Category Archives: Events

Commodity Histories Workshop, 6-7 September

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I recently presented a paper about the Liberalism in the Americas project at a workshop at the Open University entitled, ‘AHRC Commodity Histories Project: Networking Workshop 1. Designing a Collaborative Research Web Space: Aims, Plans and Challenges of the Commodity Histories Project’. This workshop was part of a larger AHRC-funded project, Commodity Histories: An Online Space for Collaborative Research, which itself grew out of a collaborative network, Commodities of Empire, led by Dr Sandip Hazareesingh of the Open University and Dr Jonathan Curry-Machado and Professor Jean Stubbs, both Associate Fellows at the Institute for the Study of the Americas.

The workshop brought together digital humanities experts, people leading various kinds of digitisation projects, and those with experience of creating and participating in virtual collaborative research spaces. The aim was to share experiences and discuss challenges in the establishment, maintenance, and success of these digital enterprises to support the development of the Commodity Histories project.

My paper, ‘Liberalism in the Americas: Building an International Network, Digital Library, and Virtual Research Community‘, focused on how to engage the wider academic community in digital projects, and how the Liberalism project, and several other digital projects underway at ISA, have sought to incorporate feedback from projected users of the resources into their design. This helped to stimulate some broader discussion about the merits of different methods of obtaining this feedback. In the early stages of the Liberalism project, we sought advice from our Steering Committee and Advisory Groups- all experts in the field – about which thematic topics, types of documents, and regions of the Americas should be prioritised in the construction of our digital library. So this was very much an expert-led consultation process. Our workshop and lecture series helped to provide additional ongoing feedback from scholars on the content of the digital resources during the academic year 2012-13, and these events also went some way towards incorporating the views of a broader spectrum of potential users of the library, including graduate students.

However, Dr Matthew Alan Hill, who leads the digital project Atlantic Archive: US-UK Relations in an Age of Global War, 1939-1945 at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, took a more open and democratic approach in garnering feedback on the development of his resources. Through an online survey, which is currently open on the Atlantic Archive research hub, anyone can give their views on what themes and document types should be prioritised for the next phase of digitisation. This method has the advantage of casting the net wider in terms of the range of users that would potentially provide feedback for shaping the content of digital resources.

The Commodity Histories workshop participants agreed that considerations of audience were paramount in making the decision as to appropriate methods of feedback and engagement. The Atlantic Archive project, for instance, aims to serve the needs of history school teachers and pupils, as well as undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars working in the field. Due to the vast majority of the documents in the Liberalism in the Americas Digital Archive being available only in the Spanish language, UK secondary schools were not considered a realistic audience for these resources. Consequently, seeking feedback from a more limited audience of graduate students and more advanced scholars seemed quite appropriate in the case of the Liberalism resources. But clearly both approaches could have strengths and weaknesses.

Please do share your thoughts below in the comments section!

Victor Bulmer-Thomas, “Freedom to Trade, Free Trade and Laissez-Faire: Latin American Approaches to Economic Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century”.

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ISA welcomed a distinguished guest to conclude our Liberalism in the Americas 2011-2012 lecture series, on 6 June 2012: Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas, currently a Visiting Professorial Fellow at ISA, delivered a fascinating lecture on “Freedom to Trade, Free Trade and Laissez-Faire: Latin American Approaches to Economic Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century.” A video recording of the lecture and ensuing discussion is available to view on our youtube channel, and the full text of Professor Bulmer-Thomas’s article can be downloaded from the Liberalism in the Americas Collection in SAS-Space, our institutional repository. We thank the Economic History Society and the Society for Latin American Studies for sponsoring this lecture, which also acted as a plenary for our workshop on Economic Liberalism in the Americasthat took place earlier in the day.

