The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte Michael Kenneth Huner Keywords Javier Uriarte, Michael Kenneth Huner, State Formation, Nineteenth Century, Postcolonial, Latin America uriarte, javier. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. Routledge, 2020, xvi + 306 pp. Literary scholar Javier Uriarte supplies in The Desertmakers incisive reflection about late-nineteenth-century state formation in Latin America. The work achieves distinction as a valuable study for experts in this field and would serve as a fine addition, with interdisciplinary appeal, to a graduate course on the subject. The book does not lend itself for use in a typical undergraduate classroom. Its dense thirty-page introduction struggles to articulate concisely the work's contributions. It requires wading into the rich analysis of the essays that follow to discover them. Four extended essays on the writings of an intriguing collection of authors comprise the heart of the book. It is indeed a curious compilation at first glance: the famous British adventurer Richard Burton, the Argentine-born English novelist W. H. Hudson, the Argentine scientific explorer Francisco Moreno, and the singular Brazilian literary chronicler Euclides Da Cunha. Two subjects of the British empire grouped alongside two citizens of then-recently created or consolidated South American republics would seem to invite a mere review of contrasting cultural perspectives and styles, not a study of a coherent literary community. But these authors often read and referenced each other, or had other literary and political acquaintances in common—like Domingo Sarmiento and Teddy Roosevelt—as Uriarte documents. They shared the elite worldview of the burgeoning neocolonial age in the region, either as traveling representatives of an informal British reach in South America or as traveling agents of the liberal-republican states in Brazil and Argentina. And, as Uriarte also demonstrates, they all arrived at a common disillusionment with the promised results of liberal progress and state-making realized via war, especially those conflicts that waged campaigns of apparent extermination. The diverse range of conflicts involved is noteworthy here: interstate war, civil war, Indian wars, and a counterinsurgent campaign are the focus of the [End Page 319] writings examined. It is an apt variety consistent with the historical experience of postcolonial Latin American states; interstate wars were the least common form of conflict in the region. Uriarte then appropriately links the specific conflicts discussed in a causal chain and considers the massive, interstate Triple Alliance (or Paraguayan) War (1864–1870) generative of the others. He collectively reads the accounts of the conflicts "as journeys through remains, through ruins" (268). The common thesis is that these writers recount how, as modern capitalist-backed forces attempted to extend state authority over previously unconquered "deserts," the wars to do so—and the accounts of those wars—reproduced desertlike ruins in turn. The thesis is perhaps most strained, however, in the first essay about Richard Burton and his understudied travelogue Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay. Uriarte does make a crucial contribution to the study of Burton's travel writings; nearly all previous studies ignored his travels through South America and his letters about the war in Paraguay. And, indeed, Uriarte's integrative analysis of Letters is quite strong. He highlights how Burton's travels with the allied armies into Paraguay remained well behind the progress of the actual front and so what he encountered were battlefield ruins and secondhand stories about their developments. The result is Burton's sympathetic portrayal of Paraguayans as heroic premodern savages and his critique of the destructiveness of the allies' war, even as he considers the Paraguayans doomed by the inevitable momentum of history. The problems arise when Uriarte wanders into other historical questions. He attempts to resurrect the interpretation of Great Britain's imperial role in the conflict—an interpretation that now definitively persists in a zombielike state no matter how many times historians kill it. It feeds Uriarte's insistence that Paraguay was the victim of allied aggression that finished the country's "sui generis process of modernization" (62). This depiction ignores the findings of a generation of recent historical scholarship on nineteenth-century Paraguayan state formation—including works that Uriarte cites—that...