CRAFTING A REPUBLIC FOR THE WORLD: SCIENTIFIC,

GEOGRAPHIC, AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL INVENTIONS OF

COLOMBIA (NEBRASKA, 2018)

LINA DEL CASTILLO

(University of Texas-Austin)

INTRODUCTION
There were no colonial legacies in Spanish America. This book is about them.
It tells the tale of nineteenth-century Spanish Americans whose remarkable creativity
and deep engagement with on-the-ground realities allowed them to craft a republic
that the world would seek to emulate. Their creativity was inspired by the socio-
political and spatial revolutions unleashed by Spanish American independence and
early processes of republican state formation. Spanish Americans marshaled in new
histories, new sciences, and new geographies that offered radical new ways of
understanding the past and that would allow them to propel economic development
and manage how territorial sovereignty would intersect with individual sovereignty in
their present and future republics. This story has long been buried under enduring
narratives of 19th century chaos, colonial legacies, Liberal versus Conservative
caudillos, and aloof, disconnected elites that preferred Euro-centric models to local
needs and realities.

Consider, for instance, the sheer volume of influential monographs and

undergraduate history textbooks that emphasize the persistence of Latin Americas
colonial legacies. These legacies, we are told, joined the contradictions inherent to
elite adoptions of foreign 19th-century ideas like liberalism, and produced entrenched
patterns of underdevelopment and dependency.1 The result was a Poverty of
Progress that implicitly revealed a Poverty of Theory among 19th-century historical
actors.2 Scholarship continues to uncritically consume a historical construct of Latin

1 Stanley Stein and Barbara Stein, The Colonial heritage of Latin America (1970); Jeremy Adelman, ed.,
Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History (1999); Anbal Quijano, Amrica
Latina en la economa mundial, Problemas del desarrollo 24: 5-18 (1993); Emilia Viotti da Costa, The
Brazilian Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Roberto Schwartz and Victor Bulmer-
Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (Cambridge, 1995, 2004, 2014);
Raymond Williams, The Columbia Guide to the Latin American Novel Since 1945 (Columbia University
Press, 2007). Thomas C. Wright, Latin America since Independence: Two Centuries of Continuity and Change
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2017); Marshall Eakin, The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures (New
York: St Martins Griffin, 2007); Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependencia y
desarrollo en Amrica Latina (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1969); Ramn Grosfoguel, Developmentalism,
Modernity, and Dependency Theory in Latin America, in Nepantla: Views from South 1:2 (2000): 347-
374.
2 E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (UC Press, 1980).

1
America as a region stymied by intractable Spanish colonial legacies of intellectual
intolerance, racism, political absolutism, and capitalist dependency.

This book argues that, if it were not for the deep cultural work carried out by
19 century Spanish Americans like those considered here, the very category of
th

colonial legacies would not exist. But the kind of legacies Spanish Americans
invented did not cede the creation of key political and scientific categories to
Europe. They saw themselves as emerging from imperial structures, not nation
states. As inheritors of polycentric empires, the margin-periphery dichotomy made no
sense.3 This was the framework within which early-to-mid 19th century Spanish
Americans committed themselves to a republican-liberal project that actively invented
an array of narratives about what the colonial legacy meant, what it entailed, and how
it needed to be addressed. And yet, distinct inventions of the colonial legacy drove
folks to do battle in the voting booth, on the battlefield, in courtrooms and legislative
chambers, on Church altars, in classrooms, and in the court of public opinion. These
struggles reflected Spanish American efforts to define the global meaning of
republicanism and how it should be expressed territorially, constitutionally, and
culturally. There was no actual colonial legacy that hamstrung 19th-century state
formation outside of the language-discourse and the sociological imagination that
these historical actors unleashed. The colonial period is, in a sense, a liberal-era
invention.

A second related contribution of this book is its focused demonstration of how

19 -century elites were, in fact, profoundly engaged with the deep, revolutionary
th

transformations occurring in the region. I demonstrate their engagement with local

realities by first tracing out the spaces of sociability where party leaders found
common ground. Leaders from across the political spectrum interacted with each
other not only in the halls of Congress and provincial legislatures, but also in scientific
societies. Only a handful of scholars have explored mid-19th century Latin American
scientific societies, and when they do, they tend to offer only a passing and often-
dismissive reference, arguing they were largely unsuccessful derivatives of European
models.4 That dismissive tone is in part due to historical actors who trivialized cross-

3On a similar critique of post-colonial for ceding the category of the West (democracy,
capitalism, liberalism, and modernity itself) to Europe and for dividing the post-colonial into
centers and peripheries, imperial metropoles and colonial peripheries, see Frederick Cooper,
Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (UC Press, 2005). See also Mark Thurner,
History's Peru: The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography (U Florida Press, 2011)

4Safford, The Ideal of the Practical; Snchez, Gobierno y geografa; Loaiza Cano, Manuel Anczar y su poca;
Diana Obregn, La sociedad de naturalists neogranadinos y la tradicin cientfica.
2
party spaces of sociability when reflecting on the mid-19th century from their late 19th
century position of deeply entrenched political party strife.5 My book centers on how
scientific sociability produced a remarkable consensus among historical actors that
included lawyers, merchants, government officials, military engineers, religious leaders,
architects, naturalists, journalists, and educators. They agreed that the republic needed
to find ways to foment circulation by dismantling blockages supposedly produced
during the period of monarchical rule. They argued that the republic needed to engage
in a sustained scientific effort to know and map the national territory and the people
and resources it contained. This book shows how spaces that facilitated elite
consensus -- regardless of political party or regional origins -- were instrumental in
dismantling and repressing those social movements that sought to further the interests
of popular sectors. From this perspective, historiographical interpretations about
long-standing ideological divides between Liberal versus Conservative party leaders
that were rooted in the period of independence, and that were disconnected from
local realities, begin to lose their explanatory power.6