Bulmer-Thomas’s lecture gave a broad-ranging overview and interpretation of Latin American approaches to international trade in the long nineteenth-century. He argued that “unrestricted free trade was seen as a distant goal by all but the most ideologically committed liberals and economic policy focused on much more limited objectives”. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the key objective was “freedom to trade” with any international partner, as opposed to the mercantilist system of the Spanish and Portuguese empires that restricted the number of ports open to trade, excluded the participation of foreign shipping, restricted intra-colonial trade, and granted royal trading monopolies. Between the 1770s and the 1820s, the colonial governments opened more ports to international trade, granted permission for colonial ports to trade with neutral ships, and lost the ability to enforce imperial monopolies. After independence, the newly independent states, as well as the remaining Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico, operated under the “freedom to trade” principle, but stopped short of “free trade”, since commercial concessions were often extracted by trading partners, and tariffs and export duties were often high on the Latin American side of the exchange.

By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, however, a form of “free trade”, where partner trading countries ceased to enforce discrimatory policies on Latin American goods, had become the norm. Bulmer-Thomas explained that in the aftermath of independence, when the need for international recognition and international debts were high, important trading partners, including Great Britain, France,and Portugal, were able to extract special trade privileges from Latin American countries. But their ability to extract such concessions diminished as the nineteenth century progressed, especially as the international weight of the United States increased and affected the direction of trade policy. Again, this stopped short of being “laissez-faire”, since both Latin American countries and many of their trading partners continued to make considerable use of tariffs. Indeed many of the newly independent countries in Latin America raised tariffs from the levels that had operated while they were part of the Portuguese and Spanish empires: the disruption to economic infrastructure and fiscal systems caused by the independence wars meant that taxes on trade were often a vital source of revenue. Alejandra Irigoin’s paper in the Economic Liberalism in the Americas workshop that preceded Bulmer-Thomas’s lecture further suggested that many countries within Latin America had to rely on trade-based taxes because attempts to shift to a fiscal system based on direct taxation in the 1820s had failed.

Bulmer-Thomas concluded his lecture by considering other aspects of economic liberalism that our previous workshop had also considered, especially regarding the development – or not – of factor markets in labour, land and capital. In these areas, there was a degree of debate regarding the preferable level of state involvement in shaping land, labour, and capital markets as the best means of creating economic growth and development, although these debates did not always neatly fall along liberal and non-liberal lines. Bulmer-Thomas then answered a range of questions on the contradictions within economic liberalism; the liberal Vs illiberal nature of tariffs and contraband trading; the role of internal barriers to trade within federal states; the relationship between coerced labour and market forces; and the importance of commodities to Latin American economies.

You can listen to Bulmer-Thomas’s thoughts on these issues, as well as the lecture itself, on our youtube channel, and you can download the text of his talk in our Liberalism in the Americas SAS-Space collection. Please also join the discussion in the comments section below!

Economic Liberalism: Workshop

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Our series of workshops that have been exploring major historiographical themes in the comparative history of liberalism in the Americas came to a close on 6 June 2012, with a vibrant session on Economic Liberalism in the Americas in Senate House, London. We were extremely pleased to have the support of the Economic History Society and the Society for Latin American Studies in holding this event, and the associated public lecture by Prof. Victor Bulmer-Thomas also on 6 June 2012.

Written working papers were submitted by four paper presenters in advance of the workshop for registered participants to read, and a fifth paper was briefly introduced during the workshop, in order to devote maximum possible time to discussion. Our commentators, Prof. Rosemary Thorp and Prof. Alan Knight, both from St Antony’s College, Oxford, opened discussion in the two panels with some critical comments and feedback on the papers, and some broader, thought-provoking observations on the theme of economic liberalism. In particular, the papers and discussion focused on the often problematic relationship between economic liberalism and political liberalism and made some comparative observations about the impact of liberalism and neo-liberalism in the Americas. The programme can be downloaded here.

Much of the discussion also centred on clarifying exactly what economic liberalism means in different policy arenas, from banking and monetary policies, to principles of taxation, property laws, internal and external trading systems, and labour issues. In reaching some conclusions, areas for further research were also identified, including the relationship between fiscal policy, credit networks, and land speculation in the early American republic and how liberal economic policy affected the relationship of states and markets with respect to urban centres, urban consumers, urban property and urban planning across the region. More generally, it was noted that future studies of liberalism should endeavour to bring economic and political developments and perspectives together, as well as employing a geographically sensitive analysis.

