Dictatorship in the Nineteenth Century: Conceptualisations, Experiences, Transfers

Edited by Moisés Prieto


Historical research on modern dictatorship has often neglected the relevance of the nineteenth century, instead focusing on twentieth-century dictatorial rules. Dictatorship in the Nineteenth Century brings together scholars of political thought, the history of ideas and gender studies in order to address this oversight.

Political dictatorship is often assumed to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, but the notion gained currency during the French Revolution. The Napoleonic experience underscored this trend, which was later maintained during the wars of independence in Latin America. Starting from the assumption that dictatorship has its own history within the nineteenth century, separate from the ancient Roman paradigm and twentieth-century totalitarianism, this volume aims at establishing a dialogue between the concepts of dictatorship and the experiences and transfer of knowledge between Latin America and Europe during this period.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students of modern history, as well as those interested in political history and the history of dictatorship.


Table of Contents

Introduction: “The dictator is coming…”

Moisés Prieto

Part I: Conceptualisations

1. The Napoleonic Regime: a paradigm or an anachronism for the new century?

Michael Broers

2. Caesarism in the Nineteenth Century

Markus J. Prutsch

3. Dictatorship, Bonapartism, Caesarism: On Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire

Francesca Antonini

4: Military dictatorship as the ‘reign of the mightier’: Karl Ludwig von Haller’s organicist concept of natural order and autocratic rule

Alexander Kruska

Part II: Experiences

5. Tyrants or fathers in the bosom of the family? The Argentine caudillos of the post-independence-era as “good dictators”

Stephan Ruderer

6: Caudillismo and Gender in the Hispanic World: the case of Peru, 1810s-1840

Mónica Ricketts

Part III: Transfers

7. Garibaldi and the dictatorship: features and cultural sources

Cesare Vetter

8. The Epitome of Modern Dictatorship in the Early Nineteenth Century: Dr. Francia in Paraguay, or: “The Chinese Emperor of the West”

Stefan Rinke

9. An Iconography of Early Nineteenth-Century Dictatorship in the Atlantic Space

Moisés Prieto


Moisés Prieto is an Associate Researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He was previously an academic visitor at the University of Oxford, and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research embraces dictatorship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, media history, the history of migration, and the history of emotions.


https://www.routledge.com/Dictatorship-in-the-Nineteenth-Century-Conceptualisations-Experiences/Prieto/p/book/9780367457174


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