Cattle, Capital, and Cannon: War-Making and the Construction of a Liberal Accumulation Regime in the Platine Basin

Abstract

Abstract: This thesis historicizes the emergence of nation-states in the Plata region of South America during the half-century of civil and international chaos which followed independence. Drawing on several approaches within the broad ambit of historical materialism, it argues that Latin America became part of global capital accumulation with the conquest but that the (geo)political framework of its incorporation has been substantially remade over the following centuries. Case studies of the Argentine Civil Wars (~1810-70) and the related War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70) demonstrate how nineteenth-century conflicts had economic dependency as a central outcome. This was so because export-oriented agrarian and commercial elites succeeded in defeating internal and external obstacles to their class rule. As a result, the Plata became incorporated into the “informal empire” of British capital, with harsh lasting consequences for its economic development. This argument contributes to bypassing a general opposition or lack of constructive engagement between “world-systemic” and “geopolitical” Marxisms. It is contended that both approaches have crucial lacunae in explaining the patterns of postcolonial nation-building in Latin America and especially the Plata. Also addressed are broader methodological and theoretical questions about the task of historicizing the nation-state, modern geopolitics, and capitalism.