This is not to say that conflict and contention did not occur among Spanish
American intellectuals and government officials. Of course they did. But those
contests were less about entrenched ideological differences than manifestations of
elite efforts to mobilize and bargain with popular sectors, hoping they would go to the
voting booth or onto the battlefield.7 Consider, for instance, the historiographical
truism that posits a Liberal-Conservative split over questions of centralism versus
federalism.8 The territorial and constitutional changes of the mid-19th century are
much more interesting when seen from the vantage point of ideological consensus
and engagement with realities on the ground. Rather than resulting from a Liberal
push towards federalism versus a Conservative push towards centralism, we should
understand these fundamental territorial and constitutional changes and concomitant
political party strife in terms of how Liberals and Conservatives were focused on

5 Jos Manuel Restrepo, Historia de la Nueva Granada, Bogot 1963, Vol. II, 71-72.
6 Lpez-Alves, State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810-1900 (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2000); Vincent C. Peloso, Barbara Tenenbaum, Liberals, Politics, and Power: State Formation in
Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Elizabeth Dore and
Maxine Molyneux, Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2000); Hosbawm, Eric. 1990. La revolucin in R. Porter and Me Teich, eds., La revolucin en
la historia, 16-70. Barcelona: Editorial Crtica; Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented
Land, Divided Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
7 Sanders, Contentious Republicans.
8 Tulio Halpern Donghi, The Contemporary History of Latin America, edited and translated by John
Charles Chasteen (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Howard J. Wiarda and Harvey Kline,
Latin American Politics and Development (Boulder: Westview Press, 2014); Ronald Schneider, Comparative
Latin American Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 2010).
3
figuring out ways to expand the circulation of people, products, and ideas while
controlling political participation.

New Granada offers an illuminating case in point. Greater circulation required

greater participation in the republic by peoples in far-flung, often difficult to reach
regions. The nineteen New Granada provinces of 1832 that had a voice in the
national Congress, and whose representatives elected the President, mushroomed into
thirty-six provinces from 1845-1853. This transformation occurred at a moment when
space, not individuals, carried political rights. The result was a marked expansion of
political participation by people in newly enfranchised spaces. Newly minted
municipalities within the new provinces brought to political office folks whose
kinship networks had previously been excluded from the national scene. These new
political players saw allies in the Liberal Party, founded in 1848, precisely because the
bulk of the new territorial divisions occurred under the first president to run on a
Liberal Party ticket. Members of the Conservative Party, for their part, began to see
how they and their kingship networks were losing political ground. The political rights
afforded to the newly formed provinces and municipalities that favored the Liberal
Party needed to be quashed. With that goal in mind, Conservatives enthusiastically
embraced the most radical liberal republican measure at the time: universal manhood
suffrage. Once universal manhood suffrage passed via New Granadas 1853
constitution, in the wake of the abolition of slavery in 1851, the floodgates opened for
competition between the recently formed political parties to mobilize newly
enfranchised citizens to vote. Competition spilled over into the battlefield, unleashing
the Civil War of 1854, one driven more by popular sectors than party elites. Party
leaders soon realized they needed to reach consensus to reign in violence and
instability, and spaces of scientific sociability facilitated this consensus building. One
result was that by 1855, the many municipalities of the thirty-six provinces were
subsumed into nine overarching, sovereign, centralizing states. Political party
influence in each of these states was negotiated among elites and territorialized. By
1863, these states developed their own constitutional limits on individual suffrage
rights without fear of a challenge by the national government.

In short, although competition clearly existed between political parties when it

came time to mobilize popular sectors, the differences between party leaders were not
primarily ideological. Furthermore, party leaders also were deeply engaged with the
effects that their experiments with republicanism had on the ground. Violence,
inequality, questions of sovereignty, circulation of trade, civil wars, slavery,
emancipation, struggles over land held in common by indigenous communities, and
the role of the Catholic Church in state formation are central to my analysis precisely
because of the ways intellectuals and government officials grappled with these realities
and their implications.
4
 The third related aim of the book is to show how, by the mid-19th century,
Spanish American experiments with republicanism had no models to follow. From
their perspective, neither the ossified aristocratic regimes of Europe, nor the racist
antebellum United States had been able to produce political and racial equality
through republicanism.9 Spanish Americans had reason to believe that their republican
experiments were on the vanguard of political modernity.10 To best experiment with
political modernity, Spanish Americans turned to science.

This book demonstrates how the language of 19th-century science permeated

the thinking, methods, and practices that experimentally sought to craft a modern
republic for the world. I am less concerned with artisans and their role in state
formation, although popular artisans do form part of this story.11 Instead, the
crafting explored here underscores the material culture and practical handiwork that
was central to the production of early to mid 19th-century scientific knowledge. A
growing body of literature by historians of science and medicine has underscored the
craft of scientific discoveries.12 I build on studies that show how this crafting was
critical for time when there was a lack of disciplinary coherence to the diverse sciences
that Spanish American intellectuals and government officials developed for the
purposes of republican governance.13

Here it might be worth clarifying how this book engages with postcolonial and
subaltern histories of science. Postcolonial histories of science may elaborate nuanced
theoretical positions seeking to blur dichotomies through the notion of hybridities,
but in practice these works have actually produced dichotomous narratives of
west/non-west, subaltern/elite, center/periphery, local/global etc. 14More importantly,
they have ceded categories like Western Civilization, centers of calculation,

9 Michel Gobat, The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism,

Democracy, and Race, American Historical Review 118:5 (Dec. 2013), 1345-75.
10 James Sanders, The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in
Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). For popular royalism, see
Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution.
11 Iigo Garca-Bryce, Crafting the Republic: Limas Artisans and Nation Building in Peru, 1821-1879
(University of New Mexico Press, 2004).
12 Suman Seth, Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory (MIT press, 2010); Joan
F. Fujimura, Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1996); Kenton Kroker, Pauline Margaret Hidson Mzumdar, Jenifer E Keelan,
Crafting Immunity: Working Histories of Clinical Immunology (Ashgate, 2008).
13 Maria Portuondo, Constructing a Narrative: The History of Science and Technology in Latin
America, History Compass 7 No 2 (2009): 500-522.
14 Harding, The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader;; Arnold, Colonizing the Body and Prakash,
Another Reason
5
reason, and enlightenment as the limited creation of societies that happen to be
located in the North Atlantic.15 Critics like Fredrick Cooper have questioned the
underlying assumptions of the contemporary post-colonial by demonstrating how
attempts to provincialize Europe in effect rendered invisible the processes of global
co-creations in which colonies were as important as imperial metropoles in the
invention of categories such as citizenship, reason, ecological domination, capitalism,
industrialization, and unions.16 The post-colonials studied here operated outside of
dichotomous understandings; they saw themselves as creators of modernity and
republicanism. The creators of these new, autochthonous sciences, historical writings,
and geographic practices did not envision these productions as peripheral forms of
knowledge that occurred far from important centers of calculation. They instead
affirmed that these forms of knowledge production were proper to a Spanish
American republic on the cusp of becoming the model other places needed to
emulate. The forms of knowledge production and practices examined by this book
include: the land survey techniques developed specifically for New Granada efforts to
map, measure, and distribute indigenous lands held in common; mid-century political
ethnographies documenting New Granada popular culture in the provinces; the
emergence of New Granadas science of constitutionalism and political
administration; and the geographic writings, texts, and maps produced of New
Granada provinces.

