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The Spanish Empire (HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS THE DISSOLUTION OF THE…

- - - - 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.
      - 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. There were muchtouted, 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.
    - - In Argentina and Cuba, for example, per capita GDP
        was 102 per cent and 112 per cent, respectively, of the United States’ level in 1800.12 Furthermore, the average value of exports from Spain to America was 400 per cent higher in 1796 than it had been in 1778.13 The Spanish monarchy, then, seemed poised to rejoin the first rank of European powers.
      - 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.10 Demographic growth was magnificent, aided in part by population expansion, migration inducement, and frontier settlement schemes sponsored by the crown
    - - general fragility
        
        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
        
        The political buoyancy and burgeoning prosperity, however, must not be overstated.
      - Spains economic problems
        
        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 ;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 Ca´diz 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 ’.
        
        This predicament was exacerbated by the Madrid treasury’s reliance on American revenues, which comprised a fifth of total receipts between 1784 and 1805. (j.H. Elliot) 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 1807.19 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.
        
        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 Tu´pac Amaru revolt in Peru and Comunero uprising
        in New Granada (modern Colombia) in the early 1780s.
        
        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. (Aline Helg)
        
        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.
      - Political turmoil
        
        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.
        
        Ferindand VII of Spain
        
        Ferdinand VII (Spanish: Fernando; 14 October 1784 – 29 September 1833) was twice King of Spain: in 1808 and again from 1813 to his death. He was known to his supporters as "the Desired" (el Deseado) and to his detractors as the "Felon King" (el Rey Felón). After being overthrown by Napoleon in 1808 he linked his monarchy to counter-revolution and reactionary policies that produced a deep rift in Spain between his forces on the right and liberals on the left. Back in power in 1814, he reestablished the absolutist monarchy and rejected the liberal constitution of 1812. He suppressed the liberal press 1814–33 and jailed many of its editors and writers. Under his rule, Spain lost nearly all of its American possessions, and the country entered into civil war on his death.
        His reputation among historians is very low. Historian Stanley Payne says:
        He proved in many ways the basest king in Spanish history. Cowardly, selfish, grasping, suspicious, and vengeful, [he] seemed almost incapable of any perception of the commonwealth. He thought only in terms of his power and security and was unmoved by the enormous sacrifices of Spanish people to retain their independence and preserve his throne.[1]
        
        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.
        
        After a couple of military defeats the junta central had to retreat to the Andalusian port of Cadiz now defended instead of boackaded 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
        
        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’.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, Simo´n Bolı´var was emboldened to ask a royalist general, Gabriel de Torres, ‘do you still imagine that decrepit and corrupt Spain could govern this modern world?
        
        The Liberator’s conclusion soon became generally accepted. Following the brief restoration of the constitutional monarchy, El trienio liberal (1820–3),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 de´cada ominosa, shorn of all but a few of its ultramarine limbs.27
  - - - 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.
      - 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.
    - - 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 (Jaime E. Rodrı´guez O)
        ’
      - 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 ’.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.
      - 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 (Jose´ Marı´a Portillo Valde´s)
    - - reasons for the Spanish decline: four overlapping themes
        
        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.
        
        first, the impact of the Bourbon reforms in both corroding the legitimacy of Spanish rule and pushing Americans to seek independence
      - Traditionally
        
        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.
        
        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 Boubon reforms
        
        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 ’.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’.
        
        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.
        
        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.
        
        three opinions about the Bourbon reforms
        
        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
        
        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 (J.R. Fischer) 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.
        
        triggering uprisings
        
        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 (Steve Stern)
        
        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 Tu´pac Amaru revolt, the
        largest and most influential of all uprisings, led by Jose´ Gabriel Condorcanqui, embodied… neo-Inca nationalism’ which was ‘used to demand equal rights ’ and ‘overthrow colonialism (Charles F. Walker)
        
        Creoles
        
        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 ’
        
        clashes between imperial cravings for centralization and colonial aspirations for greater autonomy to conduct their own affairs.
        
        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
        
        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.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
        
        One scholar argues that the collapse of peninsular authority and its dense patronage networks in 1808 ushered in an intra-elite ‘competition for power’. 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’.
        
        emergence of an identity
        
        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
        
        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
        
        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
        
        the enlightenments role
        
        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 Spanishnrule due to their anti-clerical and anti-absolutist tendencies (Simon Collier)
        
        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
        
        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.
        
