In this chapter I return to the classics of bellicist theory to formalize their insights and derive concrete observational expectations for nineteenth-century Latin America. I first look at the work of Otto Hintze and Max Weber, who suggest a more holistic approach to the effects of war on the process of state formation which combines both pre-war and post-war phases in a single overarching theory. I then use the more modern concepts and logics of historical institutionalism to generate clearer predictions from their theories. I propose that, in a pre-war phase and when hostilities are taking place, mobilization will trigger taxation and repression—i.e., the extraction-coercion cycle. Yet, war outcomes will determine whether those contingent policies will become institutionalized after the critical juncture of war. While victory will consolidate a trajectory of state formation, defeat will render state institutions illegitimate and set losers into a path-dependent process of state weakening. Finally, I discuss actors and mechanisms specific to nineteenth-century Latin America and lay out the observational implications of my argument.

The conclusions close the manuscript and make four points. First, they review the macro-level observational expectations tested in Part II, and how my findings, obtained through a triangulation of different techniques, allow for a comprehensive picture of how war affected state formation throughout the entire region. Second, they bring together all case studies in Part III, noting how the historical evidence collected fits the expectations of the theory at a micro-level—e.g., considering the behavior of individual actors and the effects of narrow events like battles within wars—and does so with out-and-out consistency—i.e., case by case, almost without exception. Third, they reflect upon the scope of the theory, discussing many other cases that could be explained by the long-term effects of war outcomes. This discussion covers many regions and time periods, showing that classical bellicist theory not only can travel, but can also solves logical problems and empirical puzzles highlighted by previous scholarship. Finally, the conclusions suggest many lines of enquiry for future research that the book leaves open.

In this chapter I lay the foundations of the book and give an overview of the argument. After introducing the importance of studying state capacity and the main puzzle of why certain states are set in divergent state building trajectories, I discuss the state of bellicist theory and criticisms related to its alleged functionalist approach to history, and lack of fit with a world where inter-state war has become less frequent. I then turn to Latin America, a poster child of anti-bellicist scholars. There I review the aforementioned books by Centeno, Kurtz, Mahoney, Mazzuca, Saylor, and Soifer, amongst others. My book is set against this new consensus which dismisses war as an explanation for intra-regional variation in state capacity. In a final section, I propose the need to rethink the theory with a focus on the long-term consequences of war outcomes rather than pre-war conditions. The introduction closes with a discussion of my case selection strategy and chapter layout.

Was war intense and frequent enough in Latin America to cause state formation? How should we evaluate the capability of these states in the nineteenth century? This chapter presents a background of how war formed the colonial state in Latin America and features some cross-regional comparisons between Europe and Latin America which give context to the rest of the book. After showing how warfare in Europe and in the Americas led to the institutionalization of the colonial state, I focus on entire century between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI to show that Latin America faced comparatively frequent and severe warfare during this period. I then show that the territorial effects of warfare were similar in both regions and that the modes of financing war were also comparable and similarly conducive to state building. Put together, these pieces of evidence demonstrate through simple descriptive comparisons that the idea of a relatively peaceful Latin America populated by weak states, although a valid overall characterization of the region in the twentieth century, collapses when our focus is the nineteenth century.

It is not hard to find examples of the use of Latin in nineteenth-century Cambridge to reject modernity or to mystify and police the boundaries of elite status and existing social and imperial hierarchies. But concentration on such examples obscures a history of the expression of radical ideas in Latin and of engagement with here-and-now issues. How can we incorporate such complexity into our understanding of the history of Latin studies, and avoid mistaking one side of an argument for the standard view of the elite? And how should Latin face its future or even its present? We should be brave enough to insist that the history of ‘western civilisation’ (not uniquely admirable or the only one to deserve attention) is incomprehensible without Latin.

This essay examines representations of maroons and marronage in nineteenth-century African American literature. It argues that maroons – enslaved people who fled from bondage and self-exiled to remote places like swamps, forests, and mountains – complicate the familiar notion of the U.S. South as a place of unfreedom for African Americans during the era of slavery. Like maroons themselves, whose lives necessitated concealment, marronage has often been overlooked in nineteenth-century African American literature because it does not comport with a teleology of freedom-seeking that originates in the South and moves unidirectionally toward the supposed beacons of freedom in the North and Canada. It reveals that enslaved people who participated in acts of marronage created spaces of freedom within the slaveholding South, spaces that linked them to diasporic traditions of enslaved resistance via marronage throughout the further souths of the Caribbean and Latin America.

Nineteenth-century international lawyers inherited a discipline in flux and inhabited a world of rapid change. As capitalism entered a period of crisis and Western imperial adventures intensified, the first generation of professional international lawyers grappled with the need to construct order. The ‘standard of civilisation’ arose as a disciplinary response to the contradictions of global capitalism. This chapter provides a detailed account of the contours of the ‘logic of biology’ and the ‘logic of improvement’. It details both the constant presence of racialised, gendered and infantilising tropes in the writings of the discipline’s ‘fathers’ and their insistence that capitalist modernity was the only path to civilisation and, by implication, to equal rights and duties under international law. The struggles over extraterritoriality demonstrate the concrete stakes of these theoretical constructions as well as the role of semi-peripheral lawyers who adopted and transformed ‘civilisation’ in order to serve the interests of their own domestic ruling classes.

Viennese courtly Kapellen were in decline by the time Beethoven began his career as a symphonist, with the result that one of the most important contexts for eighteenth-century symphonies was no longer available to the young generation of composers. This decline, along with various other developments in Viennese musical life during Beethoven’s lifetime, led to a reconfiguration of the symphony’s role. Public, rather than private concerts became the main platform for symphonic performance in Vienna and abroad by 1800. The organisation of Vienna’s concert life meant that symphonies were increasingly conceived as grand, individualistic works, rather than routine household entertainment music. Furthermore, select members of the Viennese aristocracy, including some of Beethoven’s supporters, continued to cultivate symphonies, with the result that Beethoven was better placed than some of his contemporaries for securing the performance and subsequent publication of symphonies. This chapter contextualises Beethoven’s first three symphonies within the broader culture of symphonic composition and performance at the turn of the nineteenth century.