The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America by James E. Sanders (review)

In the middle years of the nineteenth century, a strikingly inclusive republicanism in Latin America reached heights unknown in Europe and outpaced parallel movements in the United States in its universalism and practical scope. Historians of Latin America increasingly acknowledge this phenomenon, but it has not significantly penetrated scholarly understandings of the global history of liberalism, modernity, republicanism, and democracy. In this provocative and absorbing book, James E. Sanders explores what he calls “American republican modernity.” He reconstructs a 40-year period, from the 1840s to the 1870s, in which, he argues, a unique conception of republican politics came “close to hegemony” in Spanish America.

Sanders provides ample evidence that the rapidly expanding Latin American public sphere was regularly conversant with declarations of equality, broad sovereignty, and racelessness. He clearly demonstrates how plebeians sought to turn this discourse to their advantage and makes a convincing argument for their ability to achieve tangible results.

This narrative does not fit neatly into persistent narratives of dominance; it mirrors neither the persistent claim that all good things came from Europe nor the argument that enlightenment ideas ultimately brought only misery to most people in the colonial and postcolonial world. Both of these interpretations still need dismantling, and Sanders skillfully exposes significant cracks.

Latin Americans in these years championed a republicanism in which order and economic progress were thought to proceed from political liberty, rather than the other way around. In this they were unique. Republicanism was not successful in Europe, and in the United States it was seriously limited by exclusions based on race and property-holding. The Latin American iterations of republicanism allowed subalterns to claim equality as citizens and to push back against potentially damaging aspects of liberalism, in particular those regarding land and property. Republicanism before the 1880s, both as proclaimed and as practiced, did not decimate the lives of the majority of Latin Americans; in many ways, it presented real opportunities.

Sanders suggests that we take seriously contemporary Latin Americans’ assertion that it was here that the most expansive and potentially liberating modernity flourished. In this regard, this book is a celebratory account. There are compelling reasons to embrace Sanders’s interpretation, especially for an audience of non-Latin Americanists, for whom this story will likely be entirely new and potentially transformative. Some Latin Americanists, however, may feel uncomfortable, despite Sanders’s clear attempt to acknowledge them; many would prefer to place more emphasis on the very real limits of republicanism and on the persistence of deeply unequal socioeconomic systems. Sanders also gives limited attention to the ways in which the propagation of republican discourse coupled with such limits resulted in the denial of discrimination inherent in what Marixa Lasso calls “myths of harmony” and in the widely discussed “myth of racial democracy.”

Finally, some will question the prominent role that elite discourse plays in this book, missing as it does an equal emphasis on structural and institutional imperatives that drove it. Certainly, Sanders shows that the practical reach of republicanism was the result of popular pressure; elites were forced to honor rhetorical commitments by an engaged populace making demands on weak states. But he does less to explore the causal implications of the global economic context. In his narrative, the rise of the “order and progress” regimes of the turn of the century are presented as an ideological shift, a new acceptance of economic progress as the main marker of modernity. But it was only in the very late nineteenth century that Latin American countries could realistically pursue such progress, strengthen the state, and lessen their dependence on popular legitimacy.

Crucially, none of this changes Sanders’s central assertions. Elites did speak in inclusive terms, plebeians did take advantage, and the reach of republicanism...