Although the historiography on colonial and postcolonial science from the

periphery has so far largely missed this dimension to New Granada science, this
body of scholarship nevertheless is now in a position to recognize it. Scholars have
long argued that there is no such a thing as periphery.17 We now know that all modern
sciences were co-created by centers and peripheries through forms of transnational
accumulation of information produced through the work of invisible technicians and
centers of calculation.18 This historiographical trend acknowledges that excellence
was not just the monopoly of metropolitan centers of calculation.19 And yet, studies
that examine examples of scientific excellence on the periphery are few and they are
generally predicated on competitive geographic advantage; rarely could such practices

15 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture.

16 Cooper, Colonialism in Question.
17 The center-periphery model for Latin American history of science was offered by scholars such as
George Basalla, The Spread of Western Science, Science, 156 (1967): 611-622. For critiques see:
David Wade Chambers, Locality and Science: Myths of Center and Periphery, in Alejandro
Lafuente, A. Elena, and M.L. Ortega (eds). Mundializacin de la ciencia y cultura nacional (Madrid:
Doce Calles, 1991, 605-18.
18 Shapin, The Invisible Technician, American Scientist 77, No 6 (November-December 1989): 554-
563.
19 Latour, Science in Action.

6
be replicated elsewhere.20 The sciences explored in this study do not fit this model.
The men that developed the sciences of republican nation building in New Granada
believed others could emulate their scientific practices and disciplines. And they
were.21

Spanish American elites nevertheless saw their path towards modernity as

riddled with the obstacles of the past. The spatial order that would structure the newly
emerging republican system and the historical narratives that legitimated both became
prime sites of experimentation. New histories and original contributions to scientific
practices, including geography, cartography, land surveying, ethnography,
constitutional science, sociology, and the calculation of equity through land reform
would pinpoint remnants of the colonial legacy and root out colonialisms adverse
effects. These phenomena occurred throughout Spanish America. To highlight the
spatially grounded dimensions of these revolutions, this book takes as a case in point
the generations of Bogot-centered elites, who were not necessarily from Bogot, but
who developed these sciences of the republican vanguard from that capital city.
Regional and national elites believed that Bogot was ideally positioned to foment the
circulation of people, technology, goods, capital, and ideas. But from 1821-1863,
Bogot served as the capital city of at least four different republics, each with its own
distinct constitutional and territorial configurations. A few words on Colombias
constitutional, territorial, and economic changes may therefore help situate the reader
in the fast-paced transformations considered in this book.

The first Republic of Colombia (1821-1831) proposed a centralizing

constitutional order to facilitate the mobilization of troops and resources needed to
establish independence for a vast territory encompassing the former Captaincy
General of Venezuela and the former Viceroyalty of New Granada (roughly todays
Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, and parts of Guiana and Brazil). Bogot
became the default capital city during these moments of instability, when sovereignty
by the pueblos was nevertheless still up for grabs.22 When the threat of Spanish
Reconquista abated by 1826, cities chafing under Bogotas rule, like Valencia, Caracas
and Quito, pulled away from that first Gran Colombian Republic. The republics of
Ecuador, Venezuela and New Granada (roughly todays Colombia and Panama)
emerged in its wake. Bogotas role as capital city for New Granada from the 1830s-

20 Gootenberg, A Forgotten Case of Scientific Excellence on the Periphery; The Nationalist

Cocaine Science of Alfredo Bignon, 1884-1887, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 1
(Jan 2007): 202-232.
21 Juan Jos Saldaa, Science and Freedom: Science and Technology as a Policy of the New
American States, in Science in Latin America: A History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).
22 Gabriel Paquette, The Dissolution of the Spanish Atlantic Monarchy, The Historical Journal 52,
no. 1 (Mar. 2009): 175-212.
7
1850s oscillated between that of a centripetal force drawing the regions in towards
Bogotas sphere of political control, to that of a circulatory mechanism that diffused
economic and political power to other regional capitals.23 By 1858, this regional, city-
driven process created the short-lived Confederacin Granadina, or Granadian
Confederacy, which only lasted as long as the civil war that tore it apart. Nine new
states emerged in its wake to form a federal pact launching the United States of
Colombia in 1863 that lasted until 1886.

These dynamic constitutional and territorial changes are suggestive of the

dramatic social-political and economic transformations that occurred in Colombia
during the first half of the nineteenth century. Available economic histories tend to
examine the latter half of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, when Colombia
was more firmly engaged as an exporter of coffee and other commodities.24 These
works together with the precious few studies that emphasize the first half of the 19th
century critically depend on the sources produced by the provincial government
functionaries, lawyers, merchants, religious leaders, diplomats, writers, military
engineers, and government officials considered here.25 The economic picture that
emerges from these studies tends to show economic segmentation and stagnation for
reasons similar to those given by 19th-century historical actors. In part that is because
Colombias geographic terrain was and is undeniably significant in shaping economic,
social, cultural, and political patterns and movements.26 The massive Andean
mountain range that splits into three cordilleras and is divided by two deep river

