Imperial Uncertainties and Republican Conflicts: Archives, Diplomacy, and Historiography in Nineteenth-Century Chile

During the second half of the nineteenth century the Chilean state sponsored several missions to European archives to identify and transcribe official records from the colonial period. Since the immediate objective of these operations was to create a diplomatic archive that enabled the authorities to respond to the territorial claims presented by neighboring states, the commissioners gave special attention to the political reports, statistical descriptions, ethnographic accounts, and cartographic representations generated by the European scientific expeditions that had visited Latin America during the eighteenth century. Convinced of the reliability and accuracy of these sources, the envoys created a documental collection that exactly reflected the diplomatic conjuncture faced by the novel republic. But the outcomes of these diplomatic missions went beyond dealing with the immediate territorial disputes. By collecting these types of references, the commissioners also laid the bases for the first systematic efforts to study the colonial past, offering nineteenth-century Chilean historians an impressive arsenal of references that determined not only the content of their approaches but also the epistemological foundations of their works. Those colonial documents initially employed to defend the "frontiers of the state"—more precisely the idea of territory as legal property based on historical proofs—were also critical inputs for the development of a national historiography that started to interpret the colonial period as a reflection of the present. Analyzing the circulation and republican uses of colonial legal and scientific knowledge, this article seeks to explore the intersections among archives, diplomacy, historiography, and territoriality in the transition from a colonial order to a national one.