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In September 1810, less than four months after
expelling the Spanish viceroy, the new government in Buenos Aires founded a
public library. As struggles over
sovereignty broke out across the Iberian Americas, a pattern began to
emerge: Independence leaders decreed
libraries as, or even before, they declared independence. In the midst of war, with legitimacy
precarious and literacy limited to a privileged few, why was priority attached
to creating public facilities for reading? Jorge Luis Borges, it seems, was by no means
the first Latin American to imagine the history of the future contained in a
library. This research, which is
generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, explores how the transnational circulation
of knowledge shaped the formation of nation-states in Latin America during the
century after Iberian rule was defeated in the 1820s. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, it
combines the methods of global intellectual history and sociology of knowledge to
develop a new way of thinking about nations as communities of shared knowledge. This idea makes it possible to take into
account how nations are experienced and enacted as well as how they are
imagined. I show how evidence from the pioneering nations of Latin America
invites historians to rethink many of their general theories about how
knowledge travels and how it affects political identities. The history of
knowledge is an emerging field of study, which is beginning to produce some
exciting work, but most of the evidence gathered so far is from Europe and/or
from the early modern era. My forthcoming book, Republics of Knowledge, offers a challenging alternative
perspective by exploring the nineteenth-century histories of Latin America,
when this newly-independent region was foundational to transnational debates
about culture and politics. It is
designed to stimulate debate about the significance of knowledge not only in
Latin America but in all modern societies.
Nicola Miller
Professor of Latin American History
Department of History
UCL