23 Claudia Paola Ruiz Gutierrez, La gnesis del federalismo en la Nueva Granada: debate y prctica
de la descentralizacin a mediados del siglo XIX: 1848-1863 PhD dissertation El Colegio de
Mxico, Centro de Estudios Histricos.
24 William Paul McGreevey, An Economic History of Colombia, 1845-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge Latin
American Studies, 2008); Marco Palacios, Coffee in Colombia, 1850-1970: An economic, social and political
history (Cambridge: Cambridge Latin American Studies, 1980); Jos Antonio Ocampo, Caf, industria y
macroeconoma: ensayos de historia econmica colombiana (Bogot: Ediciones Fondo de Cultura Econmica,
2015); Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875-2002 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006); Charles Berquist, Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886-1910 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1986); Catherine LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia,
1850-1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986); and Jane Rausch, Colombia:
Territorial Rule and the Llanos Frontier (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999); Fabio Snchez,
Antonella Fazio vargas, Mara del Pilar Lpez-Uribe, Land conflict, property rights, and the rise of the export
economy in Colombia, 1850-1925 (Bogota: CEDE Universidad de los Andes, 2008).
25 Joshua M. Rosenthal, Salt and the Colombian State: Local Society and Regional Monopoly in Boyac, 1821-
1900 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Pilar Lpez-Bejarano, Un estado a
crdito:deudas y configuracin estatal de la Nueva Granada en la primera mitad del siglo XIX (Bogot: Editorial
Pontificia UniversiddaJaveriana, 2015); Heraclio Bonilla (ed), Consequencias econmicas de la independencia
(Bogot: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2012).
26 Ulrich Oslender, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
8
valleys, the Cauca and the Madgalena, produces remarkable climatic variation, but also
makes overland travel difficult. Considerable international debt incurred during the
period of independence had the effect of exacerbating conditions of fragmentation,
stagnation, and poverty. Efforts to privatize communal land holding had a
transformative effect on indigenous communities and on properties held in mortmain
by the Catholic Church.27 The gradual transition towards the abolition of slavery also
transformed the economy and thousands of lives.28 Finally, although a somewhat
smaller segment of the national economy, the economic lives of artisans played a
significant role in urban politics in Bogot and at the national level.29 Throughout this
period, the Panamanian isthmus tantalizingly promised easy connections between the
Atlantic and Pacific, and as a result played an important role in the territorial and
constitutional logic of the republic at midcentury. Although beyond the scope of this
study, international interests in canal building together with internal strife culminated
in Panamas independence from Colombia by 1903.30

Structure
Six thematically and temporally interlinked chapters explore the consensus,
continuities, and contentions that drove the dramatic territorial, constitutional, and
socio-political changes that shaped Colombia during the first half of the 19th century.
Each chapter reconstructs how different groups of Spanish Americans turned to
geography, historical writing, and innovative scientific discourses to invent discrete
colonial legacies, and, in doing so, legitimate claims to rule and enact policy.
Educators, intellectuals, government officials, and religious leaders deployed what
they understood to be modern scientific technologies to either root out negative
colonial legacies or to enhance those legacies of Spanish culture and Catholicism that
lent morality and inclusiveness to a developing Spanish American republicanism.31

27 Garca-Mejia, The transformation of the Indian communities; Fernando Daz Daz, Estado, iglesia y
desamortizacin, in Manual de historia de Colombia, 2nd ed 3 vols. Bogota: Instituto Colombiano de
Cultura, 1982 vol 2: 413-66.
28 Jason MacGraw, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation struggle for
citizenship (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014) and Jorge Andrs Tovar Mora
and Hermes Tovar Pinzn, El oscuro camino de la libertad: los eslavos en Colombia, 1821-1851
(Bogot:Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economa, 2009).
29 David Sowell, Early Colombian Labor Movement: Artisans and Politics in Bogot, 1832-1919
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
30 Aims McGuiness, Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (Ithaca: Cornell Universisty
Press, 2008).
31 Rebecca Earle, Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810-1930 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007). See also Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, El pensamiento colombiano en el siglo XIX,
4th edition (Mexico: Alfaomega Grupo editor, 2001).
9
 The first chapter agues officials of the first Colombian Republic deployed print
culture as a technology to erase past foundations. Print culture was relatively new to
Spanish America by the 1820s.32 Before then, communities of governance were
imagined through the circulation of manuscripts.33 The chapter underscores, how, at a
time when independence was still up for grabs, republican officials deployed print
culture to found a republic that was a complete departure from Spanish colonial rule.
Examining early republican erasures of historical memory deepens our understanding
of the role the press played in the invention of nations.34 Colombian officials edited,
re-framed, and re-printed the writings of Creole savants that had been active during
the early period of independence, and had been executed by the Spanish Reconquista
armies. These men, prior to execution, had joined the hundreds of naturalists,
mineralogists, military engineers, and botanists who participated in the massive
Bourbon project of reform and information gathering through botanical expeditions,
coastal soundings, mappings, and centralization of archives.35 Yet, in the hands of
republican officials, Creole savants stood alone. Their executions proved the Spanish
Monarchy was obscurantist and deemed enlightened knowledge dangerous. One
figure stood out in these early republican narratives: Francisco Jos de Caldas. Rather
than demonstrating how Caldas was simply member of an entire community of
interpretation and learning, the executed, martyred Caldas became the patriotic father
of Colombian geography whose original contributions were extinguished by the
Spanish Crown.36 The chapter also signals a second and related kind of historical
manufacturing that emerged during this period through the juxtaposition of Caldas
with editorial commentary. Historians have recently demonstrated how the 1808-1815
dissolution of Spains Spanish Atlantic Monarchy had at its core the territorial logic of

32 Rebecca Earle, Information and Disinformation in Late Colonial New Granada, The Americas
54, no. 2 (1997): 167-84.
33 Thomas B.F. Cummins, Emily A. Engel, Barbara Anderson, and Juan M Ossio (eds) Manuscript
Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches (Los Angeles: The Getty Research
Institute, 2014).
34 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 1991); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1995).
35 Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic
Enlightenment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); Raymond Craib, Cartography and
Power in the Conquest and Creation of New Spain, Latin American Research Review 35, No. 1 (2000):
7-36; Jorge Caizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and
Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stamford: Stamford University Press, 2001); Neil
Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2008); Juan Pimentel, La fsica de la monarqua: ciencia y poltica en el pensamiento de
Alejandro Malaspina (1754-1810) Theatrum Naturae o Coleccin de Historia Natural. Madrid: Doce
Calles and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas, 1998.
36 Silva, Los ilustrados de Nueva Granada, 1760-1808 and Nieto-Olarte, Orden Natural y Orden Social.