For further details, please download the full conference report, and consult some of the working papers presented during the workshop in our Liberalism in the Americas collection in SAS-space.

Matthew Butler, “Revolutionary Religion? Liberalism and Catholicism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico.”

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Dr Matthew Butler (University of Texas, Austin) continued our lecture series on 18 April 2012, with a fascinating examination of radical religious movements in Mexico during the period of political, economic and socio-cultural upheaval after the Mexican Revolution in the early twentieth century. Having joined our group for the earlier workshop on Liberalism and Religion: Secularisation and the Public Sphere in the Americas, Butler discussed his new work on the schismatic religious movement led by Father Pérez in the 1920s and its relationship to the transformed place of liberalism within Mexican political cultures in the post-revolutionary era. You can watch the full lecture and ensuing discussion session on our youtube channel.

Connecting his lecture to our previous discussions in the workshop, Butler began by explaining that constitutional Catholicism and Church reform movements had long been an integral part of Mexican religious identity at both elite and popular levels of society. Although there had been considerable conflict between more radical liberal governments and the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century – over issues of Church property and clerical fueros in particular – many liberal administrations had adopted more co-operative relationships with the Church and the majority of the population continued to identify strongly with Catholicism in many areas, and the revolutionary governments’ policies towards the Church provoked a violent reaction from Church supporters, known as the Cristero War or the Cristiada (1926-29).

The “schismatic” movement that Butler explored in most of his lecture represented a combined agenda of popular Catholicism, agrarianism, popular liberalism, and anti-clericalism and was centred in the rural regions of Guerrero, Puebla, Chiapas, Veracruz and Tlaxcala during the mid to late 1920s. The anti-clerical aspect of the schismatic body, known as the Mexican Catholic and Apostolic Church, represented not a rejection of religion but a reformulation, being primarily directed against Ultramontanism, seeking to eradicate corruption and abuse of hierarchical authority from the Mexican Church, and creating a more interactive, mutually beneficial relationship between the clergy and their flock.

Not only was the schismatic church an attempt to build a more patriotic and abuse-free church to serve the Mexican people and nation, but the movement also acted to sacralise some aspects of the Revolutionary reform agenda – particularly regarding agrarian reform and social engineering projects seeking to improve the living conditions of the Mexican peasantry and to structure the moral universe of the ordinary population around ideals of citizenship, virtue and patriotism. Butler emphasised that the schismatic church had vibrant popular support in local communities, which strongly shaped how the schismatic church operated at local level. This was partly due to the schismatic body being able to step into the vacuum left by the suspension of official Catholic Church services from 1926, when the episcopate effectively announced a clerical strike in protest against Plutarco Elías Calles’ policies against the Church. But the support for the schismatic church also emanated from the synergy with particular local concerns and with the broader agrarian, community autonomy, and popular religion agendas that were widespread in the areas where the schism took hold. Later in the lecture, Butler explored in considerable detail how this schism impacted at different local levels, comparatively examining communities to the north of Mexico City in the valleys of Texcoco and Teotihuacan and rural areas in the Sierra Norte del Puebla and around Veracruz to the south.

You can listen to the full recording of Butler’s lecture on our youtube channel – and please leave us your thoughts in the comments section below.

Liberalism and Religion: Workshop

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The fourth workshop in our series,Liberalism and Religion: Secularisation and the Public Sphere in the Americas, took place on 18 April 2012 in London. The workshop series brings together scholars who work on different parts of the Americas to examine themes related to the history of liberalism in a comparative context.

Following the pattern of previous sessions, the workshop was wholly discussion based: our commentators, Dr Austen Ivereigh (Catholic Voices) and Dr Natalia Sobrevilla Perea (University of Kent), opened the sessions with some reflections and questions about the papers that participants in the workshop had been able to read in advance. Papers were contributed by Prof. Roberto di Stefano (Universidad de Buenos Aires), Dr Trevor Stack (University of Aberdeen), Prof. Ricardo Martínez Esquivel (Universidad de Costa Rica) and Dr Gregorio Alonso (University of Leeds). Download the Programme (18 April) for further details.

