What role does war play in political development? Our understanding of the rise of the nation-state is based heavily on the Western European experience of war. Challenging the dominance of this model, Blood and Debt looks at Latin America’s much different experience as more relevant to politics today in regions as varied as the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa.
The book’s illuminating review of the relatively peaceful history of Latin America from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries reveals the lack of two critical prerequisites needed for war: a political and military culture oriented toward international violence, and the state institutional capacity to carry it out. Using innovative new data such as tax receipts, naming of streets and public monuments, and conscription records, the author carefully examines how war affected the fiscal development of the state, the creation of national identity, and claims to citizenship. Rather than building nation-states and fostering democratic citizenship, he shows, war in Latin America destroyed institutions, confirmed internal divisions, and killed many without purpose or glory.
A Solid Book This book focuses on the themes of war and the nation-state in nineteenth Mexico and the republics of South America; and the approach is highly inspired by Charles Tilly’s work on Europe, although Centeno derives entirely different conclusions regarding nation-state formation in Latin America. The work is original, full of data, and the writer is clever, which enables the reader to follow the abstract (academic) concepts of the book with ease. Centeno’s work is an intelligible and thought…
Bellicist Account of State Making Applied to Latin America Excellent book. Clearly written and persuasively argued. This book was required reading as part of a graduate course in State Building. We read it after the classic works of Weber, Tilly and Hintze, once we were very familiar with the bellicist account of state-making. Centeno applies Tilly’s “War makes states” argument to Latin America and argues that the legacy of weak states in Latin America can best be understood because there have been so few inter-state wars there. For Centeno, no wars=…