2025 Theses Doctoral

The Labor of the State: Unfree Workers and the Making of Republican Paraguay (1811-1864)

Katz, Mariana

This dissertation analyzes the role of unfree labor in state formation through the case of early republican Paraguay (1811-1864). Racially organized labor coercion was crucial to the functioning of the Spanish empire from the sixteenth into the nineteenth century. Despite the rhetoric of equality adopted by the republics that replaced the empire, unfree work continued to exist, enabling not only greater profits for the region’s dominant classes but, as the case of Paraguay reveals, the consolidation of sovereign polities.

Through an extensive analysis of accounting records, court cases, correspondence, and travelers’ accounts, among other sources, this dissertation shows how Paraguayan governments from independence to the start of the War of the Triple Alliance reinvented forms of labor coercion to shape the republican state. It examines the lives and labor of state slaves, tributaries, coerced settlers, convicts, soldiers, and drafted peasants who were forced to construct roads, town halls, and forts; manufacture weapons, iron, ships, and uniforms; and tend the state’s cattle and horses.

At the same time, the research reveals how workers negotiated these obligations, often pushing for greater compensation or more autonomy. When conflicts arose between economic elites and the government or between state officials at different levels, unfree workers were able to leverage their positions in the state’s labor force to oust unpopular authorities, secure resources and privileges, and advance their own visions of a fair administration of the state and its resources. In other words, this dissertation uncovers an unexpected connection between labor obligations imposed from above and forms of political empowerment emerged from below in the transition from colonialism into nationhood.