The papers and the discussion helped to shine a critical light on several important issues and to highlight research areas that needed further investigation. Overall, the workshop participants emphasised the need to turn away from an oppositional conception of liberalism and religion in the context of Latin American state-building and to understand the overlapping and intertwined spaces that liberalism and Catholicism occupied in the public sphere in the nineteenth century. In addition, several avenues for future research were indicated, including how the relationship, by turns co-operative and conflictive, between liberalism and religion operated within local political and social institutions. Above all, the comparative framework of analysis helped discussants to think about the larger origins and consequences of Church-State conflicts across the region in terms of political discourse, institutional structures, and social identifications.

Download the full conference report for further information. And please leave a reply in the comments section!

Prof. Linda Colley, “Liberties and Empires: Writing Constitutions in the Atlantic World, 1776-1848”

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ISA welcomed a distinguished guest to take part in our Liberalism in the Americas lecture series on 21 March 2012: Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University, Linda Colley. A recording of the lecture, entitled “Liberties and Empires: Writing Constitutions in the Atlantic World, 1776-1848” is available to watch on our youtube channel. There was a big turnout for Colley’s lecture, which was generously co-sponsored by the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies and by the University of London’s John Coffin Memorial Fund.

Colley’s lecture was impressive in its geographic breadth and its depth of analysis of the swift expansion of constitutional practice throughout the Atlantic World, and even beyond. The decades following the American Revolution were marked by an increasingly self-conscious mobilisation of written texts and print culture to inform, display, extend and justify political power around the world, in what Colley referred to as “public and political writing-ness”. One of the core tenets of her argument was to show the multiple contexts within which written constitutions were produced, and the multiple ends to which they were put. In particular, the lecture emphasised the centrality of written constitutions to imperialist projects – American, French, and British – as well as to nation-states; to monarchist systems – in Haiti, Portugal, and Brazil for instance – as well as to republics. With these points, Colley’s lecture echoed conclusions that were made during one of our previous workshops on Liberalism, Monarchy and Empire: Ambiguous Relationships, and the argument put forth by Max Edling in the workshop on Liberal Constitutionalism in the Americas, that the federal constitution of the United States had been designed to strengthen the authority and reach of the central government throughout the union, particularly regarding the settlement of intra-union disputes and the management of international relations.

This perspective was also used to challenge the assumption that British politics was largely unaffected by the wave of constitutionalism and “writing-ness”. On the contrary, Colley pointed to figures such as John Cartwright and Jeremy Bentham who participated in an internationalist dialogue of constitutionalism, penning constitutional proposals for different parts of Europe and Latin America. Much of this activity was underpinned by the assumption that Anglo-Saxons were better equipped to design governing systems and political structures than other peoples, an idea that simultaneously justified and reinforced imperial expansionism on both sides of the Atlantic.Therefore, Colley noted, constitutions, as “engines of improvement and freedom, sometimes merged… with the ambition to manage, control and even invade”.

Colley also identified several fascinating issues that would make productive avenues for future research: in particular, her research has uncovered an extensive body of “amateur” constitution writing across the globe (including a radical figure in New South Wales, who composed a blueprint for a democratic, republican, and imperial Australia in the 1850s), which could yield numerous insights into the transnational circulation of political ideas, local political cultures, print cultures, and alternative visions for political organisation that were on the agenda but never codified into law. Another fruitful avenue Colley suggested was investigating the broader print and literary culture – both elite and popular – of the era, and how constitutions compared to other types of texts designed to inform, reform, control, and demarcate boundaries. This is a particularly important subject given the self-conscious awareness that many constitution-makers of the era had for the “potential of language and texts to mould and to manage”.

