“Forment provides scholars and students of Latin America’s Middle Period with a challenging study of the nature and extent of democracy in what has generally been considered an authoritarian political landscape. . . . Forment’s creative and evidentially expansive approach employs scale and subject to rebut the commonly held historiographical wisdom that the postindependence world of politics and public life consisted of unstable government, authoritarian rule, and an exclusionary, personalist, and clientelistic politics. In scale, he digs down to the community and local level, relying on newspapers, essays, books, pamphlets, and other forms of published writing. In subject, he breaks public life down into civic, economic, and political components. . . . In making such a broad, innovative interpretation, boldness is required. Using an abundance of primary sources, Forment reveals a world of increasingly vibrant civic, associational life, and multistrata agency in nineteenth-century Mexico and Peru up to 1880.”
— Stuart F. Voss, American Historical Review