A Revolution in Stages: Subaltern Politics, Nation-State Formation, and the Origins of Social Rights in Ecuador, 1834-1943

This dissertation on the history of modern Ecuador addresses the conflicts between peasants and landlords at the regional level, workers and emergent class organizations, as well as state agents and institutions over nearly a century, between 1834 and 1943. It traces the effects that regional struggles had on a reciprocal process of national-state and civil-society formation. Throughout this period, conflicts and alliances defined both the rights and privileges of groups and the stability of state authority at the regional level. In a first stage of conflict and negotiations between peasant communities and the state in the nineteenth century (1834-1896), the principal allies of the communities were radical liberals, as these communities resisted state policies of de-corporativization, tribute collection, and attempts to seize indigenous lands. In those conflicts, the ethnic authorities of the communities allied with a new liberal movement to confront the power of the landholding elites. In 1895, a second stage (1895-1906) of negotiations emerged along with an alliance between the peasantry from the coast, indigenous communities from the Sierra, and the Radical Liberal Party, an alliance that mobilized subaltern classes and generated a civil war. In the twentieth century, the key allies of indigenous and peasant communities became urban workers and middle-class socialists. Between 1906 and 1925, there was a process of counter-revolution and economic integration into world markets that sought to sustain itself through authoritarian forms of labor organization and domination of the peasantry. During this third stage of transformation (1925-1945) through conflict and negotiation, a new strategy emerged to reconstitute popular and peasant political power through connections with other urban industrial workers and middle-class circles. Popular movements and democratic political parties thereby emerged with a powerful capacity to pressure and reform the state, and in turn, the state instituted new social rights and distribution policies between 1925 and 1944. Ultimately, this is a study of how subaltern classes confronted internal colonialism and how political contention was crucial in the building of a nation-state that incorporated popular demands for justice, redistribution, and recognition