Peter Henderson’s Gabriel García Moreno and Conservative State Formation in the Andes, analyzes nineteenth-century debates over modernization and state formation during the administration of Ecuadorian President Gabriel Garcia Moreno, one of the country’s most controversial politicians.
Henderson focuses on five major themes: the creation of political networks, regionalism, the liberal-conservative ideological divide, caudillismo, and perennial attempt to modernize state and society. He challenges dominant historical narratives that claim that Garcia Moreno sought to create a Catholic theocracy negotiated with the Vatican to gain control over the church’s vast rural estates and land holdings in the late nineteenth century.
Although their designs were frustrated by the Liberal Revolution of the early twentieth century, the monograph enhances our understanding of conservatives’ ideas of progress at the time, and the role they imagined the state should play in formation of national society.
By N. H. Gill
Chapel Hill, 2016
Southern Affairs 