“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

in the previous decades. By the early 1850s, these relationships had become sufficiently
robust to blunt attempts to impose national limitations on their scope. Acting in the name
of local autonomy, but with an eye towards broader relationships secured by reciprocity and
personal reputations, borderlands elites had triumphed in the first round of sovereign
conflicts over the region’s political and economic divisions.
Conclusion
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, efforts to impose national boundaries and legal
categories on the borderlands repeatedly collided with dense webs of integrated trading
networks stretching across the Río de la Plata. The success of these trading chains,
particularly in the eastern borderlands along the Uruguay River, rested upon the ability to
move goods, cattle and money across boundaries without interference from outside officials.
Rather than states, these trading relationships depended upon reciprocal ties and local
reputations to sustain them. For men like Urquiza, protecting these simultaneously
integrated and localized borderlands systems provided a source of wealth and power.
Attempts to erect national divisions and slice up these borderlands associations threatened to
bring the entire edifice down. For this reason, each successive attempt to do so, whether in
Brazil, Uruguay, or ultimately Argentina, met with fierce and concerted resistance from
peripheral elites. Eventually, Urquiza and his allies succeeded where European naval
blockades and unitarist politicians had failed, brining an end to Rosas’ rule over Buenos
Aires.
The victory over Rosas and Oribe represented a triumph for models of borderlands
sovereignty premised upon local laws and cross-border connections cemented together
through factional political alliances and personal reputations. The Caseros coalition largely
agreed on the need to defeat sovereign models that interfered with their borderlands legal,
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