        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 ’.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.
        
        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 Andre´s 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
        
        Enlightenment ideas, derived from France, catalysed Spain’s
        modernization and, subsequently, hastened the end of the old regime. (Herr)
        
        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.
        
        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: "The Crown’s promotion of blacks and mulattos in the militia (1778), its new slave codes (1784, 1789) and its granting of racial dispensations to nonwhites (1795) all seemed to signal that Spain was willing to neutralize creole power by constructing new alliances with
        previously excluded groups."
        
        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 (Lynch)
  - - - late colonial state
        
        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 ’.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.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.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
        
        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 (Jordana Dym and Christophe Belaubre)
        
        Far from muffled under a repressive Bourbon yoke, civil society and intellectual life, too, flourished.
        
        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.
      - rebellions
        
        Historians now conclude that they were neither precursor movements of independence nor movements which reflected the emergence of incipient nationhood (Hamnett) Instead, they ‘aimed at perpetuating past practices not at
        overthrowing them (Anthony McFarlane)
        
        Recent research into the Tu´pac 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 (David T. Garrett)
        
        When the unified monarchy was pulverized by
        the cumulative effects of war and revolution, this shared political culture continued to thrive (John Robertson)
        
        Enlightenment: As in Europe, it often was not subversive, but
        instead ‘developed within and in support of the established order, not outside and against it (T. C. W. Blanning)
        
        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
        
        In spite of these valuable insights, however, there is an emerging, persuasive consensus that enlightened ideas neither ‘detonated the independence movements ’114 nor ‘produced a conception of colonial liberation (John Lynch)
        
        The emerging consensus is that ‘ neither Sua´rez nor Rousseau ’ predominated. The distinctiveness of Spanish American political thought lies in its ‘pluralism and confusion
        
        role of the press: 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 1808.121 In most of South America, at least, a ‘transformation of information networks did not precede revolution
  - - - 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
      - 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 re´gimen
      - It also has endowed the ‘ trigger’ of the 1808 political
        cataclysm with greater explanatory power than was previously attributed to it.
    - - 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 Ca´diz ; 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.
      - the abdication
        
        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 Jose´ I, always has been deemed crucial
        
        It was the sudden acephelous condition’, it was observed recently, ‘that explains the cataclysmic character of the crisis of the Spanish monarchy.’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.
        
        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
        
        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 ’.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
        
        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.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
        
        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
        
        Recent scholarship demonstrates a robust demand for autonomy, but not independence.137 This liminality, which complicates linear narratives of alienation, identity formation, and the embrace of ‘enlightened values ’, is a crucial topic for future research
        
        liberalism vs absolutism
        
        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.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 Ca´diz, and the revolution made in Spain, were the work of the machinations of those who desired to separate the Americas from the metropolis.
        
        Cortes failure to reach consensus
        
        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
        
        In the most recent scholarship, the ideological contradictions, not simply administrative deficiencies, of the Ca´diz liberals – particularly their attempt to reconfigure the empire from a composite of multiple societies into a single political community while denying Americans equal political rights142 – is acknowledged as alienating Americans from Spain when separation was merely one of a number of possible paths.
        
        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
        
        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.
        
        Some scholars offer a more sympathetic explanation for the attitudes of the Ca´diz liberals: 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
        
        confusion with terminology
        
        This confusion suggests that national identity was forged during the independence struggle itself.
        
        The nation was the result, not the cause, of the independence
        movements
        
        Spanish American ‘ elites dedicated themselves to creating that
        discursive infrastructure of nationhood only after independence was won (Guerra)
        
        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.
        
