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- Convenor:
-
Joanna Crow
(University of Bristol)
- Discussants:
-
Matthew Brown
(UC Santa Barbara)
Matthew Brown (University of Bristol)
- Location:
- Malet 253
- Start time:
- 3 April, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to open up new debates on post-independent Chile, by incorporating a rich variety of hitherto under-explored case studies, from perceptions of Bolivarian expansionism, and indigenous vocabularies of citizenship, to the monitorial education system.
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks to open up new debates on post-independent Chile. Incorporating a rich variety of hitherto under-explored case studies - from indigenous vocabularies of citizenship, to the monitorial education system, and the role played by drafters of constitutions - it challenges the four major limitations that have dominated much of the previous historiography. First, panellists explore the opportunities and possibilities of the period, as well as the well-documented difficulties and problems. The 1820s, they argue, was not merely a decade of anarchy and disorder, as has so often been claimed - especially by Liberal historians in Chile. It was also a time of fruitful experiments and profound reflections; just because the experiments were not successful (federalism, for example) does not mean they were necessarily doomed to failure from the outset. Second, the papers affirm that the decade is worth studying in its own right, for what happened then, not simply as the end of, or the transition to something else (the wars of independence and the Portalian regime respectively). Third, they investigate political practices as well as ideas (namely liberalism and republicanism), and when studying the latter they focus very much on the adaptation and moulding of international ideas to local circumstances. Finally, the panel aims to go beyond the 'nation-state' approach that is so prominent in many scholarly works on the early independence era, by drawing out and analysing not only the continental and global dimensions of the republican project, but also its (internal) regional permutations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Juan Luis Ossa (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the various forms taken by Chilean liberalism during the 1820s.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the various forms taken by Chilean liberalism during the 1820s. The origins of liberal ideas in Chile are to be found in the works of the so-called "liberal revolutionaries" of the period 1810-1830. Indeed, the analysis of the writings of men of letters like Camino Henríquez, Manuel de Salas, Juan Egaña, José Miguel Infante and Francisco Antonio helps us understand the development of key political concepts such as "social contract", "popular sovereignty", "representative government", "constitutionalism", "balance of power", "equality", "virtue" and "freedom". Given that these concepts are rooted indistinctively both in the "French" and the "British" Liberal Schools, the main objective of these pages is to account for the influence (direct, indirect or in opposition) played in Chile by the most re-known European and North American thinkers at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Also, it seeks to define the links between liberalism and republicanism, emphasising that both traditions were not mutually exclusive as later studies have aimed to show.
Edward Blumenthal (Universite Paris 7 diderot/Universite Cergy Pontoise)
Paper short abstract:
Trans-border caudillos operating in the Andes attracted the support of opponents of the newly established post-independence authorities in Chile and the Rio de la Plata. These two case studies highlight how political movements crossed the new borders even as they helped form them.
Paper long abstract:
Trans-border caudillos such as the Carrera and the Pincheira brothers illustrate how exile in the early republican period played an important role in shaping national political projects. Following the independence wars, the new authorities in Chile and the Rio de la Plata had the difficult job of consolidating their authority, and exile was a tool they used to control political opposition. Various groups opposed to the sanmartinian power on both sides of the Andes, including Federalists, Loyalists and their indigenous allies, consolidated around independent armed exile groups, such as those led by the Carrera or the Pincheira brothers. Neither wholly "Chilean" nor "Argentine", these groups followed pre-existing colonial patterns of mobility, but gave them new political meaning, shaped by ideas of liberalism and federalism, but also loyalty to the Spanish king. At the same time, they were trans-Andean political movements whose political message found an echo on both sides of new national borders. These two case studies show that while the mountains were more of a connecting highway than a dividing line, political movements acting on both sides of the Andes had the effect of strengthening the nascent border between the two countries. Indeed, only when political authorities in Santiago and the Rio de la Plata cooperated were these threats eliminated. They also show the need to go beyond national boundaries when analyzing nineteenth century nation-building projects.
1
Joanna Crow (University of Bristol)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the complexities of Mapuche-Chilean relations during the early independence years, focusing on written communications and the formal meetings known as parlamentos.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the complex, dynamic relationship that developed between the Mapuche and Chilean state authorities in the first decades following independence from Spain. It shows that the lands south of the Bio Bio River remained under the control of the Mapuche (despite constitutions claiming the contrary), and that successive governments were obliged to take this people seriously. We know from existing scholarship that many Mapuche supported royalist forces during the wars of independence, but that there were also several important Mapuche leaders who allied themselves with the insurgents and, after the latter's victory, entered into negotiations with the fledgling Chilean republic. My paper investigates further the intricacies of these negotiations - how they were carried out, the processes involved and the vocabularies used - and seeks to compare them with Mapuche-Spanish negotiations during the late colonial period, and indigenous-state negotiations elsewhere in Latin America during the early independence era.It focuses particularly on the parlamentos and written communications, and suggests that during this period of political experiments a number of Chileans and Mapuche envisaged and promoted a very different state-building project to that (centralised, exclusionary model) which was adopted by the Portalian regime and subsequent administrations.
Andres Baeza (University of Bristol)
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to discuss the role that the process of reception and adaptation of the monitorial system of education played in the shaping of the new political identity of ‘citizenship’, and the way it influenced the construction of a ‘national’ system of education in Chile during the 1820s.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I analyse the role that education played in the configuration of the new political identity of 'citizenship' in the context of the making of the Chilean Republic during the 1820s. To do this I focus on the process of reception and adaptation of the Monitorial System of education (also known as mutual system, Bell-Lancaster or British system of education) carried out in Chile after the struggles for independence. This process was characterized by a confluence of 'civilizing' discourses from those who diffused (the Quakers of the British and Foreign School Society) and received (the Chilean liberal elite and Catholic clergy) the system. In this confluence the system was neither passively imitated by the liberal elite nor compulsively refused by the Catholic clergy as shown by historiography. I argue that the process of reception was characterized by an active criticism in which the original model was depurated and eventually adapted to local circumstances and interests. As a result, the first foundations of an incipient 'national' system of education were established during the 1820s. The axis of the system was the education of the citizen on the base of the merge of traditional, Liberal and Protestant ideas.
Graciela Iglesias Rogers (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
A transnational study of the activities of the Spaniard José Joaquín de Mora in Chile, a republic that he contributed to place on the world map while in London exile, and where he was hired to draft the liberal constitution of 1828, establish the Liceo de Chile and the newspaper El Mercurio chileno.
Paper long abstract:
The life and career of José Joaquín de Mora challenge many assumptions about the period that immediately followed the Latin American wars of independence. Being a Spaniard, this jurist, poet and journalist was the first foreign consultant to be hired by several South American governments. This paper takes a transnational approach to focus on his activities concerning Chile, a republic that he contributed to place on the world map while living in exile in London, and where he later was given the chance to test the greatest number of his polymathic projects as co-author of the liberal constitution of 1828, confidant of President Pinto, founder of the Liceo de Chile and of the newspaper El Mercurio chileno. It will be argued that Mora fitted the requirements of various regional elites who aspired to have the New World drenched with the best European cultural values to make it a beacon of 'rational liberty' and progress, particularly for an Old World subjected to the autocratic constraints of the Holy Alliance. A closer look at the difficulties encountered in the implementation of this optimistic agenda serves to throw new light on a wide variety of issues regarding the organization of a newly created State, press freedom, demilitarization, secularisation, gender relations, factionalism and caudillismo.