Author: M. Trouillot
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137041447
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183
Book Description
Through an examination of such disciplinary keywords, and their silences, as the West, modernity, globalization, the state, culture, and the field, this book aims to explore the future of anthropology in the Twenty-first-century, by examining its past, its origins, and its conditions of possibility alongside the history of the North Atlantic world and the production of the West. In this significant book, Trouillot challenges contemporary anthropologists to question dominant narratives of globalization and to radically rethink the utility of the concept of culture, the emphasis upon fieldwork as the central methodology of the discipline, and the relationship between anthropologists and the people whom they study.
Global Transformations
Author: M. Trouillot
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137041447
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183
Book Description
Through an examination of such disciplinary keywords, and their silences, as the West, modernity, globalization, the state, culture, and the field, this book aims to explore the future of anthropology in the Twenty-first-century, by examining its past, its origins, and its conditions of possibility alongside the history of the North Atlantic world and the production of the West. In this significant book, Trouillot challenges contemporary anthropologists to question dominant narratives of globalization and to radically rethink the utility of the concept of culture, the emphasis upon fieldwork as the central methodology of the discipline, and the relationship between anthropologists and the people whom they study.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137041447
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183
Book Description
Through an examination of such disciplinary keywords, and their silences, as the West, modernity, globalization, the state, culture, and the field, this book aims to explore the future of anthropology in the Twenty-first-century, by examining its past, its origins, and its conditions of possibility alongside the history of the North Atlantic world and the production of the West. In this significant book, Trouillot challenges contemporary anthropologists to question dominant narratives of globalization and to radically rethink the utility of the concept of culture, the emphasis upon fieldwork as the central methodology of the discipline, and the relationship between anthropologists and the people whom they study.
Atlantic Transformations
Author: Dale W. Tomich
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438477856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
Calls attention to the political, economic, and cultural interdependence and interaction of global and local forces shaping the Atlantic world of the nineteenth century. This book presents a new approach to nineteenth-century Atlantic history by extending the analytical perspective of the second slavery to questions of empire, colonialism, and slavery. With a focus on Latin America, Brazil, the Spanish Caribbean, and the United States, international scholars examine relations among empires, between empires and colonies, and within colonies as parts of processes of global economic and political restructuring. By treating metropolis-colony relations within the framework of the modern world-economy, the contributors call attention to the political, economic, and cultural interdependence and interaction of global and local forces shaping the Atlantic world. They reinterpret as specific local responses to global processes the conflicts between empires, within imperial relations, the formation of national states, the creation of new zones of agricultural production and the decline of old ones, and the emergence of liberal ideologies and institutions.
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438477856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
Calls attention to the political, economic, and cultural interdependence and interaction of global and local forces shaping the Atlantic world of the nineteenth century. This book presents a new approach to nineteenth-century Atlantic history by extending the analytical perspective of the second slavery to questions of empire, colonialism, and slavery. With a focus on Latin America, Brazil, the Spanish Caribbean, and the United States, international scholars examine relations among empires, between empires and colonies, and within colonies as parts of processes of global economic and political restructuring. By treating metropolis-colony relations within the framework of the modern world-economy, the contributors call attention to the political, economic, and cultural interdependence and interaction of global and local forces shaping the Atlantic world. They reinterpret as specific local responses to global processes the conflicts between empires, within imperial relations, the formation of national states, the creation of new zones of agricultural production and the decline of old ones, and the emergence of liberal ideologies and institutions.
An Empire Transformed
Author: Kate Luce Mulry
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479895261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Examines the efforts to bring political order to the English empire through projects of environmental improvement When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. By initiating ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places and people in service of establishing order. Merchants, colonial officials, and members of the Royal Society encouraged royal intervention in places deemed unhealthy, unproductive, or poorly managed. Their multiple schemes reflected an enduring belief in the complex relationships between the health of individual bodies, personal and communal character, and the landscapes they inhabited. In this deeply researched work, Kate Mulry highlights a period of innovation during which officials reassessed the purpose of colonies, weighed their benefits and drawbacks, and engineered and instituted a range of activities in relation to subjects’ bodies and material environments. These wide-ranging actions offer insights about how restoration officials envisioned authority within a changing English empire. An Empire Transformed is an interdisciplinary work addressing a series of interlocking issues concerning ideas about the environment, governance, and public health in the early modern English Atlantic empire.
