Nicola Miller. Republics of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. 304 pp. $39.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-691-17675-8.
Reviewed by Meri Clark (Western New England University)
Published on H-LatAm (February, 2021)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America examines the definition, production, dissemination, and reception of knowledge in Chile, Argentina, and Peru from 1810 to 1910. This ambitious project is the work of Nicola Miller, professor of Latin American history at University College London, who has previously published on twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals and nationalism. In this book, Miller searches the crucial first century of nation-building in South America to find what counted as knowledge—that is, information verifiable by socially accepted criteria (p. 8)—and to understand why some claims gained acceptance and others did not.
Miller’s overarching chronology will be familiar to most nineteenth-century Latin Americanists: the idealistic fervor for experimentation in the 1810s ebbed dramatically but then resurged after midcentury with the opening of new spaces for political, economic, and symbolic criticism. Her contribution is to analyze how and with whom Latin Americans developed information and ideas, as well as how that knowledge changed over time. Miller’s ambitious book gathers diverse historical evidence into the same conceptual space, everything from primary sources such as newspapers, poetry, lithographs, and government documents to histories of education, science, art, and knowledge as well as cultural studies, sociology, and philosophy. She aims to bridge disciplinary divides that have, she argues, prevented scholars from appreciating the whole of Latin American knowledge and critically evaluating it as a nation-making process.
Her detailed analysis of diverse sources bolsters her argument that the extraordinary creativity and diversity of Latin American knowledge cannot be understood solely by studying its major institutions, intellectuals, or -isms (p. 43). Knowledge producers existed within and beyond these bounds, testing ideas in non-institutional spaces too. The book is, in large part, a social history of knowledge, although it also discusses philosophy and pedagogy. Her book sets up a “cabinet of curios,” filled with vivid biographies of unsung Latin Americans and fine illustrations of their objects of knowledge. Yet Miller swiftly moves into adroit explanation of how they made and shared knowledge, questioning and debating ideas, resisting and transforming European and US hegemony. One of her most compelling claims is that “Latin America … challenges historians of all areas of the world (including core European countries) to rethink their approaches to the history of knowledge” (p. 12). Miller sets that challenge into her story of the democratization of knowledge in Latin America, suggesting that its radical contours had (and still have) global reach.
Miller assembles an astonishing variety of examples—from drawing teachers to citizen scientists to engineers—into a dazzling portrait of nineteenth-century Spanish American knowledge producers. She traces intellectual networks and ways of knowing to show how Argentines, Chileans, and Peruvians made and debated knowledge within and beyond traditional institutional spaces. Part 1 establishes the “landscape,” examining knowledge repositories such as public libraries (chapter 1); the intellectual “repertoires,” or shared rhetorical strategies and references to classical Greece and Rome and the natural world (chapter 2); the widening markets and audiences for printed words (chapter 3); the pedagogy of drawing and dissemination of visual images as constitutive and critical tools of nation-building (chapter 4); and the transformations of “touchstone” words like ilustrado that showed an increasing commitment to more accessible public education (chapter 5).
In chapters 3 and 4, Miller’s argument really gets rolling: she shows us how autodidacts across South America embraced the basic right of the republics to know and share knowledge. They bought and contributed to almanacs, astronomical digests, songs, lithographic prints, and (more rarely) luxury book editions that became “ambassadors” of the trade (p. 71). Entrepreneurs like Carlos Casavalle wore many hats as publishers, editors, bibliographers, acquirers, suppliers, marketers, donors, and even government lobbyists. Miller knits together biographies of such national figures with the less-heralded actions of many informal members of the trade, like the priests granted safe conduct to carry printed texts through conflict zones. However, her most important contribution in this section is to highlight the essential role of dibujantes (drawers) who trained surveyors, mapmakers, and engineers. These artist-educators advocated the “creative imitation of American nature” (p. 100). In doing so, they taught new ways of seeing—through lithographs, maps, blueprints, and, later, photography—that helped build nations and opened spaces for debate about the dominant models of scientific progress in Europe and the United States.
Miller offers admirable insights into these Latin American knowledge communities as active nodes in an international intellectual network. Her finely assembled historical evidence reveals the tensions in “the whole knowledge environment of Spanish American countries: where and how to imitate European culture; what kind of educational policy would make the best citizens; how to contend with the colonial past and the indigenous past and present” (p. 85). To that end, part 2 addresses how knowledge made nations. Chapter 6 (“Languages”) opens by discussing the centenary spurt of national dictionaries to show how local idioms linked to national identities, as well as the “long history of deep and persistent unease about language” across Spanish America (p. 123). This chapter also explains how scholarly and popular interest in the Quechua drama Ollantay lifted Inca literature and history into the ranks of “great civilizations” on the international stage. These examples reveal the power of knowledge hierarchies, especially clear in the persistent recalcitrance of European scholars in the face of Latin American knowledge. However important, this chapter seems less integrated with the others in part 2.
