This innovative and stimulating volume is amongst the most original and insightful of all the hundreds of books published to mark the bicentenary of Independence in 2010. Situated fully within the legacy of François-Xavier Guerra, and proud of the intellectual heritage drawn from him, the authors seek to illuminate the ‘transition to modernity’ (p. 9) in the Gran Colombia region. Discarding hypotheses that see the Independence revolutions and wars as predominantly ‘liberal’ or ‘national’, they explore the transformation and reconfiguration of political culture through analysis of the concept of ‘majesty’. Building upon the authors' edited volume, Las revoluciones en el mundo atlántico (Taurus, 2006), on the Atlantic context of the decomposition of the Hispanic monarchy, they seek to understand the fractured and complex nature of the beginnings of republican society, emphasising the continuities that link the pre- and post-1810 periods. Key to their study is the fact, long neglected by a generation of historians, that political culture was immersed in notions of religion and the sacred (p. 73). Rather than seeing a religious society supplanted by a secular republic, the authors stress how new republican concepts were shaped and informed by religion in the post-Independence period.

The political cultures that emerged in Latin America by 1832 had not been imagined, or designed, or even dreamed of by anyone in 1810. None of the great liberators commemorated today planned Independence to turn out as it did. There was no ‘brutal’ rupture between royal sovereignty and republican sovereignty (p. 25), as some of the commemorations might have us think. Change took place over a 20–30 year period, charted with great passion over the course of the book, and, as the authors stress, the process was far from inevitable or natural. As monarchy crumbled, sovereignty did not evolve out of majesty; rather, the ‘majesty of the king’ was cajoled, honed and rethought by two generations of thinkers into the ‘majesty of the peoples’, in whom sovereignty would reside.

The source material for this study is a broad body of archival documents in Bogotá and Caracas, with particular insight gained from newspapers, constitutions, political pamphlets and published sermons of the era. These historians have exhumed a body of work with such success that it now seems surprising that no one had done this before them. They explain and illustrate how contemporaries understood ‘the order of majesty’, how they resisted it, and how they eventually reconfigured it towards a sense of popular sovereignty that might sustain the integrity of the new republics. Thibaud and Calderón present ‘Independence’ as a salvage effort, in which leaders and their pueblos tried to rescue something from the unexpected chaos and disintegration that they inherited as a legacy from the implosion of the Spanish empire.

According to the authors, what distinguishes the experience of New Granada and Venezuela from other Hispanic American processes is that the Constitution of Cádiz was never enacted there, precisely because of the successes of military leaders such as Antonio Nariño and Simón Bolívar before the reconquista of 1814–15. This left ‘a complex co-existence between the sovereignty of the people [as established at Cádiz] and the sovereignty of the pueblos' (p. 89), building upon the corporate nature of colonial governance, and giving full rein to calls for autonomy and independence of regions and towns from Spain and from each other in the second wave of warfare after 1816. The book also deals with the vexed questions of federalism, regalism and citizenship, and how they developed in relation to the concept of majesty as it was shaped by warfare and Atlantic connections. The authors are particularly insightful, in chapter 5, on the gulf that separated ‘immediate citizenship’, as won and performed by soldiers on the battlefield, from real, civic citizenship which was understood as representative, rather than direct. They also argue persuasively (chapter 6) that a crucial moment for the success of independence occurred around 1820, when the conflict was reconceptualised as anti-colonial (against foreigners), rather than as sacrilegious (against God). Bolívar's proclamation of the War to the Death in 1813 was crucial in performing this change.

The last two chapters illustrate the playing out of these changes between 1826 and 1832, the end of the Gran Colombian moment, which historians focusing on the current bicentennial years of 1808–12 are neglecting. There is an excellent discussion of the Ocaña Convention (1828), for example, and the growing phenomenon of the pronunciamiento in New Granada. Thibaud and Calderón show how a nascent sense of nation emerged from a sense of the majesty of the pueblos. Unity and liberty, some came to see, might not be incompatible. This excellent book must be required reading for historians seeking to understand the processes and consequences of independence from colonial rule in Hispanic America.