“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores the history of the Río de la Plata borderlands over the
course of the 19th century as the region underwent a violent transformation from imperial
periphery to part of a regional, export-oriented state system. It focuses on the contested
grounds in the eastern half of the Río de la Plata drainage along the Uruguay River. It begins
by examining the region’s dissent into revolutionary violence at the beginning of the 19th
century. The collapse of imperial authority on the Iberian Peninsula tore apart the
foundations of the old colonial order in the borderlands. Sovereign frictions then combined
with revolutionary state projects in the periphery to preclude new national structures from
emerging.
While acknowledging these violent conflicts, this dissertation is fundamentally a story
about the law. It explores the institutional and legal structures that peripheral inhabitants
developed in order to survive in their violent world. This dissertation argues that the
region’s residents developed a set of legal practices – borderlands legalities – that were
uniquely suited to the conditions they encountered in their contested ground. These
practices drew upon elements of local autonomy that had arisen in the initial revolutionary
upheavals against the Spanish empire. They also tapped into traditional concepts like vecindad
to express notions of personal standing in the community. Traders and landowners used
these local building blocks to develop dense webs of connections that sustained commerce
along the region’s rivertine trading arteries.
This dissertation argues that these alternative legalities proved surprisingly durable.
With their political and economic relationships rooted in systems premised on cross-border
trade and local legal practices, borderlands inhabitants jealously guarded their autonomy
from the efforts of elites in putative national capitals to erect boundaries and police their
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