Miller’s argument is best illustrated in the tussles over map-making (chapter 7, “Land and Territory”) and infrastructure projects (chapter 9, “Engineering Sovereignty”). These chapters neatly explain the intricacies involved in surveying territory, especially on contested borders, and the battles over how best to use that land for “national” interests. Principles of self-sufficiency spurred local resistance to the redevelopment of ports at Callao and Buenos Aires. These fascinating tales are paired in chapter 9 with a summary of international scuffles over the invention of the frigorífico (refrigerator ship) and the massive trasandino railway project that linked Chile and Argentina. Chapter 8 (“Critiques of Classical Political Economy”) contends with the prevalent view that free trade ideology ruled and, instead, argues that Argentines, Peruvians, and even Chileans read and resisted classical political economy (CPE). Noting their sociopolitical realities, the region’s thinkers tended to favor some level of protectionism (e.g., flexible tariffs) to foment domestic industrialization and livelier internal trade. The late-century vogue for teaching “social economy” was crucial to the later development of economic nationalism, she contends. Miller notes that Economic Commission for Latin America chief Raúl Prebisch had studied under Argentina’s first national statistician, Alejandro Bunge (p. 176). Here it would have been interesting to learn more about how Bunge may have used literacy statistics in economic planning, perhaps linking it to themes raised in earlier chapters about the education of non-elite and non-majority people. Instead, Miller looks forward in chapter 10 (“Education for Citizenship”) to link critiques of CPE to the turn-of-the-century rise of popular education. This era saw women, indigenous people, and unionized workers develop night schools, mobile libraries, and lecture circuits to reach those whom traditional educational institutions still neglected. Overall, Miller traces a throughline from early republican autodidacts to organized workers: for over a century, non-elites in Spanish America had fought to learn and share useful knowledge.
Miller’s book impresses in several ways. Her careful and concise explanations expose knotty issues in specific disciplines but do not get entangled in them. She also attends to the roles of women and non-elites as knowledge makers and educators as a matter of course, offering important corrections when their contributions have been neglected in the wider scholarship (e.g., Swiss-Argentine artist Andrea [Adrienne] Macaire Bacle and Peruvian artists and educators Elena and Victoria Izcué). Her interdisciplinary sources challenge her to grapple with different analytical styles and materials, yet Miller deftly articulates her own argument with commanding prose.
Miller handles her diverse evidence very effectively overall. One rare stumble comes in chapter 3, “Writing in the Dark,” after she makes the reasonable point that high production costs limited book printing—and, thus, the dissemination of locally produced knowledge—across Latin America. She contrasts the region’s lack of local manufacturing of paper, ink, and typeface to that of US industries developed to serve “a population rapidly acquiring literacy” (p. 61). Her supporting table, “Literacy Rates in Latin America, 1900 and 1950, with Selected Comparisons,” notes that some data “tend to refer to capital cities only and are rarely reliable or comparable” (p. 61). That is obvious in the case of US literacy rates (stated as 90 percent in 1900 and 98 percent in 1950), numbers that gloss over stark racial, gender, linguistic, and regional differences that the source, though dated, explains (UNESCO, 1953). The table does not offer substantial or accurate enough information to usefully compare, or critique, literacy rates in Latin America and Europe. Sustained discussion would have bolstered her claims about the hierarchies of knowledge that subordinated Latin American (especially indigenous) ways of knowing, as well as the importance of statisticians to maintaining or challenging such hierarchies. However, this table presents a minor problem in an otherwise exceptional book.
Miller has made a profound contribution to the history of knowledge by mapping the intellectual worlds of nineteenth-century Argentina, Chile, and Peru. She traces how Spanish Americans channeled knowledge to different audiences (a wider public) and ends (national and universal). Her far-reaching argument offers material of interest to historians of ideas, education, nationalism, and science. It should be required reading for graduate students in history and cultural studies of Latin America. Given the accessible prose, individual chapters could stand alone as exemplars for undergraduate readers in history. The broader regional compass that the book’s subtitle suggests should spur the comparative research of historians in many fields.
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Citation:
Meri Clark. Review of Miller, Nicola, Republics of Knowledge.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55846
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