"This is a landmark contribution to the study of state building in Latin America. Contra reigning perspectives, Kurtz adopts a society-centered and path-dependent approach that emphasizes the historical legacies of class formation and political alliances. The result is a fresh and sophisticated explanation of variations in patterns of state building - one that can withstand scrutiny in light of fine-grained evidence from specific cases." - James Mahoney, Northwestern University "This book makes a crucial contribution to the field. It will not only shift our current understanding of state capacity and its causes but will open new roads based on the crucial explanatory power of state infrastructural power - in Latin America and beyond." - Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University "In this highly original and insightful book, Marcus Kurtz redefines the scholarly debate on the origins of state institutional capacities in developing regions. Through a comparative historical analysis of Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, Kurtz demonstrates that strong and weak states were not the product of natural resource endowments, international warfare, or colonial institutional legacies. Instead, they were path-dependent legacies of critical junctures associated with post-independence state formation and 20th-century patterns of mass political incorporation. By showing how coercive labor practices in the countryside and elite divisions in the post-independence period created highly durable trajectories of institutional weakness, Kurtz sheds new light on the historical and social origins of variation in state capacities." - Kenneth M. Roberts, Cornell University "This book makes a major contribution to comparative scholarship by drawing on economic and social structuralism to explain state building in Latin America. After disproving conventional theories that highlight war-making and natural resource wealth, Marcus Kurtz breaks new ground by demonstrating the impact of rural social relations and of different groupings' political inclusion. With his sophisticated reasoning and thorough research, he illuminates the historical paths that have given rise to states of surprisingly divergent administrative capacity." - Kurt Weyland, University of Texas, Austin
