Nation before Region. The Nation-State Building and its Impact in the Southecuatiorian- Norperuvian Region

Abstract

This article intends to analyze how a big region, the north of Peru and the south of Ecuador, had many troubles on the national construction process which relays on the equality and homogeneity principles. The region had its own social and economic principles that were not so easy incorporated in the nation. Meanwhile Peru and Ecuador wanted to construct a XIX century liberal society, with a stable and harmonic social and politic landscape; the region founded itself on an undefined territory that, despite everything, supported a successfully agricultural economy with a very hierarchical and segregated social order. Systematically organized on itself, the region autonomy could not be easily incorporated in a homogeneous republican order.