Like all revolutionary processes, those that led to Latin American independence were highly volatile and experimental in nature. Often accompanied by extreme violence, even open warfare, the formation of the new Latin American states in the early nineteenth century required imagining new states, institutions, and laws. The need, often urgency, to transform colonial domains into various independent units frequently coincided with the desire to end (or at least modernize) the Ancien régime. Yet the wish to supersede the past did not guarantee rupture. Instead, it initiated a period of questioning more often than answering, of experimenting more often than finding solutions. After describing the context in which the independence took place, this chapter surveys some of the questions that had to be answered, mostly by identifying debates that required settling and the difficulties entailed in achieving this goal. It examines who had the power to declare independence, how to identify the territories that would become new polities, how the national territory and citizenship were defined, how new republican structures should be formed, and elections conducted, and the legal changes all these developments entailed.

How can we make the transition to a net-zero-carbon economy a political divide pitting conservatives versus liberals and those living in urban cores versus rural communites?

The case of internal improvements at the federal level from 1787 to 1837 suggests that American governance patterns were pragmatic and utilitarian, rather than committed to laissez-faire theory of the small state. Federal power can be used in a variety of ways to create a liberal capitalist state by building transportation and communication infrastructures. While the concessions in America’s constitutional model to small-state Republicans often thwarted the more ambitious plans, it was not laissez-faire theory that prevented the use of federal power for nation-building projects. When government in the first half of the century wanted to promote economic development, “no overriding theory held government back.” The liberal forms of governance that developed in America were not the Lockean minimal state that Louis Hartz famously imagined to be America’s continuous laissez-faire tradition. Rather, the American experience of internal improvements reveals the complicated entanglements of state, law, and capitalism in the nineteenth century and illustrates the continuing problems with neat categories of state and market, public and private, to describe the political economy of capitalism.

The Prologue begins with brief accounts of the revolutions of 1848, first in France, then in Europe. This is followed by a substantial overview of the book, emphasizing its dual focus on the experience of nine writers from 1848 to 1852 and analysis of the texts in which each writer attempted to take the measure of the revolution and its aftermath. The rest of the Prologue provides comment on features of French political culture (1815–1848) that are important for an understanding of 1848. Themes include: the continuing weight of the memory of the first French Revolution; the emergence of political groups defined by their relation to conflicts and factions of 1789–1794; the development of working-class organization and protest; the emergence of republican and socialist movements; the influence of the press; the economic and social roots of the February Revolution. A substantial discussion of French rural society in the 1830s and 1840s emphasizes the plight of the peasant smallholder, which was poorly understood by the republicans who took power in February. We conclude with a discussion of the agricultural, then financial, crisis of 1846/47 which resulted in a loss of confidence in the July Monarchy on the part of the elites.

Chapter 6 describes how some local governments have given rights of citizenship, including voting rights, to nonresident landowners; in some cases, municipalities have actually limited the franchise exclusively to landowners. Once again, this is indicative of the distinctive nature of local citizenship. Property ownership ceased being a prerequisite for voting in state and federal elections by the 1850s, as citizenship was coming to be seen primarily in ethno-nationalist terms as a matter of shared identity. Local governments, reflecting their history as commercial entities, have been more open to tying the franchise to landownership, and as a de facto matter, many cities today use zoning regulations to ensure that anyone who cannot afford to purchase a home cannot acquire residence, and therefore the right to vote. This de facto property qualification for local citizenship illustrates that local citizenship is constructed as purely private and liberal, predicated upon consumer choice, mobility, and self-interest rather than identity or civic activity.

Chapter 3 presents a brief history of local citizenship that describes the process by which our ideas about citizenship came to be divided between federal and local scales. Our bifurcated conception of citizenship was a highly contingent product of the nation-state’s long evolution from the ancient city-state. There was never a conscious decision to divide citizenship the way we did.