The presentation deals with the crisis of Spanish colonialism by looking at the changes in the political culture in Chuquisaca, the most important city in the southern Andes, today Bolivia. It is based on my recent book, El poder del disenso: Cultura polı ́tica urbana y crisis del gobierno español, Chuquisaca, 1777–1809 (an English version is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). I argue that during the four decades leading up to the mass uprisings against Spanish rule of the late 1800s, a vibrant political public sphere, both patrician and plebeian, emerged. It manifested itself in a variety of social domains: protracted legal battles, recurrent cabildos abiertos, collective petitions, popular revolts, the culture of manly honor, disputes over the right of the city council and the Universidad de Charcas to hold free annual elections to choose their authorities, clashes between urban militias and Spanish soldiers, and contested public ceremonies and rituals of state power. While the causes of disaffection varied, a discernible pattern took form over the years: the full participation of the local population in public affairs. It was a culture of dissent that undermined the very premises of Bourbon absolutism and, more generally, the imperial control.

Sergio Serulnikov received his Ph.D. from SUNY at Stony Brook. He is Full Professor of History at the Universidad de San Andrés, Director of the Department of Humanities, and researcher at the National Scientific Council of Argentina (CONICET). In recent years, he has been appointed Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, and a Research Fellow at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. His research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, among others. He is the author of El poder del disenso. Cultura política urbana y crisis del gobierno español, Chuquisaca 1777-1809 (2022). An English version is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. His other books include Revolution in the Andes. The Era of Túpac Amaru (2003) and Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (2013). In 2025, he has been appointed Visiting Fellow in the PLAS at Princeton University. His research project is entitled “The Enlightenment from a Transnational Perspective. The Career and the Books of a High Colonial Magistrate in 18th-Century Spanish America.”

Pre-Circulated Paper and Registration

The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Amanda Pinheiro.