“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...
“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ... “MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...
obtain justice within the confines of the city and the remaining limits of imperial jurisdiction. 2 The accusations that Ferrer and Berro traded suggest the variety of challenges that the massive violence spawned by two decades of revolutionary upheavals posed for the Río de la Plata’s inhabitants. Notions of national identity, political boundaries and private law rights became inextricably intertwined with the ebb and flow of repeated military campaigns. These conflicts appeared especially acute outside of the small port-cities of Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Ferrer’s sarcastic analogy between the countryside beyond the city’s walls and distant caliphates typified the deep divisions between coastal capitals and their hinterlands. For Ferrer and others in these outposts, divisions between city and country corresponded neatly with boundaries between law and lawlessness. The besieged merchants and politicians that gazed out into the borderlands from behind the ramparts felt certain that what little notion of law remained in the embattled region surely ended at the gates of their small trading communities scattered along the Río de la Plata’s coasts. But how did the inhabitants of Río de la Plata’s vast rivertine networks and grasslands beyond these ports view their situation? How did they grapple with the crisis of order spawned by revolutionary violence? What solutions did they arrive at to resolve seemingly intractable conflicts over sovereignty? For Ferrer and many contemporary intellectuals, the answer was to descend into anarchy. The Argentine author Domingo Sarmiento powerfully encapsulated this view in his famous duality of “civilization” and “barbarism.” 3 For Sarmiento, the periphery was a spawning ground for despotic rulers like 2 Ibid., 31-31bis. 3 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Facundo o Civilización y Barbarie en las Pampas Argentinas (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca La Nación, 1999). 2
Juan Manuel de Rosas and Facundo Quiroga, Rosas’ fearsome and ultimately tragic lieutenant. In this telling, law only arrived in the periphery when national cores could draw upon the wealth produced from a thriving export economy based on agrarian staples to impose order. Yet, what does the story of the Río de la Plata’s path from colonial outpost to export-oriented agricultural dynamo look like if we reverse our gaze and look through Berro’s eyes? This dissertation answers this question by examining the Río de la Plata’s contested borderlands over the course of the 19 th century. It explicitly seeks to place what traditionally has been at the edge of accounts of the formation of national identities and institutions center stage. It focuses on a region where strands of state authority had badly frayed, simultaneously corroded by local rebellions against distant and seemingly illegitimate authorities as well as from rival sovereigns seeking to incorporate the possessions of their weakened rivals. At the same time, however, it looks at how peripheral inhabitants exploited sovereign rivalry and weakness to forge commercial relationships loosely stitching the borderlands together. This dissertation describes how in the process of responding to and shaping the twin realities of political disillusion and commercial integration, peripheral inhabitants like Berro defined the Río de la Plata’s transformation into a regional state system over a century of conflict. This dissertation is also a story about law. It asks what solutions to the problems of law, order, the state and their boundaries have radial state-formation stories in Río de la Plata missed. It describes the institutional and legal structures that peripheral inhabitants in the region’s contested borderlands developed in order to cope with the challenge of order. This is not to deny the violent nature of their world. In fact, it is an attempt to put the struggles in a region where “no one [had] an enduring monopoly on violence” at the heart of the story 3
- Page 1 and 2: “MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDING
- Page 3 and 4: ABSTRACT This dissertation explores
- Page 5 and 6: TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iii ACKN
- Page 7 and 8: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Like the wandering
- Page 9 and 10: Upon returning to the United States
- Page 11: INTRODUCTION IN EARLY 1828, A FRENC
- Page 15 and 16: By moving between stories of law an
- Page 17 and 18: in the continental interior. They d
- Page 19 and 20: the fluid character of borderlands
- Page 21 and 22: and geographic conceptions. Extendi
- Page 23 and 24: local legal norms and practices in
- Page 25 and 26: that has greatly expanded the space
- Page 27 and 28: along rivertine trading corridors.
- Page 29 and 30: strains articulated by men like Art
- Page 31 and 32: Bringing the courts back into the s
- Page 33 and 34: of borderlands leaders to negotiate
- Page 35 and 36: Removing the old colonial order, ho
- Page 37 and 38: the city remained a sparsely popula
- Page 39 and 40: smugglers and other imperial outlaw
- Page 41 and 42: Imperial Collapse and Fragmentation
- Page 43 and 44: ivers, deserts and a few vagrant an
- Page 45 and 46: defend its possessions, peninsular
- Page 47 and 48: They requested that the Junta appoi
- Page 49 and 50: manufactured products for the Andea
- Page 51 and 52: The Paraguayan government proposed
- Page 53 and 54: Montevideo in January of 1811, he i
- Page 55 and 56: Ríos. From there, he continued to
- Page 57 and 58: easoning. 25 They had rejected the
- Page 59 and 60: military headquarters along the ban
- Page 61 and 62: sovereignty rooted in borderlands p
Juan Manuel de Rosas and Facundo Quiroga, Rosas’ fearsome and ultimately tragic<br />
lieutenant. In this telling, law only arrived in the periphery when national cores could draw<br />
upon the wealth produced from a thriving export economy based on agrarian staples to<br />
impose order.<br />
Yet, what does the story of the Río de la Plata’s path from colonial outpost to<br />
export-oriented agricultural dynamo look like if we reverse our gaze and look through<br />
Berro’s eyes? This dissertation answers this question by examining the Río de la Plata’s<br />
contested borderlands over the course of the 19 th century. It explicitly seeks to place what<br />
traditionally has been at the edge of accounts of the formation of national identities and<br />
institutions center stage. It focuses on a region where strands of state authority had badly<br />
frayed, simultaneously corroded by local rebellions against distant and seemingly illegitimate<br />
authorities as well as from rival sovereigns seeking to incorporate the possessions of their<br />
weakened rivals. At the same time, however, it looks at how peripheral inhabitants exploited<br />
sovereign rivalry and weakness to forge commercial relationships loosely stitching the<br />
borderlands together. This dissertation describes how in the process of responding to and<br />
shaping the twin realities of political disillusion and commercial integration, peripheral<br />
inhabitants like Berro defined the Río de la Plata’s transformation into a regional state<br />
system over a century of conflict.<br />
This dissertation is also a story about law. It asks what solutions to the problems of<br />
law, order, the state and their boundaries have radial state-formation stories in Río de la Plata<br />
missed. It describes the institutional and legal structures that peripheral inhabitants in the<br />
region’s contested borderlands developed in order to cope with the challenge of order. This<br />
is not to deny the violent nature of their world. In fact, it is an attempt to put the struggles<br />
in a region where “no one [had] an enduring monopoly on violence” at the heart of the story<br />
3 <br />
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