10
sovereignty reverting back to the pueblos.37 Early republican writers erased that
complex history to instead convey a story of the patria boba or foolish fatherland of
chaotic federalism versus civilized centralism. Although the first Colombian Republic
was a different polity than that of the New Granada Republic, this opening chapter
underscores the emphasis that 1820s patriot leaders placed on Caldas prescriptions
for how good governance would come through scientific expertise deployed to truly
know the territory. Republican leaders in New Granada continued to cherish this ideal
for generations.

The second chapter moves forward in time to demonstrate how, a generation after
independence, New Granada elites invented an entirely new legacy for Spanish
colonialism that, instead of breaking with the past, displayed continuities that needed to
be rooted out. For them, the principle legacy of the Spanish colonial period was that it
created blockages to circulation. Mid-century government officials, educators,
intellectuals, religious leaders, architects, engineers, and military generals agreed:
republicanism needed to dismantle the blockages to progress created by the Spanish
Monarchy by fomenting the circulation of people, products, ideas, and capital throughout
the national territory. This cultural project of circulation, one shared by elites from a
variety of New Granada provinces and whose loyalties crisscrossed the political party
spectrum, marked a distinct moment in New Granadas invention of nationalism.38
Circulation and integration would flow more easily across regions through the imposition
of homogeneity in currency, units of weights and measures, language, morality, and
values. Roads, canals, ports, and educational infrastructure would allow New Granada to
become the international hub it was meant to be. Provincial officials circulated through
Bogota and inaugurated educational institutions and scientific societies that further
established Bogota as a critical circulatory center for future generations of provincial
leaders. As such, this chapter challenges readings of the 1840s-1850s that focus on chaos,
instability, elite detachment, and the supposed ideological divides between Liberals versus
Conservatives or federalists versus centralists.39 The chapter also contributes to studies

37 Paquette, The Dissolution of the Spanish Atlantic Monarchy; Dym, From Sovereign Villages to
National States; Morelli, Territorio o nacin; Rodrguez, The Independence of Spanish America.
38 David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001).
39 Jos de la Vega, La federacin en Colombia, 1810-1912 (Madrid: Editorial Amrica, 1940); Robert
Gilmore, El federalismo en Colombia, 1810-1858 (Bogot: Universidad Externado de Colombia,
Sociedad Santanderista de Colombia, 1995, 2 vols); Antonio Prez Aguirre, 25 aos de historia
colombiana, 1853-1878: Del centralismo a la federacin (Bogot: Editorial Sucre, 1959); Abel Cruz Santos,
Federalismo y centralismo (Bogot: Banco de la Repblica, 1979); Pedro Pablo Camargo, La federacin
en Colombia, in Los sistemas federales del continente americano (Mxico: FCE, UNAM, 1972); Jorge
Rodrguez Arbelaez and Javier Ocampo, El federalismo en Colombia: pasado y perspectivas (Bogota:
Universidad del Externado de Colombia, 1997); Richard Stoller, Ironas del federalism en la
provincial del Socorro, in Revista Frontera de la historia 2 no. 2 (1998): 11-32; Miguel Borja,
11
that seek to show how space, place, and setting have always been culturally produced,
socially negotiated and historically shifting.40 It does so by illustrating how this mid-
century shared cultural project led to the invention of a circulatory function for national
space through the geographic and cartographic training that future generations of
provincial elites received in the Colegio Militar. A deep reading of the cartography that
these cadets produced reveals the kind of cultural, economic, technological, and spiritual
meaning mid-century actors embedded in Bogot as circulatory capital for New Granada
regions. Some Colegio Militar students went above and beyond required assignments, and
produced whimsical mental maps of New Granada that further reveal the remarkable
engagement these actors had with global trends affecting New Granada realities.

Chapter three opens by considering a critical task set before graduates of the
Colegio Militar: the survey and partitioning of lands held in common by indigenous
communities. Efforts to privatize indigenous communal lands were met with significant
obstacles throughout Spanish America.41 Among the most oft-cited reasons for delays: a
lack of trained expertise.42 New Granada was no different. The chapter shows how by
mid-century, graduates of the Colegio Militar, the best of the best, were ready to take on
this task. These well-trained experts nevertheless failed miserably. The chapter
contextualizes these failures by exploring the 19th-century invention of the indjena that
replaced a colonial-era casta category of the indio. Republicans repeatedly deployed the
trope of the miserable indjena who, under the Spanish crown, suffered exploitative tribute
and was submerged in ignorance through settlement into resguardos, or lands held in

Espacio y guerra: Colombia federal, 1858-1885 (Bogot: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, IEPRI,
2010); Palacios and Safford, Colombia. For an excellent historiographical discussion of these texts,
see Paola Ruiz, La genesis del federalism en la Nueva Granada: debate y prctica de la
descentralizacin a mediados del siglo XIX: 1848-1863, Segundo Seminario de Tsis (Mxico:
Colegio de Mxico, Centro de Estudios Histricos: 2016).
40 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, foreword by tienne Gilson (New York:
Orion Press, 1964); Pierre Bourdieu, Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory 7, no. 1
(Spring 1989): 14-25; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Barney Warf and Santa Arias (eds), The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); Markus Stock and Nicola Vhringer (eds)
Spatial Practices: Medieval/Modern with 23 figures (Gttingen: V&R unipress, 2014); and Santa Arias,
Rethinking space: an outsiders view of the spatial turn, GeoJournal 75 (2010): 29-41.
th
41 The literature on 19 -century communal land privatization is extensive. Some key works include:
Laura Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880-1952
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Jeffrey L Gould, To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the
Myth of Mesitzaje, 1880-1965 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Joanne Rappaport, The Politics of
Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990); Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2000).
42 Ramond Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004).
12
common by indigenous peoples. The invented trope of the miserable indijena became
useful not only for republicans seeking to privatize resguardos, but also for those who
wished to protect indjenas by delaying privatization. Elite indigenous families seeking to
maintain control over resguardo lands, popular indigenous folks seeking to eke out a
measure of sustenance for themselves and their families, as well as neighboring mestizos
and elites all deployed the trope of the miserable indjena to support their case. The
chapter traces out how, from the 1820s into the 1870s, the republican state produced a
plethora of often-contradictory legislation, presidential decrees, and juridical dictates that
reflected these tensions over the resguardos de indjenas.