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479895261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Examines the efforts to bring political order to the English empire through projects of environmental improvement When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. By initiating ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places and people in service of establishing order. Merchants, colonial officials, and members of the Royal Society encouraged royal intervention in places deemed unhealthy, unproductive, or poorly managed. Their multiple schemes reflected an enduring belief in the complex relationships between the health of individual bodies, personal and communal character, and the landscapes they inhabited. In this deeply researched work, Kate Mulry highlights a period of innovation during which officials reassessed the purpose of colonies, weighed their benefits and drawbacks, and engineered and instituted a range of activities in relation to subjects’ bodies and material environments. These wide-ranging actions offer insights about how restoration officials envisioned authority within a changing English empire. An Empire Transformed is an interdisciplinary work addressing a series of interlocking issues concerning ideas about the environment, governance, and public health in the early modern English Atlantic empire.
The Atlantic and Africa
Author: Dale W. Tomich
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438484453
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395
Book Description
The Atlantic and Africa breaks new ground by exploring the connections between two bodies of scholarship that have developed separately from one another. On the one hand, the "second slavery" perspective that has reinterpreted the relation of Atlantic slavery and capitalism by emphasizing the extraordinary expansion of new frontiers of slave commodity production and their role in the economic, social, and political transformations of the nineteenth-century world-economy. On the other hand, Africanist scholarship that has established the importance of slavery and slave trading in Africa to the political, economic and social organization of African societies during the nineteenth century. Taken together, these two movements enable us to delineate the processes forming the capitalist world-economy, establish its specific geographical and historical structure, and reintegrates Africa into the transformations in the world economy. This volume explores this paradigm at diverse levels ranging from state formation and the reorganization of world markets to the creation of new social roles and identities.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438484453
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395
Book Description
The Atlantic and Africa breaks new ground by exploring the connections between two bodies of scholarship that have developed separately from one another. On the one hand, the "second slavery" perspective that has reinterpreted the relation of Atlantic slavery and capitalism by emphasizing the extraordinary expansion of new frontiers of slave commodity production and their role in the economic, social, and political transformations of the nineteenth-century world-economy. On the other hand, Africanist scholarship that has established the importance of slavery and slave trading in Africa to the political, economic and social organization of African societies during the nineteenth century. Taken together, these two movements enable us to delineate the processes forming the capitalist world-economy, establish its specific geographical and historical structure, and reintegrates Africa into the transformations in the world economy. This volume explores this paradigm at diverse levels ranging from state formation and the reorganization of world markets to the creation of new social roles and identities.
The New Atlantic Order
Author: Patrick O. Cohrs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009254820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1133
Book Description
This magisterial new history elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860–2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric 'world order' of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system – a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic. Yet he also sheds new light on why, despite remarkable learning-processes, it proved impossible to forge a durable Atlantic peace after a First World War that became the long twentieth century's cathartic catastrophe. In a broader perspective this ground-breaking study shows what a decisive impact this epochal struggle has had not only for modern conceptions of peace, collective security and an integrative, rule-based international order but also for formative ideas of self-determination, liberal-democratic government and the West.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009254820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1133
Book Description
This magisterial new history elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860–2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric 'world order' of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system – a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic. Yet he also sheds new light on why, despite remarkable learning-processes, it proved impossible to forge a durable Atlantic peace after a First World War that became the long twentieth century's cathartic catastrophe. In a broader perspective this ground-breaking study shows what a decisive impact this epochal struggle has had not only for modern conceptions of peace, collective security and an integrative, rule-based international order but also for formative ideas of self-determination, liberal-democratic government and the West.
