ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Families in War and Peace Sarah C. Chambers places gender analysis and family politics at the center of Chile's struggle for independence and its subsequent state building. Linking the experiences of both prominent and more humble families to Chile's political and legal history, Chambers argues that matters such as marriage, custody, bloodlines, and inheritance were crucial to Chile's transition from colony to nation. She shows how men and women extended their familial roles to mobilize kin networks for political ends, both during and after the Chilean revolution. From the conflict's end in 1823 until the 1850s, the state adopted the rhetoric of paternal responsibility along with patriarchal authority, which became central to the state building process. Chilean authorities, Chambers argues, garnered legitimacy by enacting or enforcing paternalist laws on property restitution, military pensions, and family maintenance allowances, all of which provided for diverse groups of Chileans. By acting as the fathers of the nation, they aimed to reconcile the "greater Chilean family" and form a stable government and society.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sarah C. Chambers is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780-1854.

REVIEWS

"This is a richly documented study, detailed in its findings and replete with narratives drawn from personal correspondence and thus closely grounded in the human side of violent conflict."

-- Mark D. Szuchman Hispanic American Historical Review

"In Families in War and Peace, Sarah C. Chambers offers an insightful analysis of the intricate connections between the Chilean state and the family during independence and the following period.... This book is a solid work of scholarship and a welcome addition to the literature of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Latin America.

-- Guiomar Duenas Vargas American Historical Review

"Sarah Chambers . . . has produced another excellent monograph on Spanish America’s transition from colonialism to independence and its highly conflictive process of state-building. . . . [I]t offers an unequalled examination of family law as it developed in Chile during the first half of the nineteenth century."

-- Joanna Crow Journal of Latin American Studies

"Families in War and Peace will serve as the foundational text for studies on national family policy in Chile during the nineteenth century. The cases of political reintegration that Chambers has examined in the case of Chile have broader implications for other growing areas of scholarship, such as the transformation of property rights, the increasing use of pardons and amnesty, and the general decline in wartime confiscations in the Americas. The author has assembled an impressive collection of evidence to reconstruct the lives of numerous Chilean families struggling to survive the instability of the early nineteenth century. These stories stretch across the Atlantic world. The family secrets of the Carreras laid bare in these pages make it a fascinating book and an essential contribution to family history."

-- Jesse Hingson Journal of Family History

"Families in War and Peace provides an intriguing, exhaustive, and analytically rigorous account of the tumult of independence and the early republican era."

-- Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt EIAL

“Families in War and Peace represents an excellent contribution to the history of Latin America in general and the history of Chile in particular.”

-- Sarah Walsh The Latin Americanist

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part I. Families at War

1. Kin Mobilized for War: The Carrera Family Drama, 1810–1824 25

2. Reconquest and War to the Death: Patriot and Royalist Families Face Sanctions and Separation 62

3. Émigrés, Refugees, and Property Seizures: Chilean Officials in the Role of Family Providers 91

Part II. Reconciling the National Family

4. Constituting the Greater Chilean Family: Nation-State Formation and the Restitution of Property 125

5. Protecting Soldiers' Patrimony: Expanding Pension Eligibility for Widows and Orphans 155

6. Enforcing Paternal Responsibilities: Legal Disputes over Family Maintenance and Custody 182

Conclusion 213

Appendix: Chronology of Events in Chile 225

Notes 229

Bibliography 267

Index 277

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