The engineers and land surveyors who would partition resguardo lands had to be
well versed in these laws. New generations of surveyors also learned an elaborate and
original calculus of republican equity that would grant land parcels of equal value to all
members of indigenous communities. These innovative technologies and scientific
practices would transform New Granada, and the rest of Spanish America that
implemented this calculus, into the democratic vanguard that it needed to become. As
such, the chapter challenges historical interpretations of nineteenth-century Spanish
Americans who sought to privatize communal land holding as racist elites seeking to
impose useless foreign models on local realities.43 The radical measures they developed
for local realities were nevertheless met with overwhelming resistance, but resistance
notably did not come in the form of massive civil wars. Rather, conflict resolution was
sought out through the assorted emerging levers of the state at the local, provincial, and
national levels. These mechanisms often favored the interests of elite whites, but elite
indigenous families that had long asserted control over resguardo land use also found ways
of defending their interests. So did the neighboring white and mestizo families claiming
rights to resguardo lands, and the poorer, unmarried indigenous women seeking ways to
ensure sustenance for their families through resguardo land claims. The decentralized,
multipolar system of justice gave all litigants hope, and, through litigation, the republican
states legitimacy was gauged and engaged. This form of legitimization through
arbitration bore an uncanny similarity to how the Spanish colonial state had functioned.44
As for the attempted surveys by Colegio Militar graduates, the chapter highlights how the
break up of the Bogota province into smaller provincial jurisdictions, together with

43 Quijano Coloniality of Power; Stein and Stein, The Colonial heritage of Latin America; Brooke
Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); Frank Safford, Race, Integration, and Progress: Elite Attitudes
and the Indian in Colombia, Hispanic American Historical Review 71, no 1(1991): 20-21.
44 Yanna Yannakakis, Beyond Jurisdictions: Native Agency in the Making of Colonial Legal
Cultures, A Review Essay. Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 4 (2015): 1070-1082; Brian
Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2008). See also Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
13
conflict over who was included and excluded from the census, meant that, despite
expertise, the resguardos that Colegio Militar graduates surveyed were still in litigation well
into the 1870s.

Chapter four addresses an important paradox: at midcentury, just as elites

across the political spectrum and from the majority of New Granada provinces found
spaces of sociability that facilitated a shared ideological republican project that was
deeply engaged with local realities, the two most resilient and antagonistic political
parties, Liberals and Conservatives, burst onto the scene. At the heart of that paradox,
I argue, is the way spaces in New Granada carried political rights up until 1853. From
the period of the dissolution of the Spanish Monarchy, republican constitutions
conferred political representation to urban municipal spaces, i.e., the pueblos.45 With
New Granadas establishment in 1832, the most significant space carrying
representative weight within the republic continued to be the municipality. As noted
above, from 1845 through 1853, the Executive Power dramatically increased the
number of provinces to thirty-six, and with that expansion, the number of
municipalities also grew. The cumulative political effect was that greater numbers of
people from around New Granada that previously had been excluded from
participation in national politics had gained a significant voice. This transformation
came at the same time that a vast infrastructure of print newspapers emerged,
facilitating public reading in public spaces. This was also the moment when a scientific
society appropriately named the Instituto Caldas was founded in Bogot in 1848, and
inspired hundreds of provincial elites, from across the emerging political spectrum to
form and join local chapters. This network of provincial elites laid the foundations for
the Chorographic Commission; one of the most impressive, large-scale scientific
expeditions of the nineteenth century supported by the national government no
matter which political party held control.46

The chapter contributes to literature on the Commission by focusing on two

underexplored dimensions. First, it considers the political and territorial significance
the Commissions deployment from 1850-1853 to precisely the provinces that the
Liberal-led regime had recently carved out, including provinces that had exploded in

45 Jordana Dym, From Sovereign Villages to National States: City, State, and Federation in Central America,
1759-1839 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).
46 Efrain Snchez, Gobierno y Geografia: Agustn Codazzi y la Comisin Corogrfica de la Nueva Granada
(Bogota: Banco de la Republica y El Ancora Editores, 1999); and Olga Restrepo-Forero, La
Comision Corografica: avatares en la configuracin del saber Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Thesis 1983.
Published in Monografas Sociolgicas No 14. Mimegrafo. (Bogot: Facultad de Ciencias
Humanas, Departamento de Sociologa, 1988); Nancy Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions: The
Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2016).
14
civil war in 1851 because of the new divisions. Second, it turns to the materials
produced by the Chorographic Commission that circulated in print during the early
1850s, focusing on the travel narrative penned by the secretary of the Commission
and founder of the Instituto Caldas, Manuel Anczar. I argue that Anczars narrative
needs to be read as an early form of political ethnography, and he was not alone in the
adoption of this scientific technique at midcentury. This cultural current proper to the
19th century is more commonly known as costumbrismo, and literary critics have
largely dismissed it as a nonsensical, derivative genre.47 I argue that as members from
the emerging Liberal and Conservative parties wrestled with the implications of
expanded political participation by popular sectors, intellectuals and writers from both
parties developed costumbrismo as a science of political ethnography. This science
was meant to be read publically and widely, and the expanded public sphere of print
by midcentury facilitated this intended purpose. Costumbrismo became a technology
of transcendent surveillance intended to pinpoint and transform the national self.

