The Territorialization of the State in the River Plate Region, 1830-1915

From Surveying Maps to the Formation of National Land Registries. Uruguay, Province of Buenos Aires, Rio Grande do Sol, 1830-1915

Theoretical Framework

During the years following the Independence movements, diverse measures appeared that tended to reinforce the administration’s control over land possession in the new states located in the River Plate region. Among these processes, the generalization of cartographical documents as complementary material required for the administrative procedures for acquiring or confirming titles becomes particularly important. They therefore offer the State a “spatialized” information that was before only available with lower precision in written reports or maps drafted on a very general scale. On the other hand, starting in those same years, the State guarantees the technical quality of those maps, through the creation of “Topographical Commissions” or similar institutions that constituted the first systemized cartographical repositories of the region, thus constituting an essential base for the constitution of land registries. Studying the emergence of the systematic use of cartographical documents created on a fine scale for the control of land possession involves the detailed analysis of the technical, institutional and social conditions of its generalization: what information would this process give us about the complex processes of construction of a framework for national power in the River Plate area?

In the first instance, this process allows us to consider in an original way the technical modalities of the formation of the State’s knowledge of lands formerly possessed, but not recognized in terms that meet the new needs of the State ( that is, known precisely through the measurement of their superficies, the number of possessions present, etc) This question leads us to analyze the capacity of the new administrations to establish criteria for the cartography of properties that are adapted to its own necessities.

In the second instance, one might ask to what degree the constitution of a corpus of standardized cartographical documents that progressively includes all of the national territory could have influenced the conception that was held from the State as to what constituted the country or the “nation”.

Finally, the formation of the national repositories consisting of intricate maps constitutes a yet to be explored facet of the construction of administrative bodies that were created to acquire “statistical” data in the River Plate region. The social context of this process could throw light on significant facts about this process of state construction through the exploration of two principal areas of research: the prosopographical study of the personalities involved in the creation of administrations dedicated to this activity and the analysis of the reaction of the diverse social groups to the imposition of these new standards governing control over property. To what extent do the social tensions (which profoundly drive the evolution of the State during this period) interact with the dynamic of the formation of an administrative apparatus, which tends to acquire a certain degree of independence from the aforementioned tensions (if we accept the hypothesis that affirms that different temporalities mark these two processes)?

Projected Research and Applied Methodologies

All of the proposed studies will be carried out in a comparative manner by examining the Province of Buenos Aires, Uruguay and Rio Grande do Sol, in order to establish the regional differences that occur in the formation of national administrative systems. The principal areas of research will thus be the following:

1) A prosopographical study of the land surveyors in the area of the River Plate between 1830 and 1915: this approach will allow us to analyze the technical dimension of the formation of a cartographical repository. Understanding the interaction between the individual trajectories and the chronologies of the formation of central administrations can provide original data about the formation and evolution of the States in the region during the nineteenth century. This study will aim at reconstructing the technical conditions of a surveyor’s work during this period (favored regions of activity, variation in the annual intensity of labor, geographical mobility, variation in activity throughout working life ) as well as its social and administrative context ( training, relation with the administrative institutions of the state, social milieu).

2) A spatial and temporal analysis of the production of surveying plans: the integration of the surveying plans into a System of Geographical Information ( SIG) will allow us to make spatial and temporal analyses of the formation of this corpus of documents, which will provide the possibility of exploring the principal series of questions more in depth. The principal analyses that will be carried out include: A chronological analysis of the diffusion of the process of mapping out the properties by means of annual maps (for each year, the plans realized in the different territories will be located). This first stage in the research process should provide data for a global analysis of the process of mapping the region, essentially in order to evaluate its “efficiency”, that is, measuring the gap existing between the objectives proposed at the level of the state and the concrete results that were achieved.

Typologies of territorial sub-units in function of the chronological trajectories of cartography: By using spatial statistical techniques, we will carry out an analysis that will allow us to identify how the different parts of the territories studied were integrated into the national cartographical repository (which zones were mapped and which ones were not, which were done the first and how thoroughly…). This analysis takes as its base the hypothesis that such differences correspond to the distinct modalities of connection established between the “society” of these sub-units and the State. Identifying these differences will therefore allow us to construct a geographical typology of the relations between the local society and the central administration, based on regional attitudes with respect to process of measuring the properties.

A spatial-temporal mapping of social and client-based networks. The SIG tool makes it possible to visualize quickly and precisely all of the properties possessed or reported by a family, a given social or political group, a national category ( such as the Brazilians in Uruguay, for example) in addition to the evolution of the whole with the passage of time. This analysis will certainly shed light on the groups and families that were the most closely linked to the process of national cartography of the properties, and as a counterpoint, it will also allow us to establish which families avoided the process, or were not included in it. This third area of research proposes to study in chronological-spatial terms the interaction between the dynamics of the national administration and the domestic strategies of groups of landowners.

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Pierre Gautreau, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France

Associate researcher to the StateBuilding in Latin America Projet