Review
"Nineteenth-century experiences of state building in Latin America (ironically mirrored in Spain) offer telling analytical lessons for contemporary debates on the role of the state. This collection unites a set of the world’s most distinguished scholars on the topic and offers an invaluable resource for those interested in understanding this historical experience and drawing on it to decipher contemporary puzzles."
Peter Evans, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
"Centeno and Ferraro very effectively organize an impressive collection of essays on the challenges of state building in Latin America. Above all, they successfully marshal exceptional scholarly talent and bring it to bear on the puzzle of the long-term process of creating effective and coherent states."
Merilee S. Grindle, Edward S. Mason Professor of International Development, Harvard University
"This is the best-organized collection of papers that I have ever come across, splendid in every way. All authors concern themselves with four dimensions of state power - territory, economy, infrastructural reach, and legitimacy - introduced by the editors, who effectively conclude the volume by assessing the results of the whole enterprise. The papers are little jewels, slowly covering all of the countries with attention to key details from censuses to the nature of war, from the varieties of nationalism to the nature of bureaucracy. The results are illuminating. Holding a mirror up to northwestern Europe, Spanish development is contrasted to that of Latin America, and diversity within Latin America properly and clearly stressed. This book has been needed for a long time."
John A. Hall, James McGill Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology, McGill University
"In State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain, Centeno and Ferraro and their colleagues probe the historical origins of Latin American and Spanish state building in the "long nineteenth century". Their theoretically sophisticated and empirical rich analyses demonstrate that elites in Latin America and Spain sought conscientiously to emulate and adapt the state-making experiences of England, the United States, and France to their own circumstances. Despite some successes early on, by the early twentieth century this project of state making had proven to be a debacle. Building on the best in the contemporary social sciences and recent historiography, this important collection highlights institutional fragility, weak and shallow rule of law, difficulties in creating a competent public bureaucracy, poor economic performance, and failure to construct an encompassing sense of communal identity as central elements in this general pattern of flawed state formation. This volume establishes a new benchmark for future research by historians, political scientists, and sociologists."
William C. Smith, Editor, Latin American Politics and Society, University of Miami
"… this is a quite outstanding volume of comparative historical sociology on the Hispanic world…This suggestive and intellectually refreshing quality owes much to the care with which the editors have designed a volume that plainly derives for an extended period of collaboration."
James Dunkerley, Journal of Global Faultlines
"The great strength of this book, which will make people return to it again and again, lies in this integrated approach. The volume brings together a variety of work from diverse disciplinary and/or country study fields, making it an invaluable portal for historians, political scientists and sociologists alike to access each others’ research on state- and nation-making in Latin America."
Nicola Miller, Journal of Latin American Studies
Book Description
Examines how Latin American countries and Spain tried to build modern and efficient state institutions for more than a century - without much success.
About the Author
Miguel A. Centeno is Chair of the Sociology Department and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. He has published many articles, chapters and books, the most recent of which are Global Capitalism (2010) and Discrimination in an Unequal World (2010). He has served as the founding director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and as master of Wilson College. Centeno has been a Fulbright scholar in Russia and Mexico. He has also been a visiting professor in Buenos Aires, Seoul and Spain. In 1997 he was awarded the Presidential Teaching Prize at Princeton University.
Agustin E. Ferraro is Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Salamanca, Spain. He was visiting professor at Princeton University for the Spring Term 2011. He won the 2009 award of the Spanish National Institute for Public Administration for his research on state reforms and public policy in Latin America. As a Humboldt Scholar from 2001 to 2003, he worked at the Institute for Latin American Studies in Hamburg and at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
