Description:

The Jackson Lecture will be given by Valeria Coronel.  Lunch will be served at the event.

Description: Unlike most Latin American countries at the end of the 19th century, Ecuador lacked an "oligarchic bloc" (pact between elites) capable of suppressing the Radical Party among the political organizations of the time, or of repressing popular demands on the road to state building. My paper questions the theory of the inevitability of an "oligarchic state” in this continent, while reconstructing how in Ecuador an interclassist and interethnic political organization, integrating the bourgeoisie and intellectuals, together with peasants, artisans and post-emancipation indigenous communities, became a complex but crucial agent in state-building. Ecuador's interest for comparative studies derives from its paradoxical combination of a democratic path to state-building in the midst of capitalist dependence.

Bio: Valeria Coronel is an associate professor at Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Ecuador. Her book La última Guerra del Siglo de las Luces. Revolución Liberal y Republicanismo Popular en Ecuador was published in 2022. Coronelis is a co-founder of the website Red Crítica, https://sociologiapoliticaehistorica.wordpress.com. She received her PhD in History from New York University.