The collapse of the Spanish Monarchy in 1808 led to a revolution that resulted in the dissolution of that world wide polity and the creation of new nation states, among them Spain itself. In the wake of the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, three broad movements emerged in the Spanish world, the struggle against the invaders, a great political revolution that sought to transform the Spanish Monarchy into a modern nation state with one of the most radical constitutions of the nineteenth century, and a fragmented insurgency in America that relied on force to secure local autonomy or home rule. These three over lapping processes influenced and altered one another in a variety of ways. None of them can be understood in isolation. Unfortunately, historians have largely ignored the revolutionary political process preferring to concentrate instead on Spain’s War of Independence
