This book aims at a broad interpretative account of the dissolution of the Iberian empires, conveyed through a long, close analysis of colonial relationships between Spain and Portugal and their Atlantic-facing territories in South America. There is not enough space in this review to identify all the arguments of this lengthy and detailed analysis, but three key themes stand out. One is that these empires became unstable in the later eighteenth century when, in an effort at improvement, they were forced into geographic expansion and capital accumulation, which in turn led to international wars that made their survival more problematic. Another is that the fall of these empires stemmed not from internal revolts driven by colonial demands for political freedom and separation, but from the disintegration of the institutions and political coalitions that made colonial rule seem legitimate. The third is that, despite their great significance for Latin America, these revolutions were not inevitable outcomes of developments within the colonies, but were shaped in large part by events in Europe in the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic era.
The approach draws on Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions (1979) in rejecting ‘intentionalist’ explanations of revolution and concentrating on the crisis of old regimes caused by international wars. It is also in tune with the recent historiography of Spanish American independence which, following the lead of François-Xavier Guerra, has challenged the nationalistic historias patrias by reconceiving independence as the unexpected outcome of a sudden collapse of empires at their centres, rather than an upsurge of colonial discontents programmed by nationalist sentiments and fuelled by social and economic grievances. According to Adelman, however, there is a ‘missing part’ of the story: namely, ‘how colonists disidentified with empires and monarchies’ (p. 9) rather than how they pursued alternative identities. To remedy this fault, he proposes a new comparative perspective focused on the collapse of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in South America. For reasons that are not fully explained, Mexico and Central America (roughly the Viceroyalty of New Spain) are excluded. Nonetheless, a considerable canvas remains, encompassing Brazil and the neighbouring Spanish viceroyalties of South America, and it provides ample scope for a comparative study of the parallel imperial declines that occurred within this geographic space over the same period of time.
The book starts with the question of why and how the imperial regimes undertook to alter their relationships with their overseas possessions during the eighteenth century. Faced with intensifying international competition, Spain and Portugal concentrated on reform in the colonies, where it seemed easier to achieve than at home. The protective reorganisation of colonial commerce against foreign interlopers was a key goal. The Iberian crowns had to reform their mercantilist systems, Adelman argues, not only to promote economic growth but also to strengthen the monarchies' political bonds with merchants and with American export producers, both vital sources of financial and political support. The outcome of reform was ambiguous. Partial dismantlement of the old mercantilist systems and related administrative and fiscal reforms produced some serious disruption, as colonials defended long-established ‘pacts’ that allowed informal, localised autonomy. However, such resistance did not engender new political alternatives nor impede closer integration within the empires.
If reform did not promote serious opposition to colonial rule, why then did the colonies eventually separate from their metropolitan powers? With this question in view, Adelman builds an innovative argument about the impact of imperial economic reform in the late colonial period: he suggests that the underlying extension of market forces – chiefly through the spread of slavery and the slave trade – silently shifted relations between metropoles and colonies and reshaped the tacit political pacts that bound them. He offers new ways of seeing colonial relationships at a time of change by considering the importance of the expansion of slavery among smaller and medium-sized producers (often on frontiers) and the development of an increasingly autonomous South Atlantic economic system. If key elite groups were becoming impatient with metropolitan policies, he suggests, it was because they were becoming less economically dependent on the metropolis, rather than alienated by metropolitan oppression. The case is more plausibly made for Brazil than for the other South American territories, but Adelman's ideas about the energising of slave circuits and plantation exports in South America, especially after the fall of St Domingue, certainly deserve close attention. He is surely on firm ground when he states that, if the new political economy made some merchants (‘organic intellectuals’ in this setting) more critical of metropolitan policy, it did not seriously unsettle their loyalties. They wanted more open trade rather than fuller political rights, and if loyalties were being corroded by the new climate of freer trade, they were still very far from disintegration.
To explain why imperial loyalties did eventually dissolve, Adelman goes on to compare political behaviour in Spanish and Portuguese America during the imperial crises triggered by Napoleon's Iberian invasions of 1807–8. Here, he proceeds through a set of alternating syntheses of the complex politics which the temporary removal of the Iberian kings from their European thrones produced in their respective monarchies. The account of Spanish America gives a sharp reflection of the recent historiography, showing how events in Europe caused creoles to reconsider their futures, and how efforts to preserve the old order through radical constitutional reform did much to undermine it. The analysis of why Portuguese America differed is also presented with commendable clarity. While noting that the transfer of the monarchy from Europe to Brazil stabilised imperial relations in the short term, Adelman also shows that the Portuguese crown created a distinctive pact with its colonial elites which it was unable to sustain in the long term.
These arguments about the weaknesses of reforms driven by crisis are more fully realised in subsequent chapters on the post 1814–15 period. In the Spanish case, explanation of imperial failure pivots on the failings of Fernando VII. Like Anna, Costeloe and Hamnett, Adelman identifies Fernando's military counter-revolution as the progenitor of revolution. When reconciliation might have been successful, repression bred a revolutionary resistance. This not only challenged the stability of colonial governments but, as Adelman emphasises, also forced colonial governments to make fiscal demands which ultimately undermined the mercantile capital essential to preserve colonial rule.
The destruction of imperial rule in Brazil is harder to explain, given that the Portuguese monarchy built new foundations for its empire in Brazil and strengthened its ties to colonial elites during the years when civil wars were rending Spain's relations with its colonies. Adelman shows why this relationship was prone to dangerous instability, however. He demonstrates how the new dominance of Rio de Janeiro engendered regional rivalries, how borderland wars exhausted the treasury, how fiscal problems generated inflationary policies that undermined elite support for the state, and how, from 1820, Lisbon's imitation of Spanish liberal constitutionalism excited an anti-Portuguese opposition in Brazil that outweighed provincial opposition to Rio. We also see why, despite a new interest in representative politics and some powerful centrifugal forces in the provinces, the Brazilian outcome differed from that of Spanish America.
The closing chapters deal with important questions about how elites sought to reconstruct political pacts and institutions, why they faced some similar difficulties in Spanish America and Brazil, and why they differed in their ability to overcome their problems. There is, again, a strong economic flavour to the analysis, including an intriguing account of attempts in Rio and Buenos Aires to use national banks as a means of binding ruling groups to the state and generating the credit needed to fuel economic enterprise among an emergent citizenry.
The value of this book lies in making us reconsider some of the ways in which we interpret independence in both Spanish America and Portuguese America. By taking as his field for analysis a sector of the Iberian Atlantic that crossed imperial boundaries, Adelman helps to clarify what is similar and different in the crises of Portugal and Spain, and in the states that emerged from their imperial disintegration. This is, then, a very useful adjunct to the comparison of the Spanish and Anglo-American revolutions made by John Elliott in his Empires of the Atlantic World, and essential reading for students of Latin American independence.
