Department of History

"Modernity interrupted: motion and stasis during the Guatemalan fin-de-siècle"

The Ship Pub, Tuesday 5 November, 8:30 pm

Abstract:

For liberal-minded Guatemalan elites, the technological, economic, and cultural developments of late nineteenth-century "progress" were invariably described in the language of movement and dynamism: electric currents, market flows, and commodity circulation. They argued that in opposition to the motion and vitality of the modern world stood the obstinacy of indigenous Maya communities who refused to exchange their labour for wages, in addition to conservative institutions like the Catholic Church which opposed the liberal order. This talk seeks to understand the implications of these liberal ideas of motion and stasis in the context of economic crisis during the fin-de-siècle by examining the decades-long construction of Guatemala's Northern Railway to the Atlantic.