Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the main theoretical and empirical findings and identifies the key contributions to state theory and to the study of long-term political trajectories in Latin America. It presents a new agenda of research in the political economy of development and sketches a theory of the potential impact of political geography on the growth capacity of countries. It also considers the nineteenth-century state-formation as a hidden master key to understanding some of the most pressing issues in contemporary Latin America, including low-quality democracies and economic backwardness. The chapter delivers a central message that some paths of state-formation do not lead to state building, and a subset of them create durable obstacles to it. It draws a sharp distinction between outcomes in the modal cases of western Europe and Latin America, which opened the black box of the scope conditions implicit in the canon of state-formation approaches.