I

The significance of the year 1808 – when peninsular Spain suddenly found itself bankrupt, with its colonies adrift, bereft of naval power, its monarch abdicated, and its territory overrun by the army of its erstwhile ally – was not immediately apparent to contemporaries. Lord Byron might pity this ‘kingless people for a nerveless state’ and lament ‘how sad will be [its] reckoning day’,Footnote ⁵ but the political chaos unleashed and social dislocation wrought by a cataclysmic, six-year peninsular ‘war of independence’Footnote ⁶ still lay in the future. This carnage was followed by the disruptive oscillation between nascent liberal and restored, enfeebled yet vengeful, absolutist regimes from 1810 until 1833.Footnote ⁷

The events of 1808 were, however, a sharp discontinuity from the preceding decades' trajectory. The second half of the eighteenth century was marked by the vigorous expansion – bureaucratic, commercial, demographic, and territorial – of Spain's transatlantic monarchy. Contemporaries witnessed the accelerated incursion into Indian lands, the continuous exploration and spasmodic settlement of rustic peripheries from Patagonia to the Pacific north-west, and the military repossession of Florida, Louisiana, and the Mosquito Coast.Footnote ⁸ There were much-touted, crown-led attempts, known as the Bourbon reforms, to overhaul the navy, improve the army, modernize the colonial bureaucracy, revamp university education, enact a less-regulated trade regime, boost mineral yields, and wrest control over church property and patronage.Footnote ⁹ Remarkable, too, was urban, mercantile, and agricultural growth on the Caribbean coast and Atlantic littoral, sparked by upsurges in export-led production and galvanized by the dramatic influx of African slaves, particularly explosive in Caracas, Havana, and Buenos Aires and their hinterlands.Footnote ¹⁰ Demographic growth was magnificent, aided in part by population expansion, migration inducement, and frontier settlement schemes sponsored by the crown.Footnote ¹¹ In Argentina and Cuba, for example, per capita GDP was 102 per cent and 112 per cent, respectively, of the United States' level in 1800.Footnote ¹² Furthermore, the average value of exports from Spain to America was 400 per cent higher in 1796 than it had been in 1778.Footnote ¹³ The Spanish monarchy, then, seemed poised to rejoin the first rank of European powers.

The political buoyancy and burgeoning prosperity, however, must not be overstated. Travelling in Extremadura in the 1790s, Robert Southey suggested that if Charles IV possessed ‘one solitary spark of sense or humanity’, he must have been ‘seriously grieved to see the wretched state of his dominions’.Footnote ¹⁴ Hyperbole aside, Southey rightly diagnosed the monarchy's fragility, originating in part from imperial overstretch. The ambitious minister of Indies, for example, sounded uncharacteristically deflated when he warned, in 1779, that to supply all the troops, military supplies, and fortifications that the peninsula and its ultramarine territories required would be an ‘impossible enterprise’, even if the crown had at its ‘disposal all the treasures, armies and storehouses of Europe’.Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, the techniques employed to raise revenue and consolidate centralized control sparked tax riots and broader undercurrents of resistance across Spanish America, culminating in the Túpac Amaru revolt in Peru and Comunero uprising in New Granada (modern Colombia) in the early 1780s.

The triumph of the Franco-Spanish alliance in its war against Britain (1778–83), taken alone, might have justified the continued implementation of these new fiscal and administrative policies. It represented, however, an isolated and ephemeral geopolitical success among numerous setbacks. These included: a misguided and belated intervention in the Seven Years War (1761–3), resulting in the temporary loss of Cuba and the Philippines;Footnote ¹⁶ the forfeiture of the Falklands (Malvinas) to Britain (1771); brazen, but ultimately futile, efforts to reacquire Gibraltar (1781–2); profligate, low-intensity military stalemates with Portugal both in Europe and in the borderlands of the Banda Oriental (1762, 1776, and 1801); a disastrous military expedition to Algiers (1775); and Britain's seizure of Trinidad (1797), followed by its brief occupation of Buenos Aires (1806). Moreover, the deleterious economic impact of the French Revolutionary wars on Spain's oceanic commerce, symbolized by the British blockade of its principal port of Cádiz from 1796, the decimation of the fleet at St Vincent (1797), followed by its ultimate devastation at Trafalgar (1805), meant that the ‘metropolis was now virtually eliminated from the Atlantic’.Footnote ¹⁷

This predicament was exacerbated by the Madrid treasury's reliance on American revenues, which comprised a fifth of total receipts between 1784 and 1805.Footnote ¹⁸ Mounting fiscal problems induced the abrupt reversal of its modest tariff schedule, and the effective commercial tax rate in colonial trade leapt from about 16 per cent in 1792 to almost 33 per cent in 1807.Footnote ¹⁹ Throughout the monarchy, the crown decreed a massive disentailment and then sequestration of church property, appropriating its charity income in 1804 in an effort to boost flagging state revenues as financial obligations mounted.Footnote ²⁰ The dislocation caused by war provoked rampant contraband and the violation of royal monopolies in the Americas: in 1810, the consulado of Cartagena, for example, reported that 80 per cent of merchandise entering Caribbean New Granada was smuggled in whereas two-thirds of liquor was produced illegally, thus making a mockery of state monopolies.Footnote ²¹ In a last-gasp attempt to stave off collapse, the crown resorted to desperate trade decrees which opened American ports to merchants of neutral nations, thus breaking decisively with its vigorous defence of colonial monopoly. This bleak picture of military and commercial enervation, then, balances the tremendous dynamism within the monarchy itself.

Economic crisis was accompanied by political turmoil. The accession of Ferdinand VII, following the hasty abdication of his father, Charles IV, was nullified by Napoleon at Bayonne. There the young king and his father, still clinging confusedly to a now exceedingly tenuous title to his former throne, renounced their dynasty's claim in exchange for a guarantee of Spain's territorial integrity and generous pensions during a comfortable exile.Footnote ²² Reports of these events, though not of the sinecure, triggered uprisings across Spain. New structures of government, provincial juntas, proliferated, seemingly spontaneously. On the peninsula, these juntas soon recognized the primacy of a Junta Central. Its members confronted questions upon whose answer hinged the fate of the realm: was Ferdinand's abdication legitimate? Did sovereignty ‘return’ to the community that had transferred it, in the distant past, to the crown? Invoking vacatio regis, it claimed that sovereignty reverted to the original holders who, in turn, deposited it in a central body until the restitution of the rightful king. This action served to nullify the transfer of sovereignty to the Bonapartes and empowered the Junta Central, in Ferdinand's name, to organize an inchoate, if ubiquitous, resistance to the French army.

A spate of drastic military defeats forestalled debates over legitimacy and sovereignty and compelled the Junta Central to retreat to the Andalusian port of Cádiz, now defended, instead of blockaded, by the British fleet. There it ceded power to a Council of the Regency which, in turn, convoked a Cortes, a unicameral legislature composed of deputies drawn from the entire monarchy, to deliberate on the future of besieged and anarchy-plagued Spain. The Cortes convened in 1810 and its first act was to declare itself the embodiment as well as possessor of national sovereignty. It framed and promulgated a constitution in 1812, which held the monarchy sacrosanct but deposited real power in a unicameral legislature. Had its articles been implemented fully, the 1812 Constitution might have precipitated a radical transformation in both Spain and America. It mandated the abolition of the Inquisition, Indian tribute, forced labour, and seigneurial institutions. It declared a universal state, in lieu of multiple overlapping and clashing jurisdictions, with laws before which all citizens were equal and bound. Broad, but not universal, male suffrage was decreed.Footnote ²³

The promulgation of this constitution, however, failed to quell rebellion in the Americas. Following the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814, it was indefinitely suspended and replaced by a renewed pact between the ‘altar and the throne’.Footnote ²⁴ Ferdinand authorized a campaign to subdue the American revolts, including the despatch of a 10,000 strong army of reconquest in early 1815.

In the meantime, a species of civil war intensified in the New World. The Spanish national government defended its legitimacy against the local and provincial juntas which had sprung up, as in the peninsula, in the aftermath of the Bayonne abdications. But the conflict also brought long-simmering rivalries to a boil. It pitted capitals against provinces, rival elites against one another, and the towns against the countryside, dynamics which prefigured those of the early national period. By 1820, with Madrid's military strategy in tatters and rebel efforts increasingly co-ordinated, Simón Bolívar was emboldened to ask a royalist general, Gabriel de Torres, ‘do you still imagine that decrepit and corrupt Spain could govern this modern world?’Footnote ²⁵

The Liberator's conclusion soon became generally accepted. Following the brief restoration of the constitutional monarchy, El trienio liberal (1820–3),Footnote ²⁶ further political chaos engulfed the peninsula and decisive setbacks on American battlefields, culminating with the rout at Ayacucho (December 1824), encouraged European powers to recognize de jure the independence that the nascent Spanish American states enjoyed de facto. Truncated Spain, toiling again under a reinvigorated absolutism, prepared for its década ominosa, shorn of all but a few of its ultramarine limbs.Footnote ²⁷

II

The nomenclature employed to describe this episode varies considerably, a reflection of the divergent interpretations developed by historians. These differences are shaped by geographical focus, ideological affiliation, and the selection of chronological parameters. Those who study Spanish America's ‘revolutions’ stress complex, long-term social, intellectual, political, and military processes which culminated in the rejection of Spanish rule and its expulsion from the Americas. ‘Emancipation’ is a term chosen by those interested in the coalescence and diffusion of separatist, protean national or even sub-national identities, which preceded the overthrow of a deleterious Spanish yoke, and the formation of fully fledged nation-states. ‘Independence’ is the concept preferred by historians who emphasize the severance of institutional bonds linking Spain and America and the protracted formation of new polities, often in wider geopolitical and economic context.Footnote ²⁸

Historians of Spain, by contrast, tend to refer to the vertiginous ‘collapse’ of the American empire, often attributed to the turmoil wrought by the peninsular war which decapitated the monarchy and paralysed its administrative limbs. Still in circulation, though decreasingly fashionable, allusion to the ‘loss of America’ highlights the agency, particularly the failures, of both peninsular liberal constitutionalists and conservative absolutists in widening the breach between the two shores of the Atlantic in the decades after 1808.Footnote ²⁹ Still other accounts downplay the contraction of Spain, underscoring the harmful impact of colonies on the peninsula's economy, Footnote ³⁰ or ignore it altogether in favour of the more uplifting narratives of the blossoming of constitutional monarchy and representative government within the context of its steady integration into Europe's economy during the nineteenth century. In this article, the terms ‘dissolution’, ‘disintegration’, and ‘disaggregation’ are preferred because they reflect the central thrust of recent scholarship, distinguished by its repudiation of teleological accounts of the transition from colony to fully fledged nation and its emphasis on the sudden unravelling of imperial unity instead of the ‘long-run process of alienation’ of Americans from Spanish rule.Footnote ³¹

To these differences concerning the nature of the transformation, the character of the entity which metamorphosed remains a contentious topic. There is controversy whether the term ‘empire’ misrepresents the nature of this transoceanic polity. Strong arguments have been made which serve to portray this entity as one composed of kingdoms, not colonies, each an ‘equal and integral part of the Spanish crown’, which together formed a ‘heterogeneous confederation’.Footnote ³² Anthony Pagden has gone so far as to argue that these ‘quasi-autonomous kingdoms’ were no different, ‘whatever the realities of their legal status, from Aragon, Naples or the Netherlands’.Footnote ³³ Shades of opinion on this matter notwithstanding, there existed few lateral linkages joining the respective kingdoms to one another. Each was bound by separate, vertical allegiances to the crown. The Gazeta de Buenos Ayres, for example, made this point about the Río de la Plata's connection to New Spain in 1810: ‘we have no more relations with that people than with Russia or Tartary’. Footnote ³⁴

But this notion of pre-independence atomization must not be pushed too far. The constellation of territories was held together by deeply entrenched religious, linguistic, and cultural bonds.Footnote ³⁵ Furthermore, there existed a shared political culture which flourished from the advent of Spanish colonialism. The debate, however, concerns whether the Bourbon reformers altered this entrenched yet delicate system and the extent of this change. Under Charles III (r. 1759–88), some historians claim, crown officials began to refer to the jurisdictional units of Spanish America as colonias, a term borrowed from England and France, instead of the traditional reinos.Footnote ³⁶ In 1809, the Junta Central alluded indirectly to this shift when it declared that the ‘vast and valuable kingdoms that Spain possesses in the Indies are not colonies or factories like those of other nations, but rather an integral and essential part of the monarchy’.Footnote ³⁷ In order to assess this and related debates, it is useful to survey the prevailing explanations for the transatlantic monarchy's dissolution.

In spite of differences in terminology and emphasis, most explanations have until recently clustered around four overlapping, but not mutually exclusive, themes: first, the impact of the Bourbon reforms in both corroding the legitimacy of Spanish rule and pushing Americans to seek independence; second, the rise of a proto-national consciousness or identity as a precondition of the rupture with peninsular Spain; third, the role of ‘enlightenment’ thought as a destabilizing force which underpinned the eventual schism; and fourth, the spectre of domestic social revolution – as a result of demographic shifts, economic changes, and crown policy – as an incentive for political separation led by nervous elites. Any account of this complex, multi-faceted process of dissolution necessarily is multi-causal in approach. Generally speaking, borrowing Lawrence Stone's categories, it may be argued that long-term preconditions and medium-term precipitants, instead of short-term triggers, have most interested historians seeking to explain the rupture between the Atlantic's two shores.Footnote ³⁸ There has been general agreement that the triggers were the French occupation of the peninsula and the clumsy abdication of the Bourbon monarchs. It is the complex interaction of precipitants and preconditions, then, which have sparked debates among historians.

The crown's ambitious and comprehensive programme of political and economic renewal, which gathered momentum after Charles III's accession in 1759, often termed the Bourbon reforms, has been depicted as a major factor in the dissolution of the Spanish monarchy. Reform prompted imperial disintegration because it undermined the foundation of the crown's legitimacy in America. Royal policy-makers and agents ‘displayed an intolerant disdain for Post-Tridentine Habsburg culture’ and were imbued with a ‘secular, utilitarian spirit which dismissed the former thesis of Spain's providential mission in the world as an illusion’.Footnote ³⁹ Furthermore, the new emphasis on economic prosperity, with commerce as its motor, led to a ‘shift toward a material justification of authority’ which undermined the ‘abstract spiritual and moral purpose of the state’, made it ‘responsible for definite measurable performance’, and established a ‘new form of political legitimacy’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The accent on commerce was disruptive in other ways, requiring the substitution of aristocratic mores premised on honour by those based on trust. Furthermore, less regulated trade, reluctantly permitted as a temporary expedient to bolster the economy, threatened the religious, political, and cultural integrity of the empire and exposed it to nefarious, potentially heretical, foreign influences.Footnote ⁴¹

If new ideals and principles spoilt the spiritual adhesive which attached the individual ultramarine kingdoms to the peninsula, the stable Habsburg pact also was abrogated by aggressive policy. A ‘new reliance on executive decree and military sanction’Footnote ⁴² contaminated a political culture predicated on the symbiosis-generating trinity of compromise, negotiation, and mutual concessions. This older society, composed of corporations, was distinguished by its overlapping jurisdictions, special privileges, and ancient immunities. It was transformed by the Bourbons: ‘the sole object of loyalty was henceforth to be the unified nation-state – the cuerpo unido de nación – embodied in the person of the monarch’.Footnote ⁴³ The older, looser amalgamated corporate identity was repudiated.

But if historians have reached agreement, for the most part, concerning the spirit that animated the Bourbon reforms, they have reached three, competing conclusions about their efficacy: a first group of historians hail the extensive accomplishments of the reformers. Though the Caroline period represented a ‘fragile equipoise’, it witnessed the creation of a ‘salaried bureaucracy, supported by an extensive army of guards, [which] enabled the Spanish monarchy to reap an extraordinary fiscal harvest from the expansion of economic activity effected by its commercial reforms and its encouragement of colonial exports’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the short run, at least, royal officials were ‘remarkably successful’ in raising revenue through new tax levies, establishing more efficient collection procedures, and imposing royal monopolies.Footnote ⁴⁵ Authority was centralized and contraband declined in some regions.Footnote ⁴⁶ This ‘overhaul of imperial government’ included the creation of new viceroyalties and the appointment of intendants, the ‘prime agents of absolutism’, among other innovations.Footnote ⁴⁷ In spite of lingering minor disagreements about their scope, scale, and legacy, this first cohort of historians maintains that the Bourbon reformers rationalized administration, exacted higher revenues, and consolidated political and economic control.

A second group of historians repudiates this rather flattering portrait of the Bourbon reformers and their policies. They deride the ‘pervasive myth’ of the era as one of ‘unhindered progress’ which ‘awakened Spain and its imperial possessions from their Habsburg slumber’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The reformers, it is argued, were ‘constantly beset by difficulties’, ‘proceeded fitfully’, ‘inefficiently applied’ their lofty principles, and experienced ‘reversals of policy and long periods of inaction’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Because the crown refused to ‘tamper with the traditional social structure’, it only produced a ‘limited and largely superficial renovation’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Reform, according to this second perspective, was a belated reaction to the exigencies of ‘defensive modernization’ galvanized by the ‘external stimulus’ of geopolitical threats to the Spanish American empire.Footnote ⁵¹ It amounted to ‘calibrated adjustment, methodical incrementalism, never radical change or restructuring’.Footnote ⁵² Such tentative half-measures reflect a state which remained ‘weak by European standards. It delegated functions, tolerated high levels of illicit violence, [and] failed to consolidate territory’.Footnote ⁵³ The crown's incapacity, revealed starkly at the municipal level, to implement the reform it undertook suggests that, ‘for all the centuries of expanding royal authority, Spain remained in many ways a federation of self-governing municipalities.’Footnote ⁵⁴ The Bourbon reforms, then, failed to revive Spain's Atlantic Empire.

Those historians who espouse a third perspective acknowledge the formidable growth of the colonial economy in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. They deny, however, that state-sponsored reforms were instrumental to this prosperity. The thesis of ‘institutional intentionality’ resulted from the Bourbon ‘strategem of propaganda’, which claimed credit for results to which state action had not contributed directly.Footnote ⁵⁵ If anything, it is argued, the late colonial economy flourished in spite of a reform programme whose sole goal was the benefit of the metropolis. Tax payers in Bourbon Mexico, for example, parted with between 40 and 70 per cent more of their money than their metropolitan counterparts.Footnote ⁵⁶ Instead of reforms, it is argued, what ‘proliferated were proyectos, the majority of which never came to fruition’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This latter cohort of historians, then, remains sceptical of the crown's efficacy and the extent to which it realized the grandiose objectives it envisaged, regardless of whether general prosperity coincided with its policy ventures.

Strangely, this strikingly low appraisal of the Bourbon reforms has produced a limited impact on the analysis of the late colonial rebellions and the eventual dissolution of the Spanish monarchy.Footnote ⁵⁸ The core claim is that the uprisings were sparked by a rejuvenated absolutist government bent on fiscal exaction or restructuring government in ways unfavourable to long-ensconced elites. The combative response to state policies, in turn, presaged a broader anti-colonial conspiracy and revolt several decades later. The assumption, of course, is that the crown was up to something new, even if it was not especially benevolent, and that its actions produced enough of an effect to instigate unprecedented levels of protest from many sectors of society.

There is little doubt that administrative centralization and revamped fiscal strategies engendered widespread disaffection and instigated resistance, particularly in the robust indigenous communities of the Andes. Indian tribute levels shot up: in La Paz, for example, crown income rose six-fold between 1750 and 1800.Footnote ⁵⁹ There were more than 100 uprisings by native Indian peoples between 1720 and 1790.Footnote ⁶⁰ Some historians have endowed these protests with special historical significance. Far more than a ‘failed antecedent’, ‘precursor’ or ‘backward-looking restorationist project’, one historian has argued, the Túpac Amaru revolt, the largest and most influential of all uprisings, led by José Gabriel Condorcanqui, ‘embodied … neo-Inca nationalism’ which was ‘used to demand equal rights’ and ‘overthrow colonialism’.Footnote ⁶¹

Creoles, too, were distraught, because they continued to ‘conceive of themselves as members of a composite monarchy at a time when this notion had become anathema to the crown’.Footnote ⁶² One historian argued that Bourbon efforts to ‘abolish the “unwritten constitution” whose cornerstones were creole participation in the bureaucracy and government by compromise and negotiation’ caused open resistance, including the major Comunero revolt.Footnote ⁶³ The extirpation of Americans from institutions which governed each reino, particularly the Audiencia, and their replacement by peninsular officials, often of military background, symbolized the disregard for the tacit compact which sustained the elites' alliance with the crown.Footnote ⁶⁴ These were clashes, with myriad seventeenth-century antecedents, between imperial cravings for centralization and colonial aspirations for greater autonomy to conduct their own affairs.Footnote ⁶⁵

The transformation of political legitimacy triggered instability. Not only were creoles removed from the colonial bureaucracy, but the Americas were flooded with peninsular lawyers, accountants, and soldiers brought in to expedite the ‘revolution in government’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Emphasizing the attenuation of elite–crown co-operation, one scholar places state failure, not disruptive ambition or successful encroachment, at the heart of the analysis. Stressing elite competition within a ‘neo-patrimonial political culture’, whose main mechanism is the ‘monarch who dispenses favours’ to private economic interests, he argues that the collapse of peninsular authority and its dense patronage networks in 1808 ushered in an intra-elite ‘competition for power’.Footnote ⁶⁷ In spite of many shades of opinion, then, the prevailing view correlates the Bourbon reforms and discontent in America.

A second overarching explanation for the dissolution of the Spanish monarchy involves incipient nationalism and the ‘emergence of an identity’, embedded in a ‘separate community within a separate culture’, as a ‘precondition of revolution’.Footnote ⁶⁸ This view, naturally, intersects with the debate concerning the Bourbon reforms: did these efforts generate an irreconcilable antagonism between the groups and create an atmosphere conducive to political schism?Footnote ⁶⁹ While all historical discussions of identity formation answer this question in the affirmative, they attribute varying levels of importance to it.

The sturdiest thesis concerns ‘creole patriotism’. Drawing primarily on evidence from New Spain (Mexico), David Brading cogently argued that a new identity gradually emerged and ultimately became ‘transmuted into the insurgent ideology of Mexican nationalism’. It was employed by the clerical leadership, who were suspicious of new-fangled doctrines such as popular sovereignty, and supplemented the already universal and fervent veneration of Our Lady of Guadalupe with an appeal to the classical history of pre-conquest Mexico, now on the cusp of recovering its liberty. In order to rally an uneasy, heterogeneous coalition of creoles, castas, and Indians against Spain and to justify independence, nationalist ideology drew on an ‘idiosyncratic blend of Marian devotion, anti-españolismo and neo-Aztecism’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In this way, it resorted to the rhetoric of liberty, patria, and regeneration, not revolution and radical change.Footnote ⁷¹ This ideology was fluid, capable of integrating diverse, superficially anomalous ideas, including, most crucially, those drawn from classical republicanism. Other influential explanations with nation-state formation at their core invoke the concept of an ‘imagined political community’, both ‘inherently limited and sovereign’, emerging as a result of a burgeoning periodical press which made the coalescence of a separate, geographically rooted identity, based loosely on topographically influenced administrative divisions, possible.Footnote ⁷²

Entwined with questions about the origins of national identity is a debate concerning the enlightenment's role in the Spanish monarchy's dissolution. In the traditional narrative, new-fangled ideas and patterns of thought inspired and guided creoles, functioned as an agent of decomposition, and subverted Spanish rule due to their anti-clerical and anti-absolutist tendencies.Footnote ⁷³ In this sense, to invoke again Stone's terminology, they were represented as both preconditions and precipitants. Until recently, however, the Spanish Atlantic enlightenment was considered meekly derivative and imitative of foreign models. It failed to measure up to French or North American antecedents and produced neither bourgeois economic order nor liberal democracy.Footnote ⁷⁴

Nevertheless, independence often has been considered part of a broader ‘age of democratic revolutions’, even if it has been denigrated as a derivative and belated version of events in North America and Europe. There is abundant evidence to support such a claim: in 1781, a perspicacious crown official fretted that an independent United States would ‘serve as the inspiration and model for the rest of that part of the world’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1794, a group of creoles in New Granada were arrested in possession of the ‘Constitution of Philadelphia’; in 1795, the secretary of Quito's Economic Society was imprisoned for sedition; in 1797, the conspiracy of La Guaira appealed to ideals of equality and liberty. Scattered across the Atlantic, from Philadelphia to London, were aspiring revolutionaries – Francisco de Miranda and Mariano Moreno among them – who awaited an opportunity to implement their republican ideals.Footnote ⁷⁶ Traditionally, these figures are conceived of as the noble ‘precursors’ who wielded new doctrines to combat despotism and to dissipate the lugubrious legacy of three centuries of Spanish rule.

Historiography in peninsular Spain, however, was nourished by a different soil and this difference partially explains the divergent relation between enlightenment and imperial dissolution articulated there. Beginning with Andrés Muriel in the late 1830s, conservative historians lamented the ‘excessive fondness for innovation’, ‘enchantment by vague and abstract theories, seductive in appearance yet nefarious in practice’, of the enlightenment. They blamed the French Revolution and its ‘contagion of ideas’ for Spain's demise.Footnote ⁷⁷ The ‘ruinous consequences’ wrought by ‘Encyclopedism’ gave rise to the historiographical, as well as popular, dichotomy of the ‘two Spains’: a laudable one, rooted in pristine peninsular tradition, and its nefarious counterpart, inspired by sinister foreign influences.Footnote ⁷⁸

Historians of France, by contrast, long ago modified Daniel Mornet's thesis that enlightenment thought was a precondition for monarchy's crisis as France lurched toward revolution.Footnote ⁷⁹ Nevertheless, in the historiography of the Spanish Atlantic monarchy's demise, just as in France, enlightenment and revolution long remained ‘two terms joined together in recurrent cycles of retrospective polemic’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Whereas conservatives bewailed the disastrous impact of enlightened ideas, liberal historians arrived at the opposite conclusion while sharing the same central assumption: enlightenment ideas, derived from France, catalysed Spain's modernization and, subsequently, hastened the end of the old regime. Footnote ⁸¹

The fourth traditional, though often neglected, explanation involves the impact of demographic shifts and rising fears of social revolution. The most prominent exponent of this view, George Reid Andrews, contended that ‘elite disquiet’ mounted when the crown failed to assist them in their ‘confrontation with the masses’:Footnote ⁸²

This situation left exit from Spanish rule as the only option to forestall social revolution. White creoles, already alarmed by the growing social mobility of free blacks and mulattos, the demographic increase of the castas, and the prospect of slave revolts in the wake of the Haitian revolution, ‘lost confidence’ in the crown and rushed to fill the power vacuum before the forces of social revolution could gather force.Footnote ⁸⁴ As Francisco de Miranda, key visionary and early martyr of independence, observed: ‘I confess that as much as I desire the liberty and independence of the New World, I fear anarchy and revolution even more’.Footnote ⁸⁵ In this way, even aspiring creole revolutionaries feared that social upheaval would obviate the political changes which they sought and would produce consequences which they could not predict, let alone control.

III

Recent work has confirmed the immense quality of earlier generations of scholars who studied the dissolution of the Spanish monarchy. Certain assumptions and conclusions, however, have been recast in light of new evidence and shifting perspectives. The first of these revisions concerns the late colonial state. Depictions of the Bourbon state still accentuate its predatory, extractive, and despotic characteristics yet, simultaneously, lethargic, clumsy, ineffective, and anachronistic traits. One consequence of this latter view, however, is the perception that the Spanish transatlantic monarchy slouched on to the nineteenth-century stage in a rather dismal state, unsuited for any thing greater than a minor part in the unfolding European geopolitical drama, and on the verge of collapse. Certainly, if the chaos that enveloped Spain after 1808 is emphasized, this perception is justifiable.

Historians now recognize the need to account for the ‘durability of archaic structures’, a shift that ‘requires suppressing postdictive temptations to make empires appear fated to eclipse’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The persistent image of a grasping, failed despotism, for example, does not correspond with recent findings. Instead, this research reports a ‘patchwork fiscal reality’ and extensive system of intra-imperial transfer of tax receipts, itself subject to alignment with interests of elites, in order to redistribute it to regions that could not or would not raise sufficient revenue. This subsidy defrayed defence costs, which spiked as a result of the new fortifications constructed in the wake of the Seven Years War.Footnote ⁸⁷ Naval reconstruction, too, depended on public–private partnerships: shipbuilding under Charles IV ‘systematically relied’ on ‘private initiative’, especially credit extended by colonial as well as peninsular elites.Footnote ⁸⁸ Notwithstanding Madrid's centripetal efforts and matching rhetoric, the late eighteenth-century transoceanic empire, then, resembled those early modern European polities identified and described by John Elliott as ‘composite monarchies’, founded on a ‘mutual compact between the crown and the ruling class of their different provinces – which gave even the most arbitrary and artificial of unions a certain stability and resilience’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Studies by historians of Spanish American politics and ideas corroborate this finding. With regard to political institutions, the ‘putative goal’ of centralization in practice gave way to ‘substantial flexibility’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Bourbon meddling, it turns out, led to a ‘resurgence’, not ‘inhibition’, of elite civic participation. Elites acted to ‘benefit from new opportunities or challenge attacks on their local privileges and customs’.Footnote ⁹¹ Creoles, particularly on the periphery, gained limited access to quasi-governmental, crown-sponsored institutions, such as the consulado and the Economic Society.Footnote ⁹² Furthermore, there was a deceleration of the pace of reform, or at least a change of tactics, following the revolt of Britain's thirteen Atlantic seaboard colonies and, subsequently, after Túpac Amaru and the Comuneros.Footnote ⁹³ Far from muffled under a repressive Bourbon yoke, civil society and intellectual life, too, flourished.Footnote ⁹⁴ The study of natural history, for example, was nurtured by the crown as a handmaiden to development (fomento) and ‘improvement’.Footnote ⁹⁵ What mattered to creoles, it is increasingly certain, was ‘control over policy-making, not polity-making’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Coterminous with the revaluation of the Bourbon monarchy is the reassessment of the nature, aims, and scope of the late eighteenth-century conspiracies and rebellions. Historians now conclude that they were neither precursor movements of independence nor movements which reflected the emergence of incipient nationhood.Footnote ⁹⁷ There was ‘no swelling national esprit waiting to be released from colonial thralldom’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Instead, they ‘aimed at perpetuating past practices not at overthrowing them’.Footnote ⁹⁹ They represented ‘complex local responses to – and checks on – the peninsular model of nation-building through empire’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Recent research into the Túpac Amaru revolt, for example, suggests overwhelming loyalty of Indian elite which, far from endorsing violent rejection of Spanish authority, preferred to ‘negotiate and contest Spanish hegemony through the courts’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Similarly, elite frustration with certain aspects of the old regime did not translate directly into unrest. With the possible exception of the Río de la Plata, the quest for less regulated trade probably was not a ‘dominant factor’ in the rejection of Spanish authority.Footnote ¹⁰² A certain amount of conflict could be contained within older structures: ‘acceptable accommodation’ and ‘orderly readjustment’ prevailed.Footnote ¹⁰³ Spanish America thus remained a ‘discursive space, densely knit by networks of communication’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ When the unified monarchy was pulverized by the cumulative effects of war and revolution, this shared political culture continued to thrive.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Evaluations of the enlightenment in the Spanish Atlantic world have followed the broader European discourse of recent decades, resulting in a revision of the perceived relation between ideological shifts and political turbulence.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In Spanish America, there was a ‘complex interaction’ of two forms of the enlightenment: an absolutist variant that spurred the reformulation of imperial policy and a more liberal manifestation that encouraged experimentation with new types of governmental institutions and norms.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The public sphere, it is now recognized, not only incubated dissent, but also bolstered and deepened co-operation between local elites and the crown's agents. As in Europe, it often was not subversive, but instead ‘developed within and in support of the established order, not outside and against it’,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ making the ‘relationship between the public sphere and the state amicable and mutually supportive’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Because Spanish American societies were ‘deeply resistant to change’, government became the ‘indispensable patron’ of creoles who sought progressive reform.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Enlightenment precepts, then, ‘were neither necessary nor sufficient causes for revolt’ for ‘new thinking could just as easily be put to use to defend old structures’.Footnote ¹¹¹

Drawing upon French historiography, particularly the work of Roger Chartier, however, some contemporary scholars suggest that new forms of association, while perhaps maintaining a ‘discourse [that] affirmed respect for authority and adherence to traditional values’, may have ‘prefigured radical sociability’.Footnote ¹¹² In this manner, the intellectual culture of the antiguo régimen was intrinsically subversive even where its literal content ostensibly reinforced its edifice or at least seemed indifferent to it. Conceiving of the ilustrados as a ‘cultural group’, a recent historian of New Granada traced their coalescence around a shared basis of ‘reading, conversation, and scientific activities’ which established ‘common references’ and a shared ‘identity’, developments which prefigured autonomous status within American elite culture.Footnote ¹¹³ One of the unintended consequences of this new milieu, with its innovative habits of mind and modes of association, was that it could acquire, when confronted by a crisis, a different political vocabulary and pursue objectives not previously contemplated. In this view, enlightenment represents a steady rejection of the culture of the Baroque and the creation of a new consciousness that laid the edifice of a new public culture. In spite of these valuable insights, however, there is an emerging, persuasive consensus that enlightened ideas neither ‘detonated the independence movements’Footnote ¹¹⁴ nor ‘produced a conception of colonial liberation’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Historians of this period also have reappraised the applicability of Benedict Anderson's influential work on nationalism. Far from an ‘imagined community’ existing in an idealized future and involving a sense of sovereignty over a defined territory, those who sought America's independence from Spain wanted to recover a long-lost, pristine past when the government apparatus supposedly functioned properly and in the interest of the community it ruled. In Central America, the revival of municipal government was a ‘dynamic and creative adaptation of a proven form of political organization’ rather than a ‘limping, unthinking extension of a medieval heritage’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Furthermore, Spanish Americans justified self-government using the political languages of ‘rationalism, contractualism, and the natural law philosophy of the enlightenment’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The emerging consensus is that ‘neither Suárez nor Rousseau’ predominated. The distinctiveness of Spanish American political thought lies in its ‘pluralism and confusion’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In the Cortes of Cádiz, too, appeal was made to tradition and pre-modern Spanish precedents were exalted.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Indeed, the framers of the 1812 Constitution ‘convinced themselves that they were honest interpreters of the Spanish tradition, which had been besmirched by the despotism of both the Habsburgs and Bourbons’.Footnote ¹²⁰

In the same way that old ideas, rooted in Hispanic tradition, were more salient than previously supposed, the press's role, so pivotal to Anderson's theory, has been diminished and exposed as anachronistic. The real ‘explosion’ of the periodical press everywhere except, perhaps, Mexico, occurred only after 1808.Footnote ¹²¹ In most of South America, at least, a ‘transformation of information networks did not precede revolution’.Footnote ¹²² Anderson also has been criticized on the grounds that his understanding of ‘nation’ does ‘not correspond to historical usage’.Footnote ¹²³ It was, as Matthew Brown has shown, a ‘conceptually broad and necessarily vague construction, into which foreigners and strangers were often welcomed on pragmatic and ideological grounds’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Detailed, archive-driven studies, then, have cast doubt on the prospect of developing a satisfactory overarching theory that connects nascent nationalist identities and the disaggregation of Spain's transoceanic empire.

IV

Reassessments of the Bourbon reforms, national identity formation, and the impact of the enlightenment as preconditions and precipitants of revolt have suggested the limitations of certain aspects of earlier interpretations. But they have not replaced them. Assisted in part by the doubts cast on existing views, however, different perspectives and emphases are emerging. The overarching unity of these views is the rejection of teleological narratives of the liberal nation-state as an intended outcome of political movements in Spanish America, conceived of and striven for, from at least 1808 if not many years before. The multiplicity of mutually exclusive political aspirations, political contingency and fragmentation, and deeper subterranean processes which complicate such linear accounts have prompted historians to shift their gaze toward moments of discontinuity, rupture as well as the durability of institutions that previously were discarded as atavisms of the antiguo régimen. This has led to a new emphasis on understudied ‘preconditions’ and ‘precipitants’. It also has endowed the ‘trigger’ of the 1808 political cataclysm with greater explanatory power than was previously attributed to it.

There are at least four new directions: the long-term, unintended consequences of changes in patterns of oceanic commerce on the relation between colony and metropole; the explanatory significance of political events and decisions in peninsular Spain, including the policies pursued by the liberals of the Cortes of Cádiz; the chaotic and incomplete nature of nation-state and identity formation in America, including the role of warfare in this process; and the international dimension's prominence in the process of independence.

Jeremy Adelman has argued persuasively that 1808 thrust into the spotlight a gradual, cumulative change, an ever-widening chasm between Europe and America, that had been stirring since the final decades of the eighteenth century. ‘If the needs of war pushed the imperial parts closer together’, he contends, the ‘commercial dynamics unleashed by competition and free trade began to pull them apart.’Footnote ¹²⁵ Focusing on the impact of trade reform and merchant capital accumulation, he observed that ‘one of [its] unintended consequences’ was to ‘[unblock] the pressure on these emerging networks. So when the European and North Atlantic trading networks got caught up in the maelstrom of revolution and warfare, the South Atlantic was functioning, indeed flourishing on its own.’ Pointing to the centrality of the slave trade, conducted directly between the coasts of Africa and South America's Atlantic littoral, in this process, he suggests how it ‘evolved outside the orbit of metropolitan interests and controls’. The irony was that ‘this was a world made by empire but autonomous from imperial authority’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Reform and burgeoning export-led growth, in this view, neither catalysed resistance and the formation of a separate identity nor produced a yearning for independence. Rather, they accompanied and propelled incremental, subtle, macro-level changes and, in the final analysis, inexorable and de facto autonomy for parts of Spanish America well before the spectacular political paroxysm of 1808.

But politics, particularly those of the peninsula, do explain a great deal. The crumpling of the Spanish monarchy, resulting from the double abdications of the Bourbon kings at Bayonne, and Napoleon's installation of his brother on the throne, crowned as José I, always has been deemed crucial. Yet the explanatory priority allotted to this moment was never high until now. ‘It was the sudden acephelous condition’, it was observed recently, ‘that explains the cataclysmic character of the crisis of the Spanish monarchy.’Footnote ¹²⁷ The shock of the abdications, the absence of legitimate authority, and the power vacuum it created rippled westward, crossing the Atlantic, with a tsunami-like effect. The dramatic and traumatic reactions provoked by the absence, not exercise, of authority throughout the constituent kingdoms of the realm now is a crucial locus of research.

Here the Atlantic perspective has proved its particular value by casting light on dynamics that had long been relegated to the historiographical shadows.Footnote ¹²⁸ Though plagued by certain imperfections,Footnote ¹²⁹ this salutary trend serves to reintegrate their histories ‘not through cultural diffusion or some systemic logic, but through similar sets of conflicts and parallel responses to globalizing influences’.Footnote ¹³⁰ The unprecedented headless state of the monarchy unleashed myriad divergent, local responses which critically undermined transoceanic connectedness. Historians are increasingly attentive to the ricochet effects of the peninsula's implosion in America as well as the reverberation of American upheaval in Europe.Footnote ¹³¹ What used to be thought of mainly as a ‘trigger’ of Spanish American separatism is now considered to be a ‘precipitant’, of extraordinary magnitude, of the tumultuous processes which culminated in the monarchy's dissolution.

Recent studies conclude that the inaugural moment of nation-state as well as identity formation was the ‘unintended and unplanned result of the end of the pact between pueblos’ which the Spanish monarchy had held together. The existence of well-established administrative and economic spaces, the surfacing of long-subordinate regional and civic identities, compounded by the immensity of physical distance which separated them, proved an ‘insuperable obstacle to the construction of such an [American] identity’.Footnote ¹³² The ‘simplification’ and ‘abstraction’ of independence as a general, Pan-American phenomenon has been discarded. Instead, the ‘confluence of factors and social forces’ and the ‘simultaneous, locally-generated, uncoordinated movements, with an infinite number of leaders (cabecillas)’, is the target of research.Footnote ¹³³

The years between 1808 and 1812, then, are decreasingly depicted as an overture to revolution, but rather as a period of extraordinary confusion, notable for the survival and renovative capacity of long-established patterns of politics.Footnote ¹³⁴ In the peninsula, historians have long recognized that the juntas that proliferated so rapidly in the summer of 1808 possessed a ‘patriotic character’, but also represented a ‘revolutionary movement’ because they assumed ‘limitless power to exercise sovereignty’.Footnote ¹³⁵ In America, far from a ‘precocious attempt at emancipation’, the ‘immense loyalty’ was expressed through a ‘rejection of the invader, unprecedented demonstration of fidelity to the king, an explosion of Spanish patriotism and solidarity with the [pensinular] patriots’, articulated through the press, civic processions, and public ceremonies in which participants reaffirmed loyalty to the crown.Footnote ¹³⁶ It was conspicuous for its ardent effort to sustain the transatlantic monarchy or to conceive of it in a manner that did not challenge its basic coherence. This is not, of course, to suggest that Americans were clamouring for the restoration of a rigorous absolutism. Recent scholarship demonstrates a robust demand for autonomy, but not independence.Footnote ¹³⁷ This liminality, which complicates linear narratives of alienation, identity formation, and the embrace of ‘enlightened values’, is a crucial topic for future research.

As the pivotal, contingent character of the ‘1808 moment’ attracts scholarly adherents, older questions have resurfaced concerning whether liberals, rather than the champions of restoration absolutism, bear some responsibility for exacerbating the crisis. Early nineteenth-century liberals, on the one hand, interpreted the upheaval in America as a rejection of despotism and paraded the prospect of a constitutional monarchy as a panacea to cure the crisis.Footnote ¹³⁸ Absolutists, on the other hand, were convinced that liberals were culpable, a hypothesis Ferdinand VII articulated in a letter to Alexander I of Russia: ‘The constitution formed at Cádiz, and the revolution made in Spain, were the work of the machinations of those who desired to separate the Americas from the metropolis.’Footnote ¹³⁹

Recent scholars have latched on to this reactionary critique of Cádiz liberalism. The previous generation of historians recognized the Cortes's ‘failure to reach consensus’, the absence of a ‘universal policy for America, logically conceived and consistently applied’, and the ‘systemic dysfunction’ of ‘governmental, policy-making, information-transmitting, and consensus-generating mechanisms’ throughout the 1808–26 period.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Had the various governments after 1810 been more dexterous, had they assuaged American aspirations for autonomy, events might have taken a different course. Instead, they shunned compromise and conciliation. The intransigence was epitomized by the 41,000 troops sent to reconquer America between 1814 and 1826.Footnote ¹⁴¹ But obstinacy, in most traditional accounts, was of tertiary importance behind incompetence and vacillation, not to mention explanations that privilege the agency of American actors and factors.

In the most recent scholarship, the ideological contradictions, not simply administrative deficiencies, of the Cádiz liberals – particularly their attempt to reconfigure the empire from a composite of multiple societies into a single political community while denying Americans equal political rightsFootnote ¹⁴² – is acknowledged as alienating Americans from Spain when separation was merely one of a number of possible paths. One historian provocatively argues that Americans neither were ‘admitted to the Spanish nation in the first place’ nor ‘offered an acceptable and stable pact to integrate them into the new patria española’. Instead, ‘inequality and the rejection of autonomy’ was offered and this paltry package ‘generated a great many of diverse responses’.Footnote ¹⁴³

The Cortes debates concerning America thus assume greater prominence in the scholarly literature. Two disputes stand out: first, the right of Americans to form their own juntas; second, equality of representation in the monarchy's legislative bodies, initially in the Junta Central and, subsequently, in the Cortes.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In the Junta, in spite of the superior population of America, there were 9 Americans as opposed to 26 peninsular Spaniards. In the Cortes, there were 30 deputies for America against 250 for the peninsula. Particularly controversial, as well as pivotal to the justification of this disparity, was the distinction made between Spaniards and citizens, the latter possessing political rights, including the right to vote in national and municipal elections and hold public office. A contentious, closely related issue was the ‘problem of descent’, concerning the extent of the political inclusion of American non-whites, particularly the right to be represented while not enjoying other rights associated with citizenship, a dispute that became ‘indistinguishable from the problem of American equal rights’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Some scholars offer a more sympathetic explanation for the attitudes of the Cádiz liberals, stressing the limitations of a ‘strictly juridical analysis of [the 1812 Constitution]’ and the ‘priority’ that they granted to a collective concept of the nation resulted from the exigencies of war and the situation engendered by abdication.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Furthermore, its shortcomings must be contextualized: ‘the constitution surpassed all existing representative governments, such as those of Great Britain, the United States and France, in providing political rights to the vast majority of the male population’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Another nuanced variation on this apology suggests that peninsular liberalism evolved in response to political movements in America, particularly the American deputies' efforts to ‘transform [municipalities] into authentic vehicles for the pursuit of American autonomy’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Spanish liberals veered toward monarchical form of government, it is argued, in reaction to America's autonomist aspirations.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The Cádiz liberals were not ‘innately’ centralist, but rather antagonistic to all forms of particularism. They associated federalism, even in a liberal form, with the decentralized rule of the municipalities of the seigneurial regime, and regarded it as a retrograde step.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

These disputes between the peninsula and America, it should be noted, were as discursive as they were substantive. Both Americans and peninsular deputies ‘employed the concept of “nation” in mystifying ways, endowing it with different significances, sometimes calling it the state, sometimes only using it in a cultural sense’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ There existed two related, but not identical, notions: first, the idea of a nation of individuals who form a citizenry; second, a ‘conjunction of corporate entities, pueblos, provinces’.Footnote ¹⁵²Patria, too, is now considered to be a ‘political identity’ fraught with ‘multiple ambiguities’.Footnote ¹⁵³

This confusion suggests that national identity was forged during the independence struggle itself. It was not pre-existing, waiting for a propitious opportunity to reveal itself.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The nation was the result, not the cause, of the independence movements.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Spanish American ‘elites dedicated themselves to creating that discursive infrastructure of nationhood only after independence was won’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Unstable state and federal governments and acute conflict, not undisputed, legitimate translocal polities, were the norm. ‘Participatory and republican processes’, including popular elections of officials, galvanized the protracted initial phase of nation-building.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ So did war. The role of the army and the function of war has assumed greater significance in recent historiography as a ‘creator of identities’, for it was the army that could create a stable and unified base for central authority. It assumed the ‘place of king in the symbolic economy of the new state, a counterweight to the disaggregative tendencies which existed’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

The recognition of the multiplicity of possible polities and the contested nature of sovereignty has prompted enhanced interest in the alternative trajectories besides those which, in the very long run, resulted in the unitary nation-state. The competing models of political organization were more than ‘necessary and rather unsatisfactory way-stations on the road that led to unitary statehood’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Just as early modern Europe was ‘one of the composite states, coexisting with a myriad of smaller territorial and jurisdictional units jealously guarding their independent status’,Footnote ¹⁶⁰ historians now perceive that the Spanish transatlantic monarchy operated along similar lines well into the nineteenth century. The problem, it is suggested, was not to ‘give state form to a supposedly pre-existing nation’, but rather the ‘very organization of the sovereign states’ coming into existence.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Each part of the monarchy ‘conceived of the crisis as its own’ because each considered itself, following abdication, the ‘depository of sovereignty’. This conviction provoked simultaneous, unconnected debates across the empire, resulting in myriad irreconcilable conclusions.Footnote ¹⁶² The dichotomy of independent nation-state/colony, it is argued, obscured the variety of ‘sovereignties’, alternative forms of political organization, and entangled sub-national identities which flourished before the triumph of the unitary nation-state.Footnote ¹⁶³ The effort to replace empire with ‘something else gave rise to the simultaneous advent of patriotic localisms and centralisms … no stable or hegemonic model took root’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

While the nation-state should not be reified or perceived as the final stage of a historical teleology, one major caveat must be borne in mind: the large nation-state with a strong central government was conceived by certain revolutionary leaders, notably Bolívar, as an antidote to both the instability wrought by experiments with federalism and the decentralized, highly personalized power wielded by the caudillos who resisted the institutionalization of authority. As early as 1813, for example, Gran Colombia, encompassing several colonial political jurisdictions, was presented explicitly as an ‘alternative to the anarchy of caudillo rule’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ It was this feared prospect that was realized as post-independence Spanish America degenerated into a ‘disastrous combination of local autocracy with little central domination; a continent of repressive islands with weak central domination’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

This insight notwithstanding, these localisms are the subject of intense scholarly interest, in part because they facilitate the study of previously neglected historical actors. While scholarship on Spanish American independence has been criticized for its emphasis on ‘macro, structural and elite-centered interpretations’,Footnote ¹⁶⁷ there is now a growing consensus that it involved a broad cross-section of society in political debate and these previously neglected groups are now considered to have formed an unheralded and integral part of the story. Creole patriots were complemented, in Mexico, by village revolts, guided by millenarian ideologies, that were extremely radical at their base and only occasionally linked to elite movements.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ In New Granada, debates about political representation, sovereignty, and citizenship flourished and a ‘patriotic rhetoric incorporated racial conflicts within a larger republican discourse that sharply distinguished between an archaic, despotic and oppressive Spanish past and a new republican future of freedom, equality and justice’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

If the formation of the nation-state and national identity remain mired in controversy, other new directions are less contentious. Perhaps the most innovative of these new scholarly approaches to the end of the Spanish empire privileges the international and transnational dimensions of the dissolution and recomposition of the Spanish Atlantic world. This new approach takes two, normally related forms: the first situates Spanish America in comparative perspective, examining it alongside other independence movements, particularly those of Brazil and the United States;Footnote ¹⁷⁰ the second re-assesses international involvement in, and attitudes toward, Spanish America in this period. It examines Spanish American independence's reverberation in European intellectual debates, geopolitical calculations and stock exchanges, viewing it as an episode of ‘interconnected or “entangled” history’ of multiple colliding, concentric, or sometimes intertwined Atlantic worlds.Footnote ¹⁷¹

These studies, then, breathe new life into an already robust corpus of work treating nascent Latin America's relations with the wider world. The main themes include: foreign enlistment, diplomatic recognition, ‘informal’ empire, economic dependence and underdevelopment, and recurrent debt crises.Footnote ¹⁷² But this scholarship poses new questions, applies new methods, and challenges long-held assumptions. One remarkable monograph, for example, contends that ‘collective identity formation in Latin America took place against an ever-present background of transnational movements, migrations, and networks’ and that the involvement of foreigners in nascent polities was ‘as often based upon adventure, culture and kinship as [it was] upon commerce or threats of military force’.Footnote ¹⁷³ Even the role of foreign commercial and military factors, though, has been reconsidered in innovative and suggestive ways.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ While more research must be pursued, the four new directions surveyed here suggest that the study of Latin American independence is enjoying a renaissance.

V

There remains a lively debate concerning whether Spanish American independence really represented a break from the colonial past and constituted a ‘revolution’ in the strict sense.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Octavio Paz observed that liberal and democratic ideologies served merely to ‘adorn the vestiges of the colonial system’ with ornaments of ‘modernity’ without producing significant socio-economic change.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ For the vast majority of the population, independence offered only the illusion of change.

Many of the nascent republics ‘dragged the detritus of colonial attitudes, habits and institutions’ into the post-Independence era.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Separation from Spain did not automatically lead to the dismantlement of colonial-era restrictions, including those that stifled international commerce. In Peru, from 1820 until 1850, for instance, ‘free traders were few, far between, foreign, feeble and factionalised’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Other institutions and attitudes persisted or were resurrected soon after their initial demise. Indian tribute, for example, whose abolition was declared in the Cádiz constitution of 1812, was reimposed in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia during the 1820s.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ In Nicaragua, Indian control over land was eliminated by the late 1850s and half of the land was sold at public auction in the following decade, paving the way for the giant coffee fincas of the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Furthermore, the partition and redistribution of manorial estates, feudal-like servitude, and land redistribution only came in the mid-twentieth century. For much of the nineteenth century, in many places, the ‘hierarchical, discontinuous, internal boundaries of ethnic caste, colour, class, gender, and corporation’ persisted.Footnote ¹⁸¹ For example, African slavery endured and castas faced legal and social restrictions in education, government participation, and taxation well into the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸² But not only caste, but class and urban–rural disparities were also dramatic. In late nineteenth-century Uruguay, to take but one of many cases, a mere 5 per cent of the population was able to cast ballots and, in the countryside, a paltry 1 per cent enjoyed citizenship rights.Footnote ¹⁸³ The grandiose promises of independence were only imperfectly realized.

What happened to the peninsula after the dissolution of the transatlantic monarchy? It formerly was accepted that nineteenth-century Spain was economically backward and that this plight was attributable chiefly to the forfeiture of its captive American markets, easy access to precious metals, and sole control over valuable export commodities. This problem was compounded by its abrupt entry into a European economy in which it proved uncompetitive.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ This view was attacked in the 1980s and 1990s. Critics contended that the loss of Spanish America produced only a modest negative impact on the Spanish economy between 1820 and 1914. Furthermore, imperial contraction was, in the long run, salubrious for it compelled Spain's adaptation to new, competitive circumstances and, ultimately, increased overall production and productivity, albeit at a slower rate than the rest of Western Europe.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

This revision was challenged, in turn, as historians recognized the cultural, political, and economic utility of colonies in nineteenth-century Spain. Capitulation at Ayacucho did not vanquish the long-indulged imperial imagination, though diplomatic recognition was bestowed grudgingly following Isabel II's accession in 1834.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ While Spain might sporadically intervene militarily in post-independent American affairs,Footnote ¹⁸⁷ its chief response to defeat was the consolidation, reorganization, and reconcentration of its commercial, agricultural, and military interests in the remaining overseas dominions, España Ultramarina. Composed of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and, after 1865, Santo Domingo, each was considered an integral part of the Spanish state and nation.

Far from a ‘feeble relic of its former greatness’, recent work has shed light on the vigorous renewal of the colonial project in the 1830s and has suggested the resilience of the peninsula's bonds with España Ultramarina. Though Spain began its liberal age shorn of most of its colonies and deprived of exclusive access to the precious metals of Peru, Mexico, and New Granada, it preserved its monopoly in Cuba and Puerto Rico as a reserve for its less competitive exports. It also reaped the economic benefits of colonial commodities whose harvest required the superabundance of forced labour. By 1870, for example, the 370,000 slaves of Cuba harvested 40 per cent of the world's sugarcane. Cuba remained the peninsula's third largest export market, behind Britain and France, throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ So important was Cuba to Spain's economy and to its sense of national prestige that Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas, in 1897, just months before his assassination, would assert that it was ‘Spain's Alsace-Lorraine’.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

Accompanying the reliance on the Cuban economy, however, was the flagrant exclusion of colonials from representative government, a subordinate status symbolized by the expulsion of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Filipino deputies from the Cortes in 1837 and the creation, enshrined in the constitutions of 1837 and 1845, of ‘exceptional rule’ in the colonies until ‘special laws’ could be drafted. Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Though Spain would forfeit its Caribbean possessions and the Philippines to the voracious United States at the end of the century, its imperial ambitions were not yet extinguished. It would cling to Spanish Guinea (now Equatorial Guinea) until 1968 and remain ensconced in parts of Morocco, including Western Sahara, until 1973. Even today, Spain's retention of Ceuta and Melilla draws protests from the governments of North African countries.

Another emerging field of enquiry concerns how the transition from the transatlantic Spanish monarchy was remembered, represented, and moulded into a ‘useable’ past in the nineteenth century in both Spain and in Latin America. Recent research suggests that the indigenous, pre-Conquest past, ubiquitous as a symbol of freedom, heroism, liberty, and the illegitimacy of Spanish rule during the revolutionary period,Footnote ¹⁹¹ lost its lustre and political utility in independence's aftermath. As the new political regimes consolidated control and became entrenched, the creole patriot's temptation to regard himself as a ‘son of Montezuma’ or ‘avenger of Atahualpa’ diminished whereas figures and imagery drawn from the late colonial and revolutionary epochs were recollected and belatedly endowed with heroic status as part of the elite's exaltation of a patria criolla.Footnote ¹⁹² In Argentina, for example, San Martín has figured in 44 per cent of all stamps depicting political figures.Footnote ¹⁹³

But whereas the ‘precursors’ were deified, historians in the early nationalist period recognized that the colonial experience was ‘precisely what republics had to transcend’. Colonialism remained ‘something against which a new order had to be built’.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Similarly, little nostalgia was expressed for the municipality, the mitochondria of local identity production, whose institutional shell had sheltered the incipient independence movements. In the nineteenth century, liberal regimes suppressed elected local governments in favour of appointed governors and mayors. Elected local government would not reappear, in many cases, until the final decade of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

If in Latin America, the Spanish legacy was deemed an obstacle to overcome, in peninsular Spain the now-diminished empire became a much venerated achievement. A normally fractious political and intellectual life achieved rare unanimity when the imperial past was invoked.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Generally, it was held that inclusiveness and assimilation were unique features of Spanish colonialism and that, whether through miscegenation or diffusion of ‘civilization’, conquered peoples had been incorporated into the Spanish nation: ‘apparent conflicts created through war, slavery, despotic rule and racial heterogeneity were harmonized into a coherent whole by language, religion, laws and racial mixture’.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ This view persisted into the early twentieth century. Ortega y Gasset, to cite but one cultural luminary, would describe colonialism, with the notable exception of the duplicity and carnage that marred the initial conquest, as ‘the only true, substantial, great [historical] deed that Spain [had] achieved’.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Imperial narratives never were ‘simply an academic matter’, but rather constituted a ‘central chapter in the process of constructing Spanish nationalism’.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ It is the ‘imperial ideal's continuing validity’ after the loss of most of America, not its waning appeal, that attracts the gaze of contemporary historians.Footnote ²⁰⁰

VI

In spite of two centuries of analysis and fierce debate, at least six aspects of the dissolution of the Spanish monarchy have not been explored fully by historians. The first understudied area concerns the complexity of the late colonial state: how can historians integrate meliorist reformers who urged imperial federation, crown-led efforts to coax colonial elites into public–private partnerships, and the surprising redistributive role of Spain's fiscal apparatus into the dominant historical narratives which stress metropolitan dereliction, recalcitrance, exploitation, and impending crisis?Footnote ²⁰¹ Will this revisionist understanding of the late colonial state vanquish a neo-‘black legend’ which attributes obstacles to capitalist development and liberal constitutionalism to Latin America's Iberian institutional heritage?Footnote ²⁰²

The second neglected topic is the impact of, and the reaction to, the Bonapartist state's attempted reforms. How were its strenuous efforts to abolish, for example, the vestiges of feudalism, the Inquisition, the Council of Castile, and internal customs barriers perceived and analysed in America, particularly by those creoles previously complicit with the enlightened reform of the last Bourbons? Did the new states adapt ‘reform from above’ as a model for their new purportedly liberal polities?Footnote ²⁰³ Notwithstanding the existence of several major studies concerning the peninsula, a re-examination of Don José I's impact in America is sorely needed.Footnote ²⁰⁴

The third major subject about which strikingly little is known concerns the early, ‘failed’ constitutional experiments, such as those of Chile (1810) and Cundinamarca (1811), ultimately abandoned or thwarted during the tumult of the revolutionary era. In differing ways, these constitutions proposed greater autonomy and extensive self-government within the context of a federal, limited monarchy composed of republican states.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Further research into such ‘paths not taken’ may yield new insights into early nineteenth-century political culture which will serve to vanquish old teleologies which continue to plague nationalist historiography.

While recent research has elucidated the role of municipalities, the fourth underexplored topic is the role of regionalism in formation of the nation-state. In particular, one ‘crucial and unfinished task’ concerns how regions jostled for pre-eminence in matters of economy, politics, culture, and identity.Footnote ²⁰⁶ The way in which regional dynamics both propelled and stunted the formation of national states deserves further research.

The fifth significant gap in the historiography relates to the cabecillas (rebel band leaders) and their followers who served in the gavillas (gangs) that infested much of the Spanish American countryside during wars of independence. Whereas Spanish guerrillas of the peninsular war have received major re-examination,Footnote ²⁰⁷ insurgent royal chiefs, let alone minor figures, remain under-researched. The study of these ubiquitous groups, whose impact on the wars of independence and the post-independence political alignments was crucial, is in its infancy.Footnote ²⁰⁸

The sixth lacuna concerns the pervasiveness and importance of catechisms, sermons, and ceremonies as ‘essential vehicles for the construction and diffusion of values and identities’ during the independence period, devices that were ‘employed by both royalists and insurgents’. Some outstanding pioneering work has been completed, but further detailed studies are needed.Footnote ²⁰⁹ In addition to these specific scholarly concerns, broader challenges remain. Among these are the tasks of adapting and improving generalizations about colonialism, the ‘age of revolution’, and post-independence Latin America using new, nuanced understandings bestowed by focused case studies.

A survey of recent research indicates that, like the bonds tying together the far-flung parts of the Atlantic monarchy in the late eighteenth century, older interpretations have proven their durability, elastic enough to absorb new insights and accommodate unfamiliar evidence. Like the eighteenth-century empire, however, there are cracks in the edifice. The new interpretations discussed here strongly suggest that an exciting transformation is underway, even if its final form is not yet discernible. The scores of colloquia, conferences, and workshops planned to coincide with the bicentenary of independence could expedite the historiographical revolution.

The lamentation, however, of one of the pioneers of the study of Spanish American independence should be recalled as future research proceeds: ‘we still await the synoptic view, a general synthesis which shall be full and adequate. Perhaps the time is not yet ripe. But may we not hope for an interim report?’Footnote ²¹⁰ The fragmented state of the field may preclude the ultimate synthesis. Indeed, the potential dangers of synecdoche, of overarching conclusions drawn from the experience of one or several of the fragments of the Spanish Atlantic monarchy, is real and present. But the ‘interim reports’, if the magisterial books surveyed in this article may be described with such understatement, are now available and they have enriched scholarly understanding immeasurably. The prospect of a grand synthesis, which would integrate the complex processes from Patagonia to California into a single, seamless narrative, has never appeared more plausible.