This dissertation on the history of modern Ecuador addresses the conflicts between peasants and landlords at the regional level, workers and emergent class organizations, as well as state agents and institutions over nearly a century, between 1834 and 1943. It traces the effects that regional struggles had on a reciprocal process of national-state and civil-society formation. Throughout this period, conflicts and alliances defined both the rights and privileges of groups and the stability of state authority at the regional level. In a first stage of conflict and negotiations between peasant communities and the state in the nineteenth century (1834-1896), the principal allies of the communities were radical liberals, as these communities resisted state policies of de-corporativization, tribute collection, and attempts to seize indigenous lands. In those conflicts, the ethnic authorities of the communities allied with a new liberal movement to confront the power of the landholding elites. In 1895, a second stage (1895-1906) of negotiations emerged along with an alliance between the peasantry from the coast, indigenous communities from the Sierra, and the Radical Liberal Party, an alliance that mobilized subaltern classes and generated a civil war.