Colley’s lecture was followed by an energetic question and answer session. Within this discussion Colley emphasised that, along with many of their contemporaries, British politicians – even as they disavowed constitutionalism proper – recognised that written constitutions were a vital means of legitimising particular political systems, or even particular administrations. This helped to make Colley’s lecture a fitting conclusion to the discussion held earlier in the day at the Liberal Constitutionalism workshop, regarding the central importance of establishing or consolidating legitimacy as a motivation for writing constitutions – a detailed report of this discussion can be downloaded here.

Watch the recording of Linda Colley’s fascinating lecture once more, and please give us your thoughts in the comments section below!

Liberal Constitutionalism in the Americas: Workshop

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On 21 March 2012, we hosted the third in our series of research workshops, on Liberal Constitutionalism in the Americas: Theory and Practice, at Senate House, London. The research workshops bring together scholars working on similar themes in different parts of the Americas in order to shine a comparative light on questions related to the history of liberalism in the region.

These workshops are heavily discussion-based: after our initial workshop in October 2011, we decided to leave out spoken presentations altogether and devote the entire session to discussion, comments, questions and feedback on the written papers that paper contributors submit in advance of the workshop. This has allowed in depth, exploratory discussions for the group to focus on comparative analysis, and I hope that individual paper contributors have also found the detailed focus on their work helpful in redrafting the working papers for future publication.

The Liberal Constitutionalism workshop featured two panels, one on South America, and one the United States and the Atlantic World (see the programme (21 March) for full details), and our paper contributors were: Dr Natalia Sobrevilla Perea (University of Kent), Dr Gabriel Negretto (CIDE, Mexico), Dr Marta Irurozqui (CCHS-CSIC, Madrid), Mr Tom Cutterham (St Hugh’s College, Oxford), Dr Max Edling (Loughborough University), and Prof. Kenneth Maxwell (Retired). We were also very grateful for the participation of Dr Adrian Pearce (KCL) and Dr Erik Mathisen (University of Portsmouth) for their excellent and stimulating contributions as commentators on the two panels.

The discussion focused on many interesting areas, which were greatly enhanced by the comparative focus of the event: the extent of liberal hegemony in the early to mid-nineteenth century; the ability of non-elite actors to participate in and shape constitutional practices; the importance of constitution-making for government and state legitimation; continuity and change in political cultures through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; and the mobility and malleability of liberal constitutionalism throughout the Americas and the Atlantic World. Please see the full report (21 March) for further details, and join the discussion in the comments section!

Roderick Barman, “The Enigma of Liberalism in Imperial Brazil, 1822-1889.”

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Our lecture series, which has to date featured Professors Greg Grandin, Klaus Gallo and David Rock, continued on 10 February 2012 with “The Enigma of Liberalism in Imperial Brazil, 1822-1889” by Roderick Barman, Emeritus Professor of the University of British Columbia. The endurance of monarchy as a political system made Brazil quite unique among the newly independent nations of Latin America in the 19th century, but Barman’s lecture demonstrated that liberalism had a major impact on Brazil during this period and that, in the wider global context, this co-existence of liberalism and monarchy was not so unusual.

Barman began by outlining three essential components of liberalism–the constitution, the nation-state, and the citizen–thus making an important contribution to our ongoing discussions about how we should categorise and define “liberalism” in this research project. Central to this part of Barman’s presentation was the identification not only of the appeal of constitutions, nation-states, and citizens (and thus what made liberalism appealing to various interest groups), but also of the limitations and weaknesses that these fundamental elements of liberalism brought to its adopters.

It was in the tension between the appealing aspects and the limitations of liberalism that Barman located liberalism’s potential synergy with monarchy as a means of reform without jeopardising political order and social stability, not only in Brazil but also in various European states, such as Norway, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro after Napolean’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula was the key factor that led to the development and spread of liberal ideas and goals in Brazil, which were in turn very important in the establishment of an independent Brazil in 1822 and in the design of the 1824 constitution. A liberal-driven experiment in confederate government followed the abdication of Brazil’s first constitutional monarch, Pedro I, in 1831 and, although this experiment largely failed, liberalism remained an important referrent during the reign of Pedro II, who styled himself as a “Citizen King”.

