The second chapter provides a panorama of what it meant to be a citizen soldier from the Tupac Amaru rebellion onwards and pays close attention to the events that led to the wars of independence and how these influenced what it meant to be part of the armed forces. The chapter is divided into four sections that explore different aspects of soldiering. The first one looks at recruitment. The second at the promotion and reward members received and how this changed through time. The third focuses on the militias and National Guards as well as on the complex and intertwined relationship between these and the regular army. The final section pays attention to uniforms and the crucial role they played in placing people in a hierarchical society. The narrative oscillates between the main political events from the wars of independence to the conflicts of the 1830s, while drawing deeply on the changing legislation and regulation pertaining to the armed forces, as well as providing examples of individuals whose experiences illustrate the points argued

Colonial militias shaped the republican armed forces, so the first section analyzes the Iberian origins of militias and during the conquest, their reform in the eighteenth century and during independence. Focusing on the development of notions of citizenship during the Age of Revolution and exploring the importance of the fueros and uniforms as incentives for participation. Colonial authorities grew wary on American subjects participating to wear fancy clothes and having their own corporate court. I also study how colonial administrations dealth with militias and the impact of militarization during Tupac Amaru’s rebellion and the first military campaigns after Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. In a second section, I study the British, North American and French armed forces to compare them with the ones of the Spanish. I do this firstly because these armed forces were the most formidable at the time and there were important similarities and differences between them. And secondly, because it was precisely in these places where the ancient ideas of soldiers as citizens and citizens as soldiers was revived during the revolutionary era.

The conclusions aim to bring together all these strands and show how the armed forces in nineteenth century Peru were integral to the development of an incipient State, with a bureaucratic structure that can be clearly witnessed through the lived experience of its members. It is a social history of an institution that developed despite intense instability to provide a safety net for its members. This institution developed through trial and error, building from the colonial legislation ensuring pensions were handed out to the infirm, to those who had served for many years as well as to some surviving family members. With time this relationship between the army, its members, former members and their families became the glue that bound society to the armed forces, which in contrast to what had been often asserted in the past was much more than a collection of armed men mobilized by local leaders known as caudillos.

The third chapter is concerned with provisions for ill and incapacitated soldiers, what they could expect for what they characterized in their petitions as “blood spilled in battle”. It is divided into four sections that follow a historical background on the main events of the first years of the Republic. The first shows how the State looked after the infirm and how in the 1830s Juntas were set up the to examine the merits of the petitions. A second section investigates the procedures for retirement and the role played by the medical personnel who prepared the documents needed to support petitions. It offers examples of how the process became more institutionalized through the 1830s and 1840s. The third section is interested in the men who were severely wounded and how the State coped with their petitions. Some of these payments extended for longer and with time, more procedures were implemented to ensure those being paid were still deserving. The final section is concerned with the variations in the rewards provided to injured and infirm men. Despite there being clear regulations not all cases were treated in the same way.

This chapter concentrates on changing provision for retirement over time. In the first years of the republic when funds were scarce and civil wars constant, reform was repeatedly thwarted by recurring conflict both internal and external. Lack of funds further aggravated the State’s inability to provide. Acute instability, commonly known as ‘the anarchy’ followed, making attempts to reform the retirement system futile. In the mid 1840s the Peruvian State was able to provide pensions thanks to the advent of money linked to the sale of the bird-dung fertilizer called guano. President Ramón Castilla was able to pass new legislation and pay more. And it was at this point that institutionalization started to really gather pace. During the fourth period the State continued to provide generous pensions, but this was not enough to ensure stability and at mid-century civil war returned, impacting retirement policies. Finally, the fifth period is concerned with the policies implemented after mid-century when the military court, the fuero was dismantled. State capacity grew and more attention was given to following regulation and ensuring entitlements had been legally acquired.

The introduction presents the main arguments that will be developed in the book and how letters and petitions that were found in the military archive are the basis from which to argue that the military was an institution in the first half of the nineteenth century. The nearly one thousand case studies provide the information that makes it possible to understand the Peruvian armed forces. This chapter also covers the historiographical debate by discussing the notion of caudillos and how although most of the new republics have been seen as controlled by armed men on horseback, the military can be described as an insitution that while having a colonial origin, transformed throughout the wars of independence. The way in which those who became members of the armed forces is analyzed in detail showing that a social system of protection for those who were part of it developed from the colonial systems Comparisons are made with the cases of the United States, France, Spain and the rest of Latin America. This section ends with a description of the book’s structure and a description of each chapter.

This chapter identifies two recurring themes that, beginning with Teodoro Ramos Blanco and Alberto Peña in the 1920s–1930s, has continued to define the conceptual basis of many Afro-Cuban artists up to the present. One is their efforts to conceptualize and celebrate their African cultural heritage. The other direction focuses on Afrodescendants’ social conditions and engages with political struggles against structural racism. Challenging the established historical arc accepted by the scholarship, the chapter identifies the 1940s as the most radical moment of Afrodescendant rupture in Cuban arts. It involved the revolutionary visual language of Uver Solis, Roberto Diago Querol, and Wifredo Lam, as well as the reformist executions of unknown artists such as Nicasio Aguirre, grounded on ideas of racial inclusion and black honorability. It also questions the assumed divide between pre- and post-1959, noting how revolutionary institutions continued to function under the common sense of the superiority of Western-centric art. It points to how the defining feature of the supposedly “new” revolutionary art, socially engaged figurative expression, was long established in Republican Cuba. The serious explorations of African-based cultures pioneered in the 1940s also continued in the 1960s–1970s with Grupo Antillano.

This chapter discusses some of the mechanisms that the ideologues of the Cuban planter class, grouped at the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País in the early nineteenth century, used to transform art into a white domain. These ideologues characterized the works of popular Afrodescendant artists as crude and unsophisticated, and institutionalized art education through the Academia de San Alejandro (1818). The Academia excluded applicants of African descent (as well as women) and trained future artists in European styles, sensibilities, and techniques. As a result, we know of only one artist with identified works in nineteenth-century Cuba, Vicente Escobar (1762–1834), who was socially identified as pardo. Escobar came from a privileged sector of Havana’s population of African descent. Members of his family occupied prominent positions in the Pardo Battalions of the Militias and were successful craftsmen who accumulated some wealth, including slaves. It was probably thanks to these family connections that Escobar learned his trade as painter. This may also explain how he managed to acquire formal training at the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, which he attended in 1784.