The bicentennial of Spanish America’s wars of independence has sparked renewed interest in the meaning and historiography of these formative events. And as the title to this edited volume suggests, the process of interpreting this formative time period comes with an inherent set of historiographical challenges, particularly in understanding the roles played by subalterns and rural societies during the war and subsequent processes of state formation. These are precisely the gaps that the authors of these essays attempt to bridge as they relate to the Río de la Plata region (Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay).
In their introduction, the volume’s editors, Raúl Fradkin and Jorge Gelman, claim that until the 1970s historians had relegated popular and subaltern movements to inconsequential political revolutions with little to no social impact. They credit Tulio Hal-perin Donghi’s Revolución y Guerra (1972) for identifying urban versus rural political inversions that he coined the “ruralization of...
