Ambitious Rebels: Remaking Honor, Law, and Liberalism in Venezuela, 1780–1850 by Reuben Zahler (review)

University of Oregon history professor Reuben Zahler addresses three aspects central to the historical development of modern Latin American nation-states. The main one is the introduction of liberalism after independence. Two others, closely related to the ascent of liberalism, are republican legal reforms and the transformation of honor codes. The author’s aim is to consider not only the way Venezuelan elites went about implementing a liberal project but also to examine subaltern responses to it and actual changes the implementation of liberalism brought about in the daily lives, attitudes, and views of ordinary peoples.

To accomplish such an ambitious agenda, the author relies on judicial cases, legislation, official correspondence and speeches, periodicals, memoirs, and foreign traveler accounts, and also mixes in social, political, intellectual, and cultural history. The history of gender relations, in particular, is central to his entire discussion. Further, the overall work is framed as a contribution to a better understanding of the so called ‘middle period,’ thus bridging the historiography of the late-colonial and early-postcolonial decades in Spanish America with reference to a variety of authors, including Sarah Chambers, Lester Langley, John Lynch, Mark Szuchman, Victor Uribe, Eric Van Young, and Stuart Voss. However, perhaps because Professor Zahler’s dominant focus is on liberalism itself, some of these names are absent from the book’s bibliography.

To set the stage, Zahler provides a comprehensive introduction to the prerevolutionary historical background, the revolution for independence, and the upswing of liberalism in Venezuela. He devotes the first two chapters to documenting postcolonial Venezuela’s growing attention to written legislation as opposed to moral decency (and civility), to the rise of civilians within the country’s state bureaucracy, and to the judiciary’s instrumental role in the promotion of a liberal agenda, including increased transparency, due process, and new notions of what constituted appropriate judicial evidence. Next, he devotes two chapters to exploring the nature of honor codes and the tensions between liberalism and patriarchy. In those regards, he discusses gender and domestic life and the relations between particular notions of femininity and republicanism. Finally, the book’s last two chapters address intra-elite political divisions over appropriate economic policy in the face of the nation’s major economic instability and discuss what these tensions suggest about transformations of the honor code, and political culture more generally. This section of the book closes with an account of a rural popular uprising in 1846–1847, which exposed the rural poor’s frustration over economic inequality and related political and cultural tensions, in particular over evolving notions of honor.

Concerning the understanding of honor, this text recognizes some remarkable continuities from the colonial period to post-independence, but focuses on a key transition occurring during the middle period: the decline of notions of inherited honor and the ascent of notions linking honor to work and industriousness, civic sacrifice, republican merit, and the exercise of full political rights. This discussion would have been enriched by closer attention to the anthology Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America (2005) edited by Caulfield, Chambers, and Putnam, in particular the introduction in which the editors insightfully problematize the links between honor and liberalism, relating honor to the perpetuation of social hierarchies in the nineteenth century. Despite his acknowledgment that there were cultural and discursive changes in the status of women after independence—in courts of law they demanded reciprocity and respect for their individual rights—the author consistently highlights the upholding and reinforcement of patriarchy during republican times. He also discusses the tensions between the perpetuation of patriarchal relations, symbolized by the centrality of padres de familia, to control labor and maintain social order in the new republic, and liberalism’s egalitarian narrative.

Ambitious Rebels builds on the works on prerevolutionary, revolutionary, and postindependence Venezuela by, among others, historians Arlene Diaz, John Lombardi, Michael...