Few (if any) historical monographs will admit to telling only the stories of the “big men.” No one tells us in an introduction that they will be concerned with the centers of power, because frankly, the oppressed and marginalized people don’t really play a part in this story. On the contrary, the trend is toward the history of the heretofore ignored, because despite their reputation for powerlessness and inertness, they are actually potent historical actors. They have “agency”!
At times this kind of social history degenerates into “sentimental antiquarianism,” obsessed with the “minutiae of everyday underclass existence.” In its more clear-sighted forms, however, it is powerful history. Such is the case with Brooke Larson’s Trials of Nation Making. Her claim to be “looking at postcolonial nation-making from the margins” is somewhat misleading: the dominant perspective in her book is that of the nation-makers, the Creole elite, rather than indigenous peoples. In fact, Trials of Nation Making brings indigenous peoples into the very heart of nation-building projects in late nineteenth-century Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Larson argues convincingly that this period’s “liberal assaults on indigenous forms of subsistence and community threatened, as perhaps only the European conquest had done, the intricate webs that bound most Andean peasantries to their mountainous world and all that it had come to symbolize.”
The book’s central tragedy is the impossible dilemma faced by liberal elites throughout the Andean world: to assimilate the Indians, whether by “whitening” or civilizing them; or to enslave them. Because of their commitment to the “modernization” of their nations – which primarily meant joining forces with international capitalism – no other options were imaginable. As a result, Indians were stripped of the communal lands and state protection they had known in the segregated world of the old regime, and excluded from the equal citizenship promised by the liberal ideals of the new republics. Paradoxically, it was this very exclusion that gave indigenous people an opportunity to formulate a separate identity, an identity which ultimately laid the groundwork for the indigenous movement of the late twentieth century.
It is a compelling story. And this is due not only to Larson’s stylistic brilliance (“Columbia’s invertebrate national market” is one favorite line) or to the high drama of her subject (the angst of Creole politicians, the righteous indignation of Indian peasants, and the barbarity of military officials all have a place here). It is also a testament to the skill with which she weaves so-called marginal peoples into the center of the story. It is a story of “big men” – dictators, diplomats, rebel leaders – but it does not ignore the small people. More precisely, it is a story of small people that pays attention to the big men.
This is the kind of history that we should tell to undergraduates and even high school students. Far too many textbooks have corrected the traditional “master narrative” of the actions of powerful people merely by including the contributions of less powerful people. Larson, I think, succeeds in combining the two stories in one.
NOTES
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 442.
Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 51.
Larson, 52.
Larson, 21.
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