Depictions of everyday life and customs would reveal how colonial mentalities
produced absurd behavior that needed to be extricated from the republic. Liberals like
Anczar used costumbrismo to condemn wasteful, impious, and irrational religious
processions as a holdover from the more immoral aspects of Spanish colonialism, and
called on religious leaders to discipline their flock to worship more productive saints
such as San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmworkers. Conservative writers
like Eugenio Daz Castro deployed costumbrismo through fictional novels like
Manuela to respond to Liberal Anczars critique by championing popular religious
processions as innovative political speech. What Daz Castro found absurd was how
Liberal elites (like Anczar) that sought to mindlessly adopt foreign models and graft
them onto local realities missed the creativity of popular sectors. The legacy of
Spanish colonialism as developed by Anczar for the Chorographic Commission, and
Daz Castros elaboration of the neo-coloniality of the Eurocentric Liberal both
operated through the national self. Both were pointing to costumbres, or behaviors
that replicated oppression within the self. In this sense, costumbrismo offers the 19th-
century discovery of psychological oppression rather than the oppression of economic
dependency. These techniques of reading everyday behaviors asked strikingly similar
questions to those posed by post-colonial critical theorists like Frantz Fanon, Albert
Memmi, and Aim Csaire one hundred years later.48 The categories that 19th-century
writers used to think through coloniality, however, were very different and produced

47 For dismissal of costumbrismo, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of
Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). For newer studies see Sergio Escobar,
Manuela
48 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized; Aim
Csaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
15
remarkably innovative and creative answers.49 Rather than cede the West to
genealogically inherited, unchanging racial traits that drove the imposition of
colonialism onto others, these thinkers thought of themselves as imbricated in the
creation of modernity.

Chapter five explores the profound territorial, political, and constitutional

revolution that occurred at mid-century in New Granada. By this period, elites developed
an innovative science of constitutionalism that allowed them to think through and
experiment with the balance of sovereignty in a republic. Whereas in the early 1850s the
balance tipped increasingly towards depositing sovereignty in individuals, mid-century
Civil Wars and party strife forced the scales firmly in favor of a state sovereignty that
trumped individual and national sovereignty. The men most active in these
constitutional-territorial experiments were also the men most engaged with local realities
through the Instituto Caldas and the Chorographic Commission. Their constitutional
experiments yielded the Constitution of 1853 that sanctioned universal manhood suffrage
and the popular election of the President, Congress, the Supreme Court, and Provincial
Governors. This change meant, in effect, that individual political rights usurped a half-
century-long constitutional order that made municipal and provincial governments the
principle carriers of political rights.

Overwhelming numbers of Conservatives assumed Provincial and Congressional

offices as a result of this change, and a combination of popular and traditional Liberal
elites were radicalized. They blamed the colonial legacy: popular sectors voted against
their own interests due to indoctrination by the Catholic Church. They orchestrated a
coup against the Conservative-dominated Congress. This uprising forced elites, Liberal
and Conservative, to lose control of the national government. This movement, however,
lacked the spaces of scientific sociability and deep territorial knowledge that elites from
both political parties enjoyed. A coalition of elites, including the leader of the
Chorographic Commission, Agustn Codazzi, repressed the popular uprising militarily on
the ground. When back in control, Liberal and Conservative party leaders deployed the
technology of constitutionalism to create Sovereign States, starting with Panama in 1855.
Members of the Instituto Caldas and the Chorographic Commission led this process,
culminating in a new constitution that brought forth the Grenedine Confederacy starting
in 1858. Framing the 1854 Civil War in this way allows for a clearer understanding the
deep constitutional, political, and territorial impact of this conflict, one usually read as a

Mark Thurner, Historys Peru: The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography (Gainesville:
49
University Press of Florida, 2011).
16
confusing one-off urban coup launched by an alliance of military officers united with
disgruntled artisans that was supposedly limited to Bogot.50

The chapter shows how, despite elite agreements, party strife continued and again
exploded in Civil War from 1859-1862, bringing the Confederacys end. Conservative and
Liberal party elites agreed to divvy up their regional sites of political control, bringing
forth the United States of Colombia (1863-1886), a federation that granted even greater
sovereignty to the states than the Confederacy. Universal manhood suffrage enshrined in
the constitution of 1853 no longer was either universal or enforceable. Each individual
State issued a new constitution. Such partisan control was nevertheless negotiated with
popular sectors, especially in those Sovereign States where the Liberal party depended on
mobilized popular armies. The hard-won right to universal manhood suffrage was not
given up so easily in States like Cauca.51 The story was different in States like Boyac,
where the Conservative Party competed with the Liberal party for dominance.

One result was that by the 1860s, the science of constitutionalism yielded a
national state that lost the right to intervene in State-level electoral processes, even if an
election with national implications was conducted under massive electoral fraud. Cross-
party elite unity of purpose and fears of uncontrollable, unpredictable popular sectors
proved more significant than ensuring universal manhood suffrage. The technology of
shaming the coloniality of the mind through costumbrismo in the public sphere proved
insufficient. Constitutional science became the answer. Another casualty to the political
party strife that forced the creation of the Sovereign States also became the 1840s ideal of
circulation throughout the republic. Ultimately, these tenuous 1860s cross-party
agreements placed Liberal party leaders in a position of control over the national
government, and they considered that the Catholic Churchs affinity with the
Conservative Party was dangerous. They blamed midcentury civil wars on the Churchs
indoctrination of popular sectors. The Churchs vast properties held in mortmain became
a major target. Throughout this period of party strife and constitutional and territorial
change, the Chorographic Commission continued, and debates raged over how materials
would be presented to a more general public.

The final chapter turns to the contentious debates between Liberal and
Conservatives regarding the Catholic Church and the role it needed to play in
Colombia from the 1860s-1880s. This period was known as the Olimpo Radical, or

50 Gustavo Vargas Martnez, Colombia 1854: Melo, los artesanos y el socialismo (La dictadura
artisanal de 1854, espresin del socialismo utpico en Colombia) (Bogot: Editorial la Oveja Negra,
1973). Alirio Gmez Picn, El golpe military del 17 de abril de 1854 (Colombia: Editorial Kelly,
1972); and David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley: The
University of California Press, 1993).
51 Sanders, Contentious Republicans.

