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Dissertation Information for Justin Wolfe

NAME:
- Justin Wolfe

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1999)

ADVISORS:
- Jose Carlos Moya

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Mary Yeager
- Kenneth L. Sokoloff
- Jeffrey L. Gould

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Rising from the ashes: Community, ethnicity and nation-state formation in nineteenth-century Nicaragua

Abstract: Traditionally, nineteenth-century Nicaraguan history is divided into three periods: the years of anarchy from Independence in 1821 to 1857, the Conservative Thirty Years from 1858-1893, and the Liberal Revolution from 1893-1909. Accordingly, the divided elite fought among themselves for more than 40 years after Independence until they unified against the threat to their sovereignty in the form of U.S. mercenary William Walker. In this narrative, upon defeating him in the National War (1855-1857), Nicaragua stagnated for 30 years into a simultaneously weak, ineffective yet coercive state until Jose Santos Zelaya's regime created a truly liberal state-formation project. This study critiques this periodization and the political, social, economic and cultural history that it implies. The foundations of nation-state formation predated the National War. This proto-nationalist ideology conditioned the elite's unification during the war and for decades to come and determined its approach to the autonomous communities that resisted the state's subsequent expansion. Following the National War, the state promoted the elite ideals of "progress," but rather than imposing them from above, as is generally held, this study finds that the state negotiated Nicaragua's future.

Nation-state formation necessarily employs a populist discourse, creating a space for resistance and negotiation of the process at every level of society. Breaking with traditional approaches to nation-state formation that tend to focus on either cultural or structural transformations, I analyze how the strands of local social, economic and cultural fabric are unraveled and rewoven into the institutional fabric of the state. The analysis relies on a wide range of newly available archival sources to examine at both the municipal and national levels, how the creation of state institutions, transformations in land tenure and labor regimes, and struggles over the meaning and autonomy of ethnic identities and local communities form the foundations of the Nicaraguan nation-state. This study examines how the state's reliance on local communities to legitimize the nation-state led to the negotiated creation of localized forms of state institutions that reproduced national identity within the everyday life of the community.

MPACT Scores for Justin Wolfe

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-09-23 11:41:31

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Students under Justin Wolfe

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None