State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810-1900Despite a shared colonial past, South American nations experienced different patterns of conflict in the nineteenth century. These differences led to the creation of a variety of states and regimes, from authoritarian military oligarchies to popular democracies. Using a rigorous logic of comparison, Fernando Lpez Alves explores the roots of state building in five countries and explains why the political systems of these early postindependent societies