Abstract
AbstractIn the wake of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, democratic nationalism promoted the liberation of oppressed peoples from the shackles of absolutist empires and prophesied the emergence of a cosmopolitan brotherhood of nation states. From a global perspective, however, this political culture could be imperial. The governors of State of Buenos Aires modelled plans for the White colonization of the pampas on French Algeria. They sent a Military-Agricultural Legion to the enclave of Bahía Blanca, near the Patagonian frontier, to participate in the war against the Indians. Launched as the successor to Garibaldi’s Italian Legion of Montevideo, its leaders promised to bring civilization to savage lands in the spirit of Columbus and in the name of the Risorgimento. This case study offers a window into the cross-pollination of ideas concerning conquest and colonization between Latin America and Europe. Expansion and secession, empire and nation, mestizaje and racial hierarchies, cosmopolitanism and adventurism, all coexisted within an entangled republican universe.
Highlights
On 29 September 1856, Coronel Silvino Olivieri, commander of the Military-Agricultural Legion, was murdered by his own troops in ‘New Rome’, a settlement a two-day march from Bahía Blanca, one of the southern outposts of the State of Buenos Aires near the Patagonian frontier
Launched with great fanfare as the successor to Garibaldi’s Italian Legion of Montevideo, its officers espoused a republican ethos of the State of Buenos Aires and the Italian Risorgimento while evoking the spirit of Columbus and promising to bring European civilization to virgin and savage lands
Many returned to Bahía Blanca, others made their way to Buenos Aires or closer towns and a few melted into native settlements
Summary
For addicts of the republican press in the decade following the Revolutions of 1848, the presence of democratic volunteers from Crimea to the Maghreb to the Pampa provided hope that the triumphal march of democracy would once again arrive in Europe. In December 1858, La Tribuna published a letter from the Republican Emilio Castelar who had been stirring up public opinion for what would later be bombastically labelled the ‘War of Africa’ (1859–60) He wrote: ‘In a manner like your present situation in which you must try to dominate the Indians to push them towards a good – or bad – degree of civilization, we must subject these Moors, the remains of the barbaric races who for so long have bloodied the land and darkened its history’.69. Upon the Spanish victory in Morocco, the Argentine Press praised ‘the green laurels that the mother country has picked up in Africa’ and congratulated the ‘great nation : : : that, while crossing the Atlantic, spread civilization throughout the world, leaving its blood as the seed for vigorous peoples’.70 These transatlantic, democratic and imperial dialects of the triumph of democracy over despotism, Christianity over Islam, and civilization over barbarism were drilled into the ears of the volunteers of the Military-Agricultural Legion. He invited Italian farmers and workers to depart the ‘rancid Europe of monarchs’ to join in ‘common cause’ with republicans of the New World.
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