The Age of Dissent argues that the defining feature of the Age of Revolutions in Latin America was the emergence of dissent as an inescapable component of political life. While contestation and seditious ideas had always been present in the region, never before had local regimes been forced to consider radical dissension as an unavoidable dimension of politics. Focusing on urban Chile between the first anticolonial conspiracy of 1780 and the consolidation of an authoritarian regime in 1833, the book argues that this revolution was caused by how people practiced communication and framed its power.
Martín Bowen is an associate professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of Experimentar el cuerpo y escribir los pecados: la confesión general de José Ignacio Eyzaguirre (1799-1804).
"Martín Bowen's The Age of Dissent offers a new and original vision of a period in Chile's history that we know primarily for its political, commercial, and wartime development. Based on solid documentary research, Bowen demonstrates that the so-called Age of Revolutions was a period of profound cultural transformations that affected diverse social actors and not just an elite."--Andrés Baeza Ruz, author of Contacts, Collisions, and Relationships: Britons and Chileans in the Independence Era, 1806-1831