The Second Slavery
Author: Javier Lavina
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643903677
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
"Slavery throughout the capitalist world-economy expands. The old zones in one way or another reach their limits and the new zones break through: to become part of the new division of labor (in the 19th century). In that sense The Second Slavery would encompass both decline and renewal of slaveries. I never intended the idea to apply just to Cuba, Brazil, and the cotton South as some people seem to take it. For me it is a concept of world economy and Cuba, Brazil, and the South are the obvious examples of those zones that break through. They permit us to think about slavery in a more dynamic way, but there is much more work to be done. From this perspective I would be more inclined to include Reunion, Mauritius and some parts of India, Ceylon and Java as well as British Guiana, than the older French and British Caribbean islands." -- contributor Dale Tomich, Binghamton U., New York *** The Second Slavery includes the following essays: African Slaves and the Atlantic: A Cultural Overview * The End of the British Atlantic Slave Trade or the Beginning of the Big Slave Robbery, 1808-1850 * Peasant or Proletarian: Emancipation and the Struggle for Freedom in British Guiana in the Shadow of the Second Slavery * The End of the "Second Slavery" in the Confederate South and the "Great Brigandage" in Southern Italy: A Comparative Study * Puerto Rico: "Atlantizacion" and Culture during the "Segunda Esclavitud" * The Second Slavery: Modernity, Mobility, and Identity of Captives in Nineteenth-Century Cuba and the Atlantic World * Commodity Frontiers, Conjuncture and Crisis: The Remaking of the Caribbean Sugar Industry, 1783-1866 * The Aftermath of Abolition: Distortions of the Historical Record in Machado de Assis' Counselor Aires' Memorial * The Second Slavery: Modernity in the 19th-Century South and the Atlantic World. (Series: Slavery and Postemancipation / Sklaverei und Postemanzipation / Esclavitud y Postemancipacion - Vol. 6)
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643903677
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
"Slavery throughout the capitalist world-economy expands. The old zones in one way or another reach their limits and the new zones break through: to become part of the new division of labor (in the 19th century). In that sense The Second Slavery would encompass both decline and renewal of slaveries. I never intended the idea to apply just to Cuba, Brazil, and the cotton South as some people seem to take it. For me it is a concept of world economy and Cuba, Brazil, and the South are the obvious examples of those zones that break through. They permit us to think about slavery in a more dynamic way, but there is much more work to be done. From this perspective I would be more inclined to include Reunion, Mauritius and some parts of India, Ceylon and Java as well as British Guiana, than the older French and British Caribbean islands." -- contributor Dale Tomich, Binghamton U., New York *** The Second Slavery includes the following essays: African Slaves and the Atlantic: A Cultural Overview * The End of the British Atlantic Slave Trade or the Beginning of the Big Slave Robbery, 1808-1850 * Peasant or Proletarian: Emancipation and the Struggle for Freedom in British Guiana in the Shadow of the Second Slavery * The End of the "Second Slavery" in the Confederate South and the "Great Brigandage" in Southern Italy: A Comparative Study * Puerto Rico: "Atlantizacion" and Culture during the "Segunda Esclavitud" * The Second Slavery: Modernity, Mobility, and Identity of Captives in Nineteenth-Century Cuba and the Atlantic World * Commodity Frontiers, Conjuncture and Crisis: The Remaking of the Caribbean Sugar Industry, 1783-1866 * The Aftermath of Abolition: Distortions of the Historical Record in Machado de Assis' Counselor Aires' Memorial * The Second Slavery: Modernity in the 19th-Century South and the Atlantic World. (Series: Slavery and Postemancipation / Sklaverei und Postemanzipation / Esclavitud y Postemancipacion - Vol. 6)
The Atlantic World in the Antipodes
Author: Kate Fullagar
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781443837446
Category : Pacific Area
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This collection of essays stems from a John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures. Held over two years, the seminar investigated the effects and transformations of ideas, peoples, and institutions from the Atlantic World when carried into the Antipodes. The papers presented in this volume distil some of the key themes to emerge from discussion, each demonstrating the complexity with which discourses and practices operated in the Indo-Pacific oceanic region. Some had unexpected effects, others underwent profound transformation. Always they were changed by the ideas, peoples, and institutions of the Antipodes. Combined, the chapters underscore the ways in which both oceanic worlds were co-produced through a variety of intellectual and practical interactions over the modern period. Essays by leading Pacific scholars such as Margaret Jolly, Anita Herle, and Katerina Teaiwa are joined by essays from key scholars of various regions in the Atlantic World such as Simon Schaffer, Iain McCalman, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Michael McDonnell, as well as interventions by the new transnationalist breed of Australian historians, led by Alison Bashford and Ann Curthoys.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781443837446
Category : Pacific Area
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This collection of essays stems from a John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures. Held over two years, the seminar investigated the effects and transformations of ideas, peoples, and institutions from the Atlantic World when carried into the Antipodes. The papers presented in this volume distil some of the key themes to emerge from discussion, each demonstrating the complexity with which discourses and practices operated in the Indo-Pacific oceanic region. Some had unexpected effects, others underwent profound transformation. Always they were changed by the ideas, peoples, and institutions of the Antipodes. Combined, the chapters underscore the ways in which both oceanic worlds were co-produced through a variety of intellectual and practical interactions over the modern period. Essays by leading Pacific scholars such as Margaret Jolly, Anita Herle, and Katerina Teaiwa are joined by essays from key scholars of various regions in the Atlantic World such as Simon Schaffer, Iain McCalman, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Michael McDonnell, as well as interventions by the new transnationalist breed of Australian historians, led by Alison Bashford and Ann Curthoys.