Pedro II’s reign saw the emergence of two broad political parties – Conservative and Liberal – in the 1840s, and he successfully managed political rivalries to lead a stable political order. This was also made possible by the shared support for slavery that the Conservative and Liberal political factions had, and by a period of economic growth in the mid 19th century. In concluding his lecture, Barman identified factors explaining the decline of the constitutional monarchy: a rise in nationalist sentiment not dependent on the person of the monarch; an expansion of state bureaucracy in response to economic development; uncertainty regarding a successor to Pedro II; the abolition movement; and the development of new political philosophies, such as Spencerian Social Darwinism and Positivism, that appealed to the political classes of Brazil.

In a lively questions and discussion period, various members of the audience called on Barman to dwell on the parallels and divergences between Brazil and other parts of the Americas in the 1800s, which further connected his lecture to our ongoing discussions about the comparative impact of liberalism in the Americas. In particular, Alejandra Irigoin raised the issue of the military resources available in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil’s then capital), that other Latin American states lacked in the same period, perhaps aiding the relative stability of the centralist state. Guy Thomson also remarked on the differences between the political systems that liberalism helped to foster in Mexico and Spain, as compared to Brazil: while Barman’s lecture pointed to the position of Brazil’s emperor as the “fourth power”, Thomson outlined how in Mexico and Spain, the municipality–a more local authority–became a “fourth power” of sorts. Tony McCulloch pointed to a further area of intriguing comparison: between Brazil and Canada in their experiences of liberalism and monarchical government. Barman, having lived in Canada for many years, agreed that there were interesting parallels between the two regions, in particular with respect to how, in both countries, patriotism was tied to a synergy of loyalties to a locality or region and to the monarch.

Watch a recording of the lecture and discussion here

Download the text of Barman’s presentation here.

The Multiple Faces of Republicanism, University of Warwick, 20 Jan 2012

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As our recent workshop on Liberalism, Monarchy and Empire: Ambiguous Relationships showed, liberalism did not always, nor necessarily, go hand in hand with republicanism in the Americas in the 19th century. Nevertheless, it was extremely interesting to explore how republican governments, in various different guises, did develop in tandem with liberalism across the continent in a recent symposium at the University of Warwick: “The Multiple Faces of Republicanism: Democracy, Constitutionalism and
Popular Politics in the Hispanic world, 1824-1873”.

Organised by Jordi Roca Vernet, Guy Thomson and Francisco Eissa-Barroso, all members of the Department of History at Warwick, this symposium took place on 20 January 2012 and featured a packed programme and vibrant discussion. As suggested by the participation of several members of the “Liberalism in the Americas” network–including Guy Thomson, Will Fowler, Gregorio Alonso, and Alan Knight–there were numerous points of intersection with our interests in the Liberalism project. In particular,  Thomson and Anthony McFarlane both explored the continued appeal of monarchism, reflecting on many of the same issues that were explored in our workshop on 10 February. Moreover, Gregorio Alonso and Manuel Suárez Cortina both discussed the relationship between Church and State, and tensions between religion and politics in the public sphere, issues that we also intend to assess in our 18 April workshop, “Liberalism and Religion: Secularisation and the Public Sphere in the Americas”. Indeed, we look forward to Alonso’s participation in this event!

Jordi Roca Vernet, meanwhile, discussed the transformation of public space and the public sphere at the turn of the nineteenth century in a transatlantic context, and José Antonio Aguilar Rivera outlined how political thought in Spanish America was part of a broader transatlantic and transnational exchange of ideas. Again, this interest in the transnational dimension of political culture intersected with one of the major research themes of the Liberalism in the Americas project. Tentatively planned to take place in 2013 or 2014, we are designing an international conference on the theme of “Travelling and Translated Liberalisms” with a particular interest in how ideas circulated between North America and Latin America, and how ideas circulated between different parts of Latin America.

