This book traces the impact of exile in the formation of independent republics in Chile and the Río de la Plata in the decades after independence. Exile was central to state and nation formation, playing a role in the emergence of territorial borders and Romantic notions of national difference, while creating a transnational political culture that spanned the new independent nations. Analyzing the mobility of a large cohort of largely elite political émigrés from Chile and the Río de la Plata across much of South America before 1862, Edward Blumenthal reinterprets the political thought of well-known figures in a transnational context of exile. As Blumenthal shows, exile was part of a reflexive process in which elites imagined the nation from abroad while gaining experience building the same state and civil society institutions they considered integral to their republican nation-building projects.

During the 18th century, visitors would come and attend the British Parliament sessions in order to understand how a representative assembly could technically function, because politics is not only about ideas, but also a lot about practices and techniques. A great deal has been written on the circulation of political ideas during the 19th century, and on the part played by exiles, refugees and military volunteers in this intellectual mobility. However, less is known of what constitutes, in the end, politics: not only ideas, but practices, the material implementation of politics. How does one debate, vote, or demonstrate? What is political representation? How does one “start” a political party, and run it? All the political engineering, of the 19th century, the period of the birth of modern politics, has been the result of an intense circulation of exiles, which, along with bringing in new ideas, borrowed new ways of “making politics”. This is what this book contemplates through a wide range of examples showing how exile turned out to be, during the century of the revolutions, the laboratory of a new political grammar and of political practices resulting in the cross-fertilization between host countries and exiled communities.

Recasting the Nation in Twentieth-Century Argentina tackles the meaning of "the nation" by looking to the geographical, ideological, and political peripheries of society. What it means to be Argentine has long consumed writers, political leaders, and many others. For almost two centuries prominent figures have defined national values while looking out from the urban centers of the country and above all Buenos Aires. They have described the nation in terms of urban experience and, secondarily, by surrounding frontiers; they have focused on the country’s European heritage and advanced an entangled vision of race and space. The chapters in this book take a dynamic new approach. While scholars and political leaders have routinely ignored the country’s many peripheries, the Argentine nation cannot be reasonably understood without them. Those on the margins also defined core tenets of the nation. This volume will be vital reading for those interested in how Latin American societies emerged over the past two centuries and for those curious about how ideas outside of the mainstream come to define national identities.

Reveals new connections between war, revolution and forced migration in an era usually associated with a quest for liberty.

Latin America is a region made up of multiple states with a diversity of races, ethnicities, and cultures. In 'Transnational Perspectives on Latin America', Luis Roniger argues that a regional perspective is significant for understanding this part of the Western hemisphere. He claims that geopolitical, sociological, and cultural trends molded a contiguity of influences, shaping a transnational arena of connected histories, cross-border interactions, and shared visions, complementing the process of separate nation-state formation.--

The book investigates and compares the role of artistic and academic refugees from National Socialism acting as "cultural mediators" or "agents of knowledge" between their origin and host societies. By doing so, it locates itself at the intersection of the recently emerging field of the history of knowledge, transnational history, migration, exile, as well as cultural transfer studies. The case studies provided in this volume are of global scope, focusing on routes of escape and migration to Iceland, Italy, the Near East, Portugal and Shanghai, and South-, Central-, and North America. The chapters examine the hybrid ways refugees envisaged, managed, organized, and subsequently mediated their migrations. It focuses on how they dealt with their escape in their art and science. The chapters ask how the emigrants located themselves––did they associate with ethnic, religious, and/or cultural affiliations, specific social classes, or specific parts of society—and how such identifications were portrayed in their knowledge transfer and cultural translations. Building on such possible avenues for research, this volume aims to offer a global analysis of the multifarious processes not only of cultural translation and knowledge transfer affecting culture, sciences, networks, but also everyday life in different areas of the world.

The Yearbook of Transnational History is dedicated to disseminating pioneering research in the field of transnational history. This fourth volume is focused to the theme of exile. Authors from across the historical discipline provide insights into central aspects of research into the phenomenon of exile in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Both centuries have seen large numbers of people fleeing revolutions, oppression, persecution, and extermination. This volume is the first publication to provide a comprehensive overview over exiles of various political and ethnic groups beginning with the French Revolution and ending with the transfer of Nazi scientists from post-World-War-II Germany to the United States. This volume contains contributions about the refugees created by the French Revolution, the Forty-Eighters who were forced out of Germany after the failed Revolution of 1848/49, the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Vietnamese anti-colonial activists in France, the exiles of Nazi Germany, and the transfer of Nazi scientists such as Wernher von Braun to the United States after World War II.

This book provides the first English translation of Argirópolis (1850) by the Argentine Domingo F. Sarmiento, one of the most important political and cultural figures of nineteenth-century Latin America. Argirópolis proposes the union of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay into the United States of South America or the United States of the Río de la Plata, with a capital on Martín García island. It anticipates some aspects of the continent’s future, such as the formation of Mercosur (the Southern Common Market) in 1991. Argirópolis explores politics, modernity, and nation formation, making Sarmiento’s treatise one of Argentina and Latin America’s most relevant programmatic texts. Presented alongside a critical introduction that situates the essay in its historical and political contexts, this translation allows English-speaking readers to explore nineteenth-century Latin American perspectives on concepts such as the nation-state, sovereignty, progress, space, and modernity.

The growth of institutional capacity in the developing world has become a central theme in twenty-first-century social science. Many studies have shown that public institutions are an important determinant of long-run rates of economic growth. This book argues that to understand the difficulties and pitfalls of state building in the contemporary world, it is necessary to analyze previous efforts to create institutional capacity in conflictive contexts. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the process of state and nation building in Latin America and Spain from independence to the 1930s. The book examines how Latin American countries and Spain tried to build modern and efficient state institutions for more than a century - without much success. The Spanish and Latin American experience of the nineteenth century was arguably the first regional stage on which the organizational and political dilemmas that still haunt states were faced. This book provides an unprecedented perspective on the development and contemporary outcome of those state and nation-building projects.

How was anti-communism organised in the West? This book covers the agents, aims, and arguments of various transnational anti-communist activists during the Cold War. Existing narratives often place the United States – and especially the CIA – at the centre of anti-communist activity. The book instead opens up new fields of research transnationally.