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“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

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were swept up in trans-Atlantic imperial rivalries. The chapter argues that as imperial<br />

structures faltered, however, conflicts over what should emerge in their wake produced a<br />

vacuum of political authority. Chapter two then explores the emergence of an alternative<br />

legal and political order in the borderlands. It focuses particularly on the connections<br />

between local law and cross-border trade. Chapter three then explores the growing conflicts<br />

between these borderlands legalities and efforts to centralize state authority by Rosas and his<br />

blanco ally Manuel Oribe in Uruguay. It concludes with the triumph of borderlands coalitions<br />

and the end of a particularly violent era of regional conflict in the early 1850s.<br />

Chapter four then focuses more closely on the local operation of these borderlands<br />

legalities in a particularly contested zone along the Uruguayan and Brazilian border. It<br />

explores how litigation in local fora led to sharpened factional identities that ignited violent<br />

conflicts behind borders even as would-be state framers attempted to constitute new nations<br />

through constitutions and political “fusions.” Chapter five then expands this discussion by<br />

exploring how sharpening local clashes radiated outwards across the borderlands along<br />

chains of commercial connections and reciprocal ties. It further explores how resurgent<br />

states, particularly under the leadership of men like Bartolomé Mitre in Argentina, utilized<br />

these conflicts to begin to bolster national authority in the borderlands. Chapter six<br />

examines how these simultaneous conflicts between local factional rivals and between the<br />

periphery and newly assertive national cores created spaces for subalterns to exploit elite<br />

fissures to assert their own rights in borderlands courts. These various strands of conflict<br />

ultimately helped propel the region into the six-year Paraguayan War.<br />

Chapter seven then looks at efforts to forge new state pacts in the wake of the<br />

Paraguayan conflict. It covers the period in the late 1860s and early 1870s when states began<br />

to project their authority into the borderlands more aggressively. It also explores the efforts<br />

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