The kid is back (again)

0.5 hours writing, 4 hours researching, page count = 196

Spent a productive afternoon at the library working on the Southern Cone comparison cases. The year 1890 is emerging as pivotal for the development of party systems in both Argentina and Chile; it's 1886 for Colombia, and around 1880 for Mexico. This supports my choice of 1880 to 1910 as the time period for looking at state formation and institutional design of security forces. One of the sources I consulted today included geography as one of the reasons for the differences between Argentina's and Chile's party system - I think what I add to that type of argument is a focus on political geography, on the spatial distribution of political actors. While Argentina is multipolar like Colombia (multiple population centers), there's a clear orientation toward Buenos Aires, which concentrates a huge share of the population, vs. several other provinces. The struggle is not as capital-centric in Colombia. It's interesting that Buenos Aires is the port; the analog for Colombia would have been to have had Cartagena or Barranquilla be the capital and concentrate power because of its connection to trade. I'm not entirely sure why this didn't happen, but I'd guess that it has to do with colonial settlement patterns, and the need to have a colonial capital that connects more easily to other Andean capitals like Lima. Anyway, the contrast is an instructive one.

I'm enjoying this comparative work, and will continue to pursue it tomorrow, as well as try to incorporate it directly into Chapter 1 in terms of writing.

P.S. Whoops! The initial version of this post had the page count as 146 instead of 196. Zoinks!