17
Radical Olympus, because of the radical Liberal political regime that dominated the
national government.52 This period also marked a fundamental change in the very
foundations of political economy. Ever since Caldas, the project of the provincial
elites had been that of promoting integrative circulatory systems of all kinds. The
regime under the United States of Colombia threatened a fragmented landscape of
independent, sovereign islands loosely connected by a weak national government. The
raison detre of the Instituto Caldas and the Chorographic Commission had been to
promote the gospel of integration by smashing colonial barriers getting in the way
of standardization and circulation and by the local accumulation of a bank of statistics
meant to be shared. The new balkanized state did not resemble that of the past, and
spaces of sociability that cut across party lines like that of the Instituto Caldas were
dismissed as useless utopias.

By the 1860s, Liberal Party leaders also offered a radical new understanding of
the colonial legacy, one that identified the Catholic Church as responsible for
coordinating and reproducing immiserating land holding patterns and perpetuating
ignorance among popular sectors. The Catholic Church became the prime target for
the elimination of this iteration of the colonial legacy. Although Liberals waxed
triumphant in the wake of the Civil War of 1859-1862, their victory nevertheless
conceded political control to Conservatives over some States. They therefore needed
to negotiate with Conservatives to implement the policies that targeted the Catholic
Church throughout Colombia.

The chapter traces how the Liberal political party in power struck at the
Churchs economic strengths by disentailing Church lands, a move that required
trained land surveyors. Although met with some obstacles, the Liberal regime
succeeded in disentailing several Church properties, even in Conservative-Party
dominated states. Colombian Conservatives, much like other Conservative
movements in the region, actually welcomed national state efforts to assert control
over the Church in ways that echoed the colonial-era patronato real.53 In this way,
Conservatives increasingly embraced colonial-era structures as beneficial for the
republic. Although this fiscal attack on the Church was somewhat acceptable to
Conservatives, the Liberal regimes ideological attack on the Church was less so.

The chapter turns to the national spatial network of Normal Schools and the
interior spaces of these centers intended to educate future citizens. The Normal School

52 Eduardo Rodrguez Pieres, El olimpo radical: ensayos conocidos e inditos sobre su poca, 1864-1884
(Colombia: Editoriales de Librera Voluntad, 1950);
53 Peter Henderson, Gabriel Garcia Moreno and Conservative State Formation in the Andes (Austin: The
University of Texas Press, 2008).
18
system that emerged suggests some continuities with the 1840s project of circulation of
people, ideas, and print culture through Bogot out to each region and back. Mid-century
mappings and geographic writings of the Chorographic Commission were printed to
circulate through Normal Schools. However, these printed maps emerged at a moment
of change in the 1860s, when notions of sovereignty came to be grounded in the States
that formed the United States of Colombia, and when Liberals increasingly sought to win
popular opinion away from the Conservative party and the Catholic Church. Codazzis
manuscript maps were divested of the rich, detailed information produced through the
Chorographic Commission. The dissemination of sanitized printed maps and atlases,
cleansed of local details and placed at the front of Normal School rooms formerly
occupied by crucifixes, would magically work on popular imaginaries. State and national
community ties would come to be more significant than municipal loyalties or religious
piety.

One result was that battles over technologies that would recreate the self
shifted away from public gatherings of partisans listening to newspaper costumbrista
vignettes to classrooms where students memorized lessons on geography and history.
Manufacturing communities of consent among popular sectors across generations
would ensure long-term Liberal dominance over the Conservative party. The
secularization of education, together with the Liberal governments decision to bring
German Protestant Normal School teachers sparked another Civil War by 1876.
Ideological attacks by Liberals on the Church also sparked intellectual battles. Some
Conservative voices, like historian of the Catholic Church, Jos Manuel Groot,
articulated a narrative that resoundingly countered Liberal party accusations of the
Church as perpetuator of a colonial legacy of backwardness. He demonstrated that,
far from being the epitome of colonialism, the Church during the colonial period was
actually the epitome of modernity given its ability to foment the production of
knowledge, engage in economic development, and serve as the testing ground for
constitutionalism and democracy through inclusiveness. Although Liberals may have
won the 1876 Civil War, they were significantly weakened and would soon lose hold
of national power. Groots embrace of the Catholic Church, furthermore, found
increasing appeal, even among radical Liberals.

The book ends with an epilogue that returns focus on how mid-century Spanish
Americans crafted their republican experiments as models for the world. I take as a case
in point the comparative sociology offered by one of the many vanguard republican
scientists considered in this book, Jos Mara Samper. During his travels to Europe at the
end of the 1850s, Samper was struck by the emerging racial discourse that pitted a
supposed Latin race against a supposed Anglo-Saxon race. Writing in 1858, the year
Franz Boaz was born, Samper boldly argued against emerging ideologies positing that

19
racial traits were biological and inherited. Samper denounced the genealogical racial
traits suggested by a Latin America and offered instead Hispano-Colombia.

Sampers model recognized and embraced a shared cultural heritage for all of
Spanish America with Spain, yet underscored how changes in institutions could have a
dramatic impact on race. Samper attributed differences among human groups to
institutions and climate. Long-term, unchangeable inherited genealogical differences
among humans simply did not exist. The movement of people through space together
with mixture and crossing of lineages, under democratic republican institutions, would
point a continental Hispano-Colombia toward modernity. He argued the tumultuous
wars Spanish America and Spain had suffered during the first half of the 19th-century
were an unavoidable rite of passage towards political modernity. Science would best
diagnose and cure political, social, and economic ills. After these trials, and with modern
sciences in hand, Hispano-Colombia promised equality for all republican citizens,
regardless of casta status. That was because Spanish American colonialism, which
developed under the watchful eye of the Catholic Church, was far kinder, more inclusive,
and less rigid than the Puritanical and racially unyielding Anglo-Saxon experience with
republicanism in North America. The Spanish colonial heritage, together with creative
scientific approaches aimed at gaining profound knowledge of the uniqueness of local
territory, resources, and people, would culminate in the formation of ideal republics
dedicated to educating all citizens to enjoy equal political access and rights.

And yet, Sampers strikingly early evaluations of human groups are largely
unknown. Chaos, caudillos, the poverty of progress, and the poverty of theory it
implied offered a much more appealing explanatory framework for Spanish Americas
19th century than historical narratives that highlighted the significance of science for
constructing a continental Colombia on the vanguard of Atlantic World republicanism.

20