European Destiny, Atlantic Transformations
Author: Scott B. MacDonald
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412822961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Book Description
With the fall of its centuries-old empire in 1974-1975, Portugal embarked on a transitional period that reconciled a long tradition of acting out national interests overseas with the need to integrate itself into Western Europe. The result has been a deemphasis on various Atlantic and colonial linkages and the forging of a new and highly successful European identity within the framework of the European Community. In "European Destiny, Atlantic Transformations "Scott B. MacDonald offers a comprehensive analysis of Portugal's foreign policy and its highly successful venture in economic and political transformation. Although Portugal is firm in its committment to a European destiny, it has not turned its back on relations with the United States and its former colonies hi Africa and Asia. MacDonald traces the evolution of U.S.-Portuguese cooperation along economic, cultural, and military lines and shows how NATO has played a pivotal role in the process. This was most recently underscored when the U.S. made extensive use of the Azores during the Gulf War against Iraq. Likewise, in its ties with the Lusophone countries formerly under its control--Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, S--o Tom" and Princip"--Portugal has sought to improve political relations and act as a peacemaker in regional conflicts such as those in East Timor, Angola, and Mozambique. The scope of MacDonald's work takes in issues posed to Portugal by new foreign policy concerns that range from the breakup of the Soviet Union to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in North Africa and the Middle East. He points out that in a world of rapidly shifting political and economic alignments, Portugal provides a representative model of a relatively small nation that has undergone succesful economic reform while deepening its committment to its new democratic system. As such, the Portuguese model is instructive for newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe and Latin America. "European Destiny, Atlantic Transformations "is an important addition to the literature on post-Cold War politics. It will be read by historians, economists, and foreign policy specialists.
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412822961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Book Description
With the fall of its centuries-old empire in 1974-1975, Portugal embarked on a transitional period that reconciled a long tradition of acting out national interests overseas with the need to integrate itself into Western Europe. The result has been a deemphasis on various Atlantic and colonial linkages and the forging of a new and highly successful European identity within the framework of the European Community. In "European Destiny, Atlantic Transformations "Scott B. MacDonald offers a comprehensive analysis of Portugal's foreign policy and its highly successful venture in economic and political transformation. Although Portugal is firm in its committment to a European destiny, it has not turned its back on relations with the United States and its former colonies hi Africa and Asia. MacDonald traces the evolution of U.S.-Portuguese cooperation along economic, cultural, and military lines and shows how NATO has played a pivotal role in the process. This was most recently underscored when the U.S. made extensive use of the Azores during the Gulf War against Iraq. Likewise, in its ties with the Lusophone countries formerly under its control--Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, S--o Tom" and Princip"--Portugal has sought to improve political relations and act as a peacemaker in regional conflicts such as those in East Timor, Angola, and Mozambique. The scope of MacDonald's work takes in issues posed to Portugal by new foreign policy concerns that range from the breakup of the Soviet Union to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in North Africa and the Middle East. He points out that in a world of rapidly shifting political and economic alignments, Portugal provides a representative model of a relatively small nation that has undergone succesful economic reform while deepening its committment to its new democratic system. As such, the Portuguese model is instructive for newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe and Latin America. "European Destiny, Atlantic Transformations "is an important addition to the literature on post-Cold War politics. It will be read by historians, economists, and foreign policy specialists.
Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy
Author: Strother E. Roberts
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081225127X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
Focusing on the Connecticut River Valley—New England's longest river and largest watershed— Strother Roberts traces the local, regional, and transatlantic markets in colonial commodities that shaped an ecological transformation in one corner of the rapidly globalizing early modern world. Reaching deep into the interior, the Connecticut provided a watery commercial highway for the furs, grain, timber, livestock, and various other commodities that the region exported. Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy shows how the extraction of each commodity had an impact on the New England landscape, creating a new colonial ecology inextricably tied to the broader transatlantic economy beyond its shores. This history refutes two common misconceptions: first, that globalization is a relatively new phenomenon and its power to reshape economies and natural environments has only fully been realized in the modern era and, second, that the Puritan founders of New England were self-sufficient ascetics who sequestered themselves from the corrupting influence of the wider world. Roberts argues, instead, that colonial New England was an integral part of Britain's expanding imperialist commercial economy. Imperial planners envisioned New England as a region able to provide resources to other, more profitable parts of the empire, such as the sugar islands of the Caribbean. Settlers embraced trade as a means to afford the tools they needed to conquer the landscape and to acquire the same luxury commodities popular among the consumer class of Europe. New England's native nations, meanwhile, utilized their access to European trade goods and weapons to secure power and prestige in a region shaken by invading newcomers and the diseases that followed in their wake. These networks of extraction and exchange fundamentally transformed the natural environment of the region, creating a landscape that, by the turn of the nineteenth century, would have been unrecognizable to those living there two centuries earlier.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081225127X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
Focusing on the Connecticut River Valley—New England's longest river and largest watershed— Strother Roberts traces the local, regional, and transatlantic markets in colonial commodities that shaped an ecological transformation in one corner of the rapidly globalizing early modern world. Reaching deep into the interior, the Connecticut provided a watery commercial highway for the furs, grain, timber, livestock, and various other commodities that the region exported. Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy shows how the extraction of each commodity had an impact on the New England landscape, creating a new colonial ecology inextricably tied to the broader transatlantic economy beyond its shores. This history refutes two common misconceptions: first, that globalization is a relatively new phenomenon and its power to reshape economies and natural environments has only fully been realized in the modern era and, second, that the Puritan founders of New England were self-sufficient ascetics who sequestered themselves from the corrupting influence of the wider world. Roberts argues, instead, that colonial New England was an integral part of Britain's expanding imperialist commercial economy. Imperial planners envisioned New England as a region able to provide resources to other, more profitable parts of the empire, such as the sugar islands of the Caribbean. Settlers embraced trade as a means to afford the tools they needed to conquer the landscape and to acquire the same luxury commodities popular among the consumer class of Europe. New England's native nations, meanwhile, utilized their access to European trade goods and weapons to secure power and prestige in a region shaken by invading newcomers and the diseases that followed in their wake. These networks of extraction and exchange fundamentally transformed the natural environment of the region, creating a landscape that, by the turn of the nineteenth century, would have been unrecognizable to those living there two centuries earlier.
Republic of Capital
Author: Jeremy Adelman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080476414X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
This book is a political history of economic life. Through a description of the convulsions of long-term change from colony to republic in Buenos Aires, Republic of Capital explores Atlantic world transformations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tracing the transition from colonial Natural Law to instrumental legal understandings of property, the book shows that the developments of constitutionalism and property law were more than coincidences: the polity shaped the rituals and practices arbitrating economic justice, while the crisis of property animated the support for a centralized and executive-dominated state. In dialectical fashion, politics shaped private law while the effort to formalize the domain of property directed the course of political struggles. In studying the legal and political foundations of Argentine capitalism, the author shows how merchants and capitalists coped with massive political upheaval and how political writers and intellectuals sought to forge a model of liberal republicanism. Among the topics examined are the transformation of commercial law, the evolution of liberal political credos, and the saga of political and constitutional turmoil after the collapse of Spanish authority. By the end of the nineteenth century, statemakers, capitalists, and liberal intellectuals settled on a model of political economy that aimed for open markets but closed the polity to widespread participation. The author concludes by exploring the long-term consequences of nineteenth-century statehood for the following century's efforts to promote sustained economic growth and democratize the political arena, and argues that many of Argentina's recent problems can be traced back to the framework and foundations of Argentine statehood in the nineteenth century.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080476414X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
This book is a political history of economic life. Through a description of the convulsions of long-term change from colony to republic in Buenos Aires, Republic of Capital explores Atlantic world transformations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tracing the transition from colonial Natural Law to instrumental legal understandings of property, the book shows that the developments of constitutionalism and property law were more than coincidences: the polity shaped the rituals and practices arbitrating economic justice, while the crisis of property animated the support for a centralized and executive-dominated state. In dialectical fashion, politics shaped private law while the effort to formalize the domain of property directed the course of political struggles. In studying the legal and political foundations of Argentine capitalism, the author shows how merchants and capitalists coped with massive political upheaval and how political writers and intellectuals sought to forge a model of liberal republicanism. Among the topics examined are the transformation of commercial law, the evolution of liberal political credos, and the saga of political and constitutional turmoil after the collapse of Spanish authority. By the end of the nineteenth century, statemakers, capitalists, and liberal intellectuals settled on a model of political economy that aimed for open markets but closed the polity to widespread participation. The author concludes by exploring the long-term consequences of nineteenth-century statehood for the following century's efforts to promote sustained economic growth and democratize the political arena, and argues that many of Argentina's recent problems can be traced back to the framework and foundations of Argentine statehood in the nineteenth century.