        replace empire with ‘something else gave rise to the simultaneous advent of patriotic localisms and centralisms … no stable or hegemonic model took
        root
        
        the large nationstate with a strong central government was conceived by certain revolutionary leaders, notably Bolı´var, 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
  - - - 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
      - Many of the nascent republics ‘dragged the detritus of colonial attitudes, habits and institutions ’ into the post-Independence era.177 Separation from Spain did not automatically lead to the dismantlement of colonial-era restrictions, including those that stifled international commerce.
      - For much of the nineteenth century, in many places, the ‘ hierarchical, discontinuous, internal boundaries of ethnic caste, colour, class, gender, and corporation’ persisted
      - 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.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.
      - there is critique to this point: 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
      - While Spain might sporadically intervene militarily in
        post-independent American affairs,187 its chief response to defeat was the consolidation, reorganization, and reconcentration of its commercial, agricultural, and military interests in the remaining overseas dominions, Espan˜a 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
      - 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.188 So important was Cuba to Spain’s economy and to its sense of national prestige that Prime Minister Antonio Ca´novas, in 1897, just months before his assassination, would assert that it was ‘Spain’s Alsace-Lorraine’.
      - 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
      - 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.
      - Elected local government would not reappear, in many cases, until the final decade of the twentieth century
    - - 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
      - This view persisted into the early twentieth century
  - - - The first understudied area concerns the complexity of the late colonial state
      - The second neglected topic is the impact of, and the reaction to, the Bonapartist state’s attempted reforms.
      - 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.
      - While recent research has elucidated the role of municipalities, the fourth underexplored topic is the role of regionalism in formation of the nation-state
      - 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.
      - 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
    - - 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
- - - - Treaty of Utrecht
        
        The Treaty of Utrecht, which established the Peace of Utrecht, is a series of individual peace treaties, rather than a single document, signed by the belligerents in the War of the Spanish Succession, in the Dutch city of Utrecht in March and April 1713. The treaties between several European states, including Spain, Great Britain, France, Portugal, Savoy and the Dutch Republic, helped end the war.
      - Spain's economic and demographic recovery had begun slowly in the last decades of the Habsburg reign, as was evident from the growth of its trading convoys and the much more rapid growth of illicit trade during the period. (This growth was slower than the growth of illicit trade by northern rivals in the empire's markets.) Critically, this recovery was not then translated into institutional improvement because of the incompetence of the unfortunate last Habsburg. This legacy of neglect was reflected in the early years of Bourbon rule in which the military was ill-advisedly pitched into battle in the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–1720)
      - Under the Treaties of Utrecht (11 April 1713), the European powers decided what the fate of Spain would be, in terms of the continental balance of power. The French prince Philippe of Anjou, grandchild of Louis XIV of France, became the new Bourbon king Philip V. He retained the Spanish overseas empire but ceded the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Milan, and Sardinia to Austria; Sicily and parts of Milan to the Duchy of Savoy, and Gibraltar and Menorca to the Kingdom of Great Britain. Moreover, Philip V granted the British the exclusive right to slave trading in Spanish America for thirty years, the so-called asiento, as well as licensed voyages to ports in Spanish colonial dominions, openings, as Fernand Braudel remarked, for both licit and illicit smuggling.
    - - The Spanish Bourbons' broadest intentions were to break the entrenched power of the criollos (locally born colonials of European descent) in Spain's American colonies. They also sought to gain control of the Guarani Misiones (in modern Paraguay, then virtually independent under Jesuit priests. The Jesuits were expelled from Spanish America in 1767. The established consulados of Mexico City and Lima were firmly controlled by criollos, so a new consulado was set up at Veracruz.
      - Immediately, Philip's government set up a ministry of the Navy and the Indies (1714) and created first a Honduras Company (1714), a Caracas company, the Guipuzcoana Company (1728), and—the most successful one—a Havana Company (1740). In 1717–1718, the structures for governing the Indies, the Consejo de Indias and the Casa de Contratación, which governed investments in the cumbersome Spanish treasure fleets, were transferred from Seville to Cádiz. Cádiz became the one port for all Indies trading (see flota system). Individual sailings at regular intervals were slow to displace the old habit of armed convoys, but by the 1760s there were regular packet ships plying the Atlantic from Cádiz to Havana and Puerto Rico, and at longer intervals to the Río de la Plata, where an additional viceroyalty was created in 1776. The contraband trade that was the lifeblood of the Habsburg empire declined in proportion to registered shipping (a shipping registry having been established in 1735).
      - Two upheavals registered unease within Spanish America and at the same time demonstrated the renewed resiliency of the reformed system: the Tupac Amaru uprising in Peru in 1780 and the rebellion of the comuneros of New Granada, both in part reactions to tighter, more efficient control.