Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World - Hardcover

"The combination of Adelman's persuasive argumentation and analysis makes this work an exceptional contribution to our understanding of nation building." -- Journal of Interdisciplinary History "This book by Jeremy Adelman takes us on a marvelous journey from late colonialism through decolonization." -- American Historical Review "Republic of Capital is an engaging, well-researched, and important contribution to our understanding of the political, intellectual, and legal changes that occurred in the Buenos Aires region from the late eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, with a brief afterword on twentieth-century developments." -- Canadian Journal of History "This is an ambitious work that approaches from a new and original vantage point an unusually vast historical landscape. It is a first-rate contribution that brings significant enrichment to the field, and should exert an important influence on its future development." -- Tulio Halperin-Donghi, University of California * Berkeley * "This is an excellent work that will be of immense value not only to scholars of Argentine history, but also to anyone who is interested in the history of ideas or the impact of laws and political institutions on economic change." -- Latin American Studies "This ambitious work considers an often overlooked issue in the historiography of Latin America: how new and unstable states undertook to create and protect property rights. . . . This is an excellent work that will be of immense value not only to scholars of Argentine history, but to anyone who is interested in the history of ideas or the impact of laws and political institutions on economic change." -- Latin American Studies "The impressive explanations of liberalism, commercial realism, and how a new commercial code was enacted provide new insights into Argentine economic and political history. Adelman has provided a model by which to study philosophical and material backgrounds to other such codes enacted in the nineteenth century." -- The Historian

Winner of the American Historical Association Prize in Atlantic History Tracing the transition from colonial Natural Law to instrumental legal understandings of property in Argentina, this book is a political history of economic life. Through a description of the convulsions of long-term change from colony to republic in Buenos Aires, it explores Atlantic world transformations in the 18th and 19th centuries.