Also pointing to one of the research themes central to the future development of the Liberalism project was Will Fowler’s paper on “Popular Liberalism and the Nineteenth-Century Mexican pronunciamiento“. Growing out of his extended research project on Mexican pronunciamientos (which has yielded an extremely useful digital database, as well as numerous publications), this paper challenged the traditional view that this form of protest or petition was centred in elite politicking, by showing how local and popular concerns could be incorporated into some pronunciamientos. The Liberalism project is similarly interested in how non-elite actors engaged with liberal ideas and institutions, such as citizenship, the constitution, elections and so on. Some of these “popular” engagements with liberalism will be addressed in our next workshop on 21 March, “Liberal Constitutionalism in the Americas: Theory and Practice”, and our future programme of events also includes an international conference on “Indigenous and Popular Liberalisms in the Americas,” (to take place in 2013/2014) examining the similarities and differences in the political strategies and identities developed by a range of non-elite actors.

There’s plenty of other related projects and conferences going on in the near future, many of which come out of the bicentennial anniversary of the Cádiz constitution of 1812, which had a major influence on political cultures across the Hispanic World. Visit our useful links page for more information!

David Rock, Liberalism in Argentina and Mexico: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives

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On 5 December 2011, we were delighted to host a lecture by the esteemed Professor of Latin American History, David Rock (University of California, Santa Barbara), entitled “Liberalism in Argentina and Mexico: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives.” He engaged with the comparative ambitions of our project by using selected contrasts from Mexico’s experiences with liberalism to throw into clearer focus the distinctive and particular aspects of Argentine liberalism. In a dynamic discussion session after his paper, Rock answered questions for nearly an hour and spoke to many of the important issues that have shaped our research agenda on the Liberalism in the Americas project.

Recalling Tulio Halperín Donghi’s maxim that Argentina was “born liberal,” Rock began by pointing out that for this to be the case, a period of “pregnancy” must have occurred, and discussed the pre-Independence trading relations that Buenos Aires developed with British merchants as evidence of this, and as a possible distinguishing feature of Argentina from many other Latin American countries. In terms of economic liberalism, at least, Rock argued that liberal policies were implemented, first in Buenos Aires, and then in other parts of the future nation-state of Argentina, with a comparative lack of opposition and contestation. In Mexico, by contrast, significant interest groups–primarily the Catholic Church, and the indigenous peasantry–posed strong opposition to successive attempts by liberal reformers to eradicate communal landholding practices.

In political terms, Rock contended that the essential liberal criterion was the presence of representative government and, in this regard, Argentina’s relationship with political liberalism was less straightforward than with economic liberalism. Although independent Mexico’s periods of monarchical rule (which will be explored by Erika Pani in our next research workshop Liberalism, Monarchy and Empire: Ambiguous Relationships) might again suggest that Mexico’s experience with political liberalism was more contested than Argentina’s, Rock outlined the existence of a “second tradition”  that opposed liberalism throughout modern Argentine history. In various different eras, disparate movements (Rosismo, nacionalismo, Peronismo) emerged to challenge the individualist elements of liberalism, whether through a clientelist political culture, corporate structures like trade unionism, or an organic vision of collective society such as nationalism.

In the extended discussion following Rock’s paper, among the most interesting issues were: how Latin American ideologies are formed from national, international, local, popular and elite influences; the political and economic struggles between the centre and the regions in the process of nation-building; the relationship between liberalism and nation-building, with the “civilising” agenda within liberal ideology being a strong impulse behind nation-building; and the relationship between liberalism and democracy. During his paper, Rock stressed the importance of representation to the existence of political liberalism and this issue was central to the later discussion of the extent of the connections between liberalism and democracy, on which no consensus was reached. By a happy coincidence, we will be returning to these very issues in our next events in February 2012: a research workshop on Liberalism, Monarchy and Empire: Ambiguous Relationships and a public lecture by Roderick Barman (UBC): “The Enigma of Liberalism in Imperial Brazil.”

In the meantime, let us know your thoughts on David Rock’s lecture in the comments section!