The The Cisplatine War

Historiographical Renewal and Historical Rupture

Abstract

The Cisplatine War (1825-1828) long occupied a paradoxical place in the historiography of the Southern Cone. Despite its profound impact on Brazil, the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, and the emergence of an independent Uruguay, and notwithstanding the vast military, diplomatic, and political literature devoted to it, the conflict was relegated to a secondary position in national memory, rarely integrated into each country's founding narratives and marked by scant dialogue among the national historiographies. Centered primarily on Brazilian scholarship and, in part, on Uruguayan work, this essay pursues three aims. First, it maps part of the contributions of a new generation of historians, without attempting to cover the entire body of scholarship on the subject, but highlighting the works I find most generative in renewing regional and national perspectives, attentive to recruitment practices, the circulation of political discourse, and the role of the press in shaping political culture. Second, it analyzes the war as a point of rupture in the trans-imperial commercial networks that had structured the Platine region since the colonial period, tracing the collapse of the Cisplatine project and the unraveling of Montevideo's mercantile connections, aggravated by the insurgent privateering of Buenos Aires. Finally, returning to Spencer Leitman's classic interpretation and to the historians recently advancing in that direction, it reflects on how the socioeconomic impasses left by the conflict fed the tensions that culminated in the War of the Farrapos (1835-1845).