This chapter deals with the importance of the Cortes of Cádiz from several perspectives. In the first place, it considers its role in the history of Hispanic and Western liberalism. Secondly, it covers its Atlantic dimension, that is, the larger geographical and ideological context in which it took place. Thirdly, it delves into the role the Cortes played in the history of Spanish America, not only through the participation of the numerous Spanish American deputies that participated in the assembly during the four years during which it was in place, but also regarding its application and influence on several of the territories that had constituted the Spanish empire in America for almost three centuries. Considering all the aforementioned elements, the author gives a fairly complete idea of the importance of the Cortes de Cádiz in historical, political, and intellectual terms. Taken altogether, the chapter suggests that the last of the Atlantic revolutions (that is, the Peninsular liberal revolution that Cádiz represents, along with the