Making and Unmaking of Revolutionary Spaces in Colombia: The Case of the Canton, 1808–53

This paper explores the politics of space in Spanish America in the wake of the Napoleonic crisis. Rather than emphasizing failed states and competing caudillos, this paper reads the early republican period in Spanish America as a transitional moment for municipal spaces and their ability to assert political rights. A clear spatial logic structured the decades of conflict that followed the collapse of ancien régime territorial hierarchies. Former capitals of colonial partidos, corregimientos, capitanias, and viceroyalties, seeking to regain control over their hinterlands, negotiated constitutional arrangements with communities of vecinos in countless cities with newly minted municipalidad.  While the young cities were determined not to lose their newly acquired rights, the pressures of war, insufficient resources, and decimated populations forced many to the negotiating table.

Focus will be on New Granada and Venezuela, where conflict over the democratization of spatial rights was worked out through a new spatial category called the “canton”. This peculiar entity, first imagined in pre-revolutionary France, migrated to Caracas in 1812 as part of a negotiating tactic with neighboring cities that competed for sovereignty and control over resources. Gran Colombia breathed new life into cantons beginning in 1821, using them to mobilize military resources and manpower. By 1826, as the Royalist threat abated, the municipal autonomy of cantons re-emerged, threatening the unity of the Colombian Republic. A central component of Bolívar’s dictatorship involved the suspension of the municipal powers of cantons by 1828. Gran Colombia’s fragmentation into New Granada, Venezuela, and Ecuador allowed cantons to survive, but just barely. The paper concludes with New Granada’s killing of cantons by the mid-19^th century. This history of the life and death of the ‘canton’ seeks to capture the nature of early nineteenth-century spatial politics as a fundamental dimension of early republican state formation.