Cambridge Latin American Studies: The Rise and Fall of Legal Rule in Post-Colonial Mexico, 1820–1900 (Cambridge Latin American Studies #106)

Synopsis

Liberalism as Utopia challenges widespread perceptions about the weakness of Mexico's nineteenth-century state. Schaefer argues that after the War of Independence non-elite Mexicans - peasants, day laborers, artisans, local merchants - pioneered an egalitarian form of legal rule by serving in the town governments and civic militias that became the local faces of the state's coercive authority. These institutions were effective because they embodied patriarchal norms of labor and care for the family that were premised on the legal equality of male, adult citizens. The book also examines the emergence of new, illiberal norms that challenged and at the end of the century, during the dictatorship of Porfirio Daz, overwhelmed the egalitarianism of the early-republican period. By comparing the legal cultures of agricultural estates, mestizo towns and indigenous towns, Liberalism as Utopia also proposes a new way of understanding the social foundations of liberal and authoritarian pathways to state formation in the nineteenth-century world.

Copyright:

2017

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781108120814

Related ISBNs:

9781107190733, 9781107190733

Publisher:

Cambridge University Press

Date of Addition:

06/14/18

Copyrighted By:

Timo H. Schaefer

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Law, Legal Issues and Ethics, Politics and Government, Sociology

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.