Chapter 1 focuses on the state as a distinct form of political organization, and analyzes the formation and capacity of states in Latin America. It initially considers the states created by indigenous peoples in pre-Columbian times and the states subsequently imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese colonial rulers. It next shows how modern states were formed in Latin America after independence from Spain and Portugal. It argues that Latin America pursued a trade-led model of state formation and that the resulting states were weak, patrimonial states – that is, states that were treated by rulers, partially at least, as their private property and did not enforce the rule of law. Moreover, it holds that state weakness has been a persistent problem in Latin America, as a discussion of Mexico and Uruguay shows, and that contemporary states are unable to impose their rule in a uniform manner throughout the territory they claim to control. It maintains that Latin America has modern states, but also that these states are weak.

Chapter 3 departs from the Colombian Pacific and ventures to the eastern Andean highland town of Cúcuta, where white slaveholding delegates from across Gran Colombia (and one from Mexico) established the policy of gradual emancipation. After surveying historical precedents for and factors leading up to the 1821 gradual emancipation law’s adoption, including Antioquia’s gradual abolition law of 1814 and the Haitian Revolution, the chapter turns to the contentious debate over the Free Womb law and the question of slaveholders’ compensation. Delegates principally wrestled over the age at which Free Womb children’s bondage would be terminated and over the parameters of their salability, grounding arguments in Enlightenment thought and colonial racial accounting ideas of the development life cycles of enslaved people. Here I also examine the debates and conditions for the trafficking of Free Womb children, a phenomenon I refer to as the Free Womb trade that adopted specific legal parameters regarding puberty and geography. The chapter ends by exploring the combative and regionalized public spheres of abolition and antiabolition that developed across Gran Colombia in the 1820s.