The Spanish community in Mexico City shared the metropolitan unease about the consequences of Bayonne. One of these men noted that as soon as Napoleon’s actions became known in America, ideas of independence emerged “which come so naturally to men” (463). Members of Spain’s political elite immediately grasped that following the example of the juntas that sprang up in the Peninsula after Ferdinand’s exit, colonial councils would be formed that would usher in independence. Although they don’t emphasize this point, their book Crisis in an Atlantic Empire: Spain and New Spain, 1808–1810 includes numerous examples that defy Rodríguez’s position and suggest that genuine American independence was feared or anticipated ever since the fateful sequence of events in Bayonne. Autonomy, or home rule, Jaime Rodríguez writes, “was a traditional concept, not a revolutionary one.” Even when the word independencia was used in New Spain, he adds, it meant “autonomy,” “self-government” or “independence from the French.” 3 Barbara and Stanley Stein beg to differ. Most scholars have meanwhile rejected this interpretation. Indeed, some of Venezuela’s creoles responsible for deposing the captain-general and installing a junta in Caracas later presented their outward commitment to the king-in-exile as a tactical move that was intended to preserve social peace. 2 The juntas’ professed allegiance to Ferdinand VII was merely a ploy that masked the new leaders’ desire to effect a complete break with the metropole. To this day, national celebrations in many countries revolve around the juntas’ establishment, as the autonomy thus achieved is seen as a prelude to revolution. The differentiation between the colonial era and the national period in Latin American history is no different, as shown in many of the works under review here.Īt what moment did the old imperial states actually begin to crumble and new polities emerge? The early nationalist historiographies of Spanish America identified the formation of juntas in the wake of Napoleon’s self-serving mediation as the first sign of life of the new countries. Every attempt at periodization is necessarily flawed, because it assumes that one epoch is neatly distinguishable from the previous one and the next. We may wonder whether the sudden change in sovereignty that marked the turning point signaled the beginning of an entirely new age. 1788–1808) to abdicate, changed the creoles’ outlook, inducing them to morph into Staatsnationen, which required the creation of new political entities ex nihilo. Napoleon’s 1808 intervention at Bayonne, where he forced both King Ferdinand VII (r. “And so long as these cultural nations remained part of a monarchy composed of a number of such nations under a single ruler, there clearly existed no call for political separateness.” 1 In other words, the transition to independence was not bound to happen. They constituted, he wrote, Kulturnationen (cultural nations) and not Staatsnationen (political nations). Keywords: Article has no keywords DOI: Īnthony Pagden recently borrowed two related German concepts to describe creole identities in Spanish America at the time that the independence movements got under way. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016. ISBN: 9781421414249.Įmpire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World.
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Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014. Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
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Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, c.
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. ISBN: 9780817317768.įrontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013. Edited by Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette. Interrupted Continuities: Transatlantic Relations during and after the Age of Revolutions (1775–1824) Book Review Essays Interrupted Continuities: Transatlantic Relations during and after the Age of Revolutions 1775–1824 Authors: AbstractĬonnections after Colonialism: Europe and Latin America in the 1820s.