The War of the Pacific (1879-1884) is the war among South American states with the second highest casualty rate in the nineteenth century. This chapter provides a detailed case study of this war while offering a long-term narrative of state building in the South Pacific (i.e., Bolivia, Chile, and Peru). The comparison between Chile and Peru is illuminating, since both countries were comparable in important confounders–e.g., their armies, navy, bureaucracies, and budgets–and were impacted similarly by important economic confounders such as economic booms and crises. In this chapter I depict the evolution of war and the balance between central and peripheral elites from independence to the mid-century. Then I illustrate how preparation for war led to state formation, and looks at the details of the campaign, battle by battle. These two sections already serve the purpose of debunking some myths in this literature, like the idea that Peru did not mobilize for the war, and that the war did not lead to extraction in Chile Finally, I discuss how war transformed state institutions, and determined diverging, long-terms trends in state capacity.

Were nineteenth century war outcomes the main determinant of state trajectories in Latin America? In this chapter I turn from examining whether and to which degree war outcomes affected comparative state capacity levels and try to determining whether war outcomes were the main factor affecting the relative position of Latin American countries in the regional state capacity ranking. Exploring the conditions that predict the rank ordering of Latin American state capacity c. 1900—which has remained virtually the same ever since—has become a standard approach in the literature. In this chapter I explore this comparative historical puzzle by replicating previously used techniques. I use qualitative comparative analysis to show that accumulated victory and defeat throughout the nineteenth century is almost a sufficient condition for states to be in the upper and lower end of a state capacity ranking, respectively. I then use simple correlations to evaluate how war outcomes were related to a broad set of state capacity indicators at the turn of the century. Finally, I discuss case-specific expectations in longitudinal data that will be explored in the case studies.

What was the effect of war outcomes on key indicators of state formation in a post-war phase? In this chapter I demonstrate that victors and losers of war were set into different state capacity trajectories after war outcomes were revealed. I do this using a set of cutting-edge causal inference techniques to analyse the gap in state capacity that was generated between winners and losers in the time-period of most stringent warfare (1865-1913). After substantiating that the outcomes of these wars were determined by exogenous or fortuitous events, I provide a short description of my treatment—i.e., defeat—and outcomes—i.e., total revenues and railroad mileage as key indicators of state infrastructural capacity. My estimator, a difference-in-differences model, shows defeat had a negative long-term impact on state capacity which remains remarkably robust even after relaxing key assumptions. Finally, I use the synthetic control method to estimate how state capacity in Paraguay and Peru would have evolved in a counterfactual world where these countries were spared the most severe defeats in late nineteenth-century Latin America.

In this chapter I return to the classics of bellicist theory to formalize their insights and derive concrete observational expectations for nineteenth-century Latin America. I first look at the work of Otto Hintze and Max Weber, who suggest a more holistic approach to the effects of war on the process of state formation which combines both pre-war and post-war phases in a single overarching theory. I then use the more modern concepts and logics of historical institutionalism to generate clearer predictions from their theories. I propose that, in a pre-war phase and when hostilities are taking place, mobilization will trigger taxation and repression—i.e., the extraction-coercion cycle. Yet, war outcomes will determine whether those contingent policies will become institutionalized after the critical juncture of war. While victory will consolidate a trajectory of state formation, defeat will render state institutions illegitimate and set losers into a path-dependent process of state weakening. Finally, I discuss actors and mechanisms specific to nineteenth-century Latin America and lay out the observational implications of my argument.

This chapter covers the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the Franco-Mexican War (1861-1867), two of the deadliest wars in nineteenth-century Latin America. A blowing defeat, and a glorious victory, these wars set Mexico in a road to anarchy and state consolidation, respectively. The chapter starts covering early episodes of war in New Spain, like the Mexican victory against the French in the Pastry War (1838-1839), which provided initial impulse for centralizing projects. It then turns to the Texan Revolution and the Mexican-American War, and corroborates the predictions of the theory in the behaviour of all actors and on each phase of the war. Leaving Mexico in the state of total anarchy and state collapse expected after a defeat, I then take a detour to discuss how victory in the Filibuster War (1856-1857) impacted Costa Rica, providing a tentative answer for the mystery of its comparatively high political development until our day. Finally, I return to Mexico and cover the Second French Intervention of Mexico, a blessing in disguise, for the victory against the French ushered the period of more spectacular stability and growth in Mexican history.

Did the threat of war trigger the extraction-coercion cycle? In this chapter I use a panel of Latin America from 1830 to 1913 to test the effects of looming international threats on domestic taxation and internal conflict. It is believed that due to the availability of foreign loans and taxable imports, states in the region did not have to engage in extraction from the local population, nor did they have to coerce individuals to comply with such policies. I summarize this argument in the form of testable hypotheses and point to factors—naval blockades and sovereign debt defaults—that might have hindered access to such external resources. I then focus on militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and how they affected revenues, tariff levels, foreign loans, civil wars, coups, etc. My analyses show MIDs had a negative effect on tariffs and revenue and diminished the likelihood of a new loan—all results that contest the established conventional wisdom. Conversely, MIDs are associated to currency depreciation—a domestic-oriented inflationary tax—and domestic conflict—in particular, civil wars and coups. The chapter shows war did trigger the extraction-coercion cycle.

The conclusions close the manuscript and make four points. First, they review the macro-level observational expectations tested in Part II, and how my findings, obtained through a triangulation of different techniques, allow for a comprehensive picture of how war affected state formation throughout the entire region. Second, they bring together all case studies in Part III, noting how the historical evidence collected fits the expectations of the theory at a micro-level—e.g., considering the behavior of individual actors and the effects of narrow events like battles within wars—and does so with out-and-out consistency—i.e., case by case, almost without exception. Third, they reflect upon the scope of the theory, discussing many other cases that could be explained by the long-term effects of war outcomes. This discussion covers many regions and time periods, showing that classical bellicist theory not only can travel, but can also solves logical problems and empirical puzzles highlighted by previous scholarship. Finally, the conclusions suggest many lines of enquiry for future research that the book leaves open.

If one is looking for the mechanism connecting war to state formation in Latin America, the obvious place to start is the Paraguayan War (1864-1870), the single most deadly war in the history of the region. This chapter provides the most detailed discussion of this case in the state formation literature and a narrative covering state formation in the River Plate Basin (i.e., Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay). I discuss how earlier, lower intensity wars affected the balance between central and peripheral elites and take a brief detour to cover the effect of the Siege of Montevideo on Uruguayan politics, potentially explaining the current Uruguayan exceptionalism in terms of its state capacity levels. I then illustrate how preparation for war led to incipient state formation amidst polarization in all contenders of the Paraguayan War and discuss the war itself, illustrating how the result of contingent battles affected the domestic fate of the state formation. Finally, I discuss how war transformed political parties and the military, two key institutions, setting the basis for long term state capacity growth in the allies, and its decline in Paraguay.