The War of the Pacific (1879-1884) is the war among South American states with the second highest casualty rate in the nineteenth century. This chapter provides a detailed case study of this war while offering a long-term narrative of state building in the South Pacific (i.e., Bolivia, Chile, and Peru). The comparison between Chile and Peru is illuminating, since both countries were comparable in important confounders–e.g., their armies, navy, bureaucracies, and budgets–and were impacted similarly by important economic confounders such as economic booms and crises. In this chapter I depict the evolution of war and the balance between central and peripheral elites from independence to the mid-century. Then I illustrate how preparation for war led to state formation, and looks at the details of the campaign, battle by battle. These two sections already serve the purpose of debunking some myths in this literature, like the idea that Peru did not mobilize for the war, and that the war did not lead to extraction in Chile Finally, I discuss how war transformed state institutions, and determined diverging, long-terms trends in state capacity.

This chapter covers the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the Franco-Mexican War (1861-1867), two of the deadliest wars in nineteenth-century Latin America. A blowing defeat, and a glorious victory, these wars set Mexico in a road to anarchy and state consolidation, respectively. The chapter starts covering early episodes of war in New Spain, like the Mexican victory against the French in the Pastry War (1838-1839), which provided initial impulse for centralizing projects. It then turns to the Texan Revolution and the Mexican-American War, and corroborates the predictions of the theory in the behaviour of all actors and on each phase of the war. Leaving Mexico in the state of total anarchy and state collapse expected after a defeat, I then take a detour to discuss how victory in the Filibuster War (1856-1857) impacted Costa Rica, providing a tentative answer for the mystery of its comparatively high political development until our day. Finally, I return to Mexico and cover the Second French Intervention of Mexico, a blessing in disguise, for the victory against the French ushered the period of more spectacular stability and growth in Mexican history.

If one is looking for the mechanism connecting war to state formation in Latin America, the obvious place to start is the Paraguayan War (1864-1870), the single most deadly war in the history of the region. This chapter provides the most detailed discussion of this case in the state formation literature and a narrative covering state formation in the River Plate Basin (i.e., Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay). I discuss how earlier, lower intensity wars affected the balance between central and peripheral elites and take a brief detour to cover the effect of the Siege of Montevideo on Uruguayan politics, potentially explaining the current Uruguayan exceptionalism in terms of its state capacity levels. I then illustrate how preparation for war led to incipient state formation amidst polarization in all contenders of the Paraguayan War and discuss the war itself, illustrating how the result of contingent battles affected the domestic fate of the state formation. Finally, I discuss how war transformed political parties and the military, two key institutions, setting the basis for long term state capacity growth in the allies, and its decline in Paraguay.

More than seventy years of England and Wales census data is available to search electronically. This chapter uses the digitized census data on London’s penal, semi-penal and voluntary institutions on census night 1881 to explore the social composition of incarcerated women. The census data shows that the prison population only counts a very specific category of female ‘deviants’, as they were predominantly young, unmarried and had low-status, unskilled and insecure occupation. Women in their mid-thirties and older, the married and widowed on the other hand only constituted a small minority of the prison population. This chapter argues that these women can be found in much greater numbers among other major state institutions like the workhouse and the public asylums. While men may have faced the brunt of penal discipline, deviant women were more often taken care of by semi-penal institutions, before but also sometimes after their conviction.

This chapter synthesises the main arguments made in the book. I discuss how the study of the cholera outbreak has been used to illuminate a wider set of questions ranging from the character of the Zimbabwean state to the nature of structural inequalities in Zimbabwean society, ideational formations in everyday life, and, more widely, the myriad meanings, memories and narratives the epidemic has left in its wake across public institutions and in civic life. I put forward the contributions that this project makes to scholarly debates about the emergence of catastrophic epidemics and the transformation of state institutions in Zimbabwe, about the politics of responding to complex emergencies, and about citizenship and political subjectivity. I place the cholera outbreak in comparative perspective by suggesting how the insights gleaned from this book might be relevant to other major epidemics in Africa. Finally, I conclude on a cautionary note as Zimbabwe continues to suffer from recurrent diarrhoeal disease outbreaks that disproportionately affect the poor. But I also note that the country’s politics are not a foregone conclusion and, despite the pessimistic tone of this book, reasons for optimism are to be found in the complexity, diversity and richness of Zimbabwean people and society.