Description
Book SynopsisIn the wake of independence, Spanish American leaders perceived the colonial past as looming over their present. Crafting a Republic for the World examines how the vibrant post-colonial public sphere in Colombia invented narratives of the Spanish colonial legacy.
Trade Review"In
Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia, Lina del Castillo offers a glimpse into the process of transforming Colombia into an Andean-Atlantic nation."—Sharika D. Crawford,
Latin American Research Review"This ambitious and invigorating book will incite discussion for years to come. It sets an important precedent for describing nineteenth-century Latin America as a period of immense political, economic, scientific, and even cultural creativity rather than as a period consumed by caudillismo, corruption, and political fragmentation. . . . The book is tremendously successful."—Fidel J. Tavárez,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History“This is the rare scholarly work that will make valuable contributions to not just one but three historical fields: the political history of republicanism, the cultural history of nineteenth-century mentalités, and the global history of science.”—James E. Sanders, professor of history at Utah State University
“Lina del Castillo’s work deepens our understanding of nineteenth-century Latin America as part of the vanguard of democracy.”—Rebecca Earle, professor of history at the University of Warwick
“Deeply researched and innovative,
Crafting a Republic for the World shows how nineteenth-century Colombians invented the notion of colonial legacies and how this notion was essential to the creation of a new science of republicanism. An inspiring account of how ideas about the past shape politics and policy!”—Marixa Lasso, associate professor of history at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia
“According to Del Castillo’s sharp and provocative analysis, Colombia’s oft-cited ‘colonial legacy’ was actually a nineteenth-century construct, one that has far outlived its early republican creators as an explanatory framework for all that is wrong with modern Latin America.
Crafting a Republic for the World will spark scholarly debate by forcing us to rethink this legacy
.”—Nancy Appelbaum, professor of history at Binghamton University, SUNY
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Postcolonial Inventions of Spanish American Colonial Legacies
Chapter 1. Gran Colombian Print Culture and the Erasure of the Spanish Enlightenment
Chapter 2. A Political Economy of Circulation
Chapter 3. Calculating Equality and the Postcolonial Reproduction of the Colonial State
Chapter 4. Political Ethnography and the Colonial in the Postcolonial Mind
Chapter 5. Constitutions and Political Geographies Harness Universal Manhood Suffrage
Chapter 6. Civic Religion vs. the Catholic Church and the Ending of a Republican Project
Conclusion: A Continental Postcolonial Colombia Challenges the Latin Race Idea
Notes
Bibliography
Index
