin America’s legal evolution and its nods with global threads. This perspective not only illuminates the dynamic mechanisms of law but also spotlights its engineers—the jurists, lawmakers, and diverse actors who shape it—as well as the many sites where legal innovation unfolded. From colonial courtrooms to modern constitutional assemblies, from Indigenous normative systems to transnational legal regimes, the companion charts how Latin American legal architects have both responded to and influenced the global fabric of law. Law interacts subtly with multiple worlds, often unseen, yet profoundly influential, enabling certain worlds while foreclosing others. Unraveling those mechanisms is the book’s central scientific pursuit (14). The book’s first section examines the evolution of Latin American legal history as a discipline, exploring past approaches, current methodological problems, philosophical underpinnings, and fresh approaches for future research. Grounded in Latin American case studies, this section transcends regional boundaries to propose a thought-provoking research agenda, reimagining law’s role in shaping societies and challenging scholars to develop new tools for writing global legal history.

In part 2, Caroline Cunill explores Indigenous law, addressing its diverse sources and challenges while highlighting the power dynamics in colonial legal systems. Part 3 examines the interplay of Indigenous customs, religious norms, and domestic governance in colonial Latin America. Through three chapters, it dissects how these diverse legal traditions merged and adapted, challenging simplistic views of imposed European law and highlighting the multidirectional nature of colonial legal orders. In part 4, Tamar Herzog outlines the experimental and fluid legal transformations during Latin America’s independence era. Her synthesis of existing scholarship sets the stage for part 5, which deals with the challenges of establishing postcolonial legal frameworks and constitutions. José María Portillo illuminates the intersection of Enlightenment principles and Catholic tradition in regional contexts, which catalyzed elite debates on religion’s role in governance. These discussions, intertwined with deliberations on federalism, slavery, and economic policy, cultivated a diverse constitutional landscape across Spanish America. Agustín Parise situates Latin American codification efforts within a global and continental dialogue, illuminating how legal concepts traversed borders and adapted to local contexts in the making of civil codes. Monica Dantas and Roberto Saba expose how Latin America’s late nineteenth-century push for legal uniformity and industrialization violently subjugated subaltern and Indigenous populations, transforming them into an exploitable workforce to fuel capitalist expansion. This analysis challenges historians’ democratic narratives of the public sphere, exposing how and why state structures systematically excluded vast populations. It reveals the contrast between idealized episodes of civic engagement and the extensive processes of marginalization. Parts 7 and 8 extend beyond this review’s scope, exploring the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, yet they underscore the volume’s remarkable breadth, tracing legal evolution from colonial times to the present day.

A Companion to Latin American Legal History brings decades of rich Spanish and Portuguese scholarship to the English-speaking world. Each of the twenty-two essays serves as a detailed chart, guiding readers through complex legal worlds from the symbolic jurisprudence of pre-Columbian civilizations to the liberal dreams of national law. Most relevant to this review is the volume’s first part, which traces the historical stages and legal paths of the region from Indigenous traditions to the postcolonial liberal era. In analyzing these essays, one can discern a shift in legal world making from the “baroque” pluralistic legal world of empires, characterized by complexity, diversity, and intricate folds, to the modernist vision of nation-states, which sought to impose order, reduce legal diversity, and adhere to linear structures of government. ³⁶

Jerome A. Offner’s chapter examines the ruins of the precontact Mesoamerican worlds of law, emphasizing the challenges in reconstructing these legal structures due to incomplete and biased colonial sources that filtered history through the voices of Spanish missionaries, dispossessed Indigenous elites, and colonists. Ultimately, he argues that the resulting record reveals more about colonial-era cultural changes than about precontact legal systems. Despite the methodological minefields, Susan Elizabeth Ramirez unearths glimmers of the Inca legal system. Through her analysis of communal living customs, she breathes life into fragments of Andean legal order. In his chapter on early colonial law, Heikki Pihlajamäki portrays derecho indiano as a constellation of legal worlds, not a monolithic system. He reveals it as a dynamic fusion of European juridical practices and Indigenous traditions, arguing that this pluralistic approach proved more effective for imperial administration than Portugal’s strategies.

This world, Tamar Herzog adds, was not divided between Spanish and Indigenous republics with a distinct order of laws. Judges, jurisdictions, and even Indigenous authorities worked in a fluid manner, weaving Spanish and Indigenous legal threads into their rulings. This legal arena became a theater of strategic maneuvering and legal jockeying, where individuals and groups—guided by both colonial and Indigenous lawyers—deftly navigated and manipulated multiple legal systems. In this world, law was constantly bent to serve local interests and solve localized problems. The turn toward universal law that the French Revolution promoted, Herzog argues, emerged as a disruptive force, eliminating explicit distinctions on paper but in practice acting in favor of free Christian males. This vision of modernity resonated with most Latin American state builders, who advocated for “the eradication of ancien régime corporations and the monopolization of power by a single sovereign.” This effort included dismantling “indigenous communal structures, their authorities, and rights, especially the right to communal lands” (562–564).

In her contribution, Sarah C. Chambers weaves together several legal transformations in Latin America from 1750 to 1850, showing how imperial reforms, actually continued by postcolonial governments, inched closer to fulfilling the vision of a homogeneous legal system. This gradual process, which aimed “to make state law dominant over existing plural legal fora” (99), was like a slow-growing vine, gradually entwining and overshadowing the diverse ecosystem of colonial law. Constitutional declarations of equality seeped through an expanding judicial system, fostering a top-down governance challenging the traditional approach of ruling according to specific groups and circumstances. Although noncitizens and enslaved individuals could appeal to natural rights principles for some legal protections, as more conservative constitutions emerged, many subaltern groups found themselves unable to fight for their rights within the state court system. Similarly, Timo Schaefer argues that the legal pursuit of equality in Latin America shifted dramatically from the 1830s to the 1880s. Early liberal laws championing equality were followed after 1880 by legal reforms that increasingly marginalized lower-class and subaltern groups. These included forced-labor laws, such as those compelling Indigenous groups to support public projects, and legislation that weakened these groups’ ability to obtain legal protection. In the end, Schaefer contends that liberal constitutions and codes, paradoxically, became instruments of exclusion, revealing a tension between liberal ideals and illiberal practices throughout the long nineteenth century.

These legal changes necessitate a reassessment of nineteenth-century Latin American constitutionalism. While scholars agree on the systematic exclusion of subaltern and Indigenous groups, Bartolomé Clavero views postcolonial constitutions as a continuation of colonialism. ³⁷ However, the new legal modernity dismantled, rather than perpetuated, the colonial plural legal order. Clavero cleverly notes continuous attacks on Indigenous rights and lands embedded in liberal constitutions; however, this does not imply that the colonial legal framework persisted. What continued was the state-building project initiated by imperial reformers, pursued with less diplomacy and more force. The tense peace of colonial times between Creoles and Indigenous peoples shifted to overt aggression. Clavero correctly identified a continuity in domination propelled by constitutions, but instead of seeing this as a continuation of the colonial legal order, it can be interpreted as the evolution of late-eighteenth-century reforms—resulting in a slow, messy, and often violent expansion of national law at the expense of subaltern groups’ rights and lands. This was not the continuation of colonialism but the birth of a new imperialism cloaked in constitutional legitimacy.

In fact, the subtle link between constitutionalism and imperialism often eludes us, obscured by scholars’ focus on the relationship between constitutions and democracy. In US history, scholars have increasingly recognized the complex interplay of republicanism, imperialism, colonialism, and constitutionalism. This nuanced understanding has shed light on how these seemingly disparate ideologies coexisted and influenced one another. ³⁸ By examining US history through a different lens—not as the beacon of liberalism against which we measure the “failures” of constitutionalism in Latin America—we can situate both regions within a common constitutional history rooted in the relaunching of imperial projects. This approach allows for a better understanding of the relationship between constitution making, war making, and world taking. The key distinctions may lie not in divergent constitutional visions but in varying state capacities. It was only toward the close of the nineteenth century that these world visions secured external funding, as the financially strained economies—burdened by the postcolonial challenges we explored in the opening section of this review—finally integrated into the broader global market. ³⁹ As the century advanced, constitutional visions morphed into imperial projects, seeking to fold Indigenous lands into the capitalist web. These imperial projects faltered in early Latin American constitutionalism not simply due to the underfunding of armies but also because subaltern groups and regional elites contested these world-making attempts not only in the public sphere but also, more importantly, on the battlefields.

Connecting worlds

A notable trend in the reviewed scholarship is the integration of Brazil into the broader Latin American narrative. Researchers have carefully assessed traditional distinctions while uncovering connections, enabling a seamless view of these interconnected worlds. Furthermore, a thorough examination of these companions and books, including their rich footnotes, reveals even more worlds to explore. In fact, these volumes serve as a modern “Aleph,” offering a multidimensional view of “the multitudes of America.” ⁴⁰

Yet one wonders whether we should now embrace another dimension by integrating the US and Canada into this complex world. The age of revolutions, as Patrick Griffin has recently observed, was not merely about the rise of democracy or the expansion of slavery, but about the unmaking and remaking of an interconnected world. It was a process where an entangled global system began to lose connections (imperial crisis), leading to revolutions (disconnecting) that eventually forged new forms of world making through state formation. These new states, in turn, evolved into imperial forms, reconnecting disparate regions through new structures of power. ⁴¹ The American Revolution exemplifies a dual global process of disconnection from and reconnection to Atlantic networks. In fact, this tension between imperial dissolution and new state formation is central to the Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions reviewed previously. This phenomenon was not unique to North America; it also shaped the emerging Latin American states. Ultimately, the Atlantic Revolutions lacked a single epicenter yet maintained structural connections at a tectonic level. Rather than being primarily an expanding intellectual movement, they occurred because the foundational structures of the world were shifting.

In this world in motion, the Latin American movements were inextricably linked to broader, structural changes. To truly understand these worlds and their connections, perhaps we must view the Americas as one vast complex world, as Karin Wulf has proposed, transcending our institutional and disciplinary divisions and traditional geographical thinking. ⁴² We should explore historical problems and worlds intersecting with and within Latin America, eschewing notions of a singular, exceptional Latin American world. Traditional geographical regions and continents have long since become containers with little content. ⁴³ As Tamar Herzog suggests, legal history offers a fruitful framework for understanding social interactions and their connections across fields. This approach can help us uncover unexpected connections, trace divergent paths, and map unconventional flows that traditional frameworks might overlook, encouraging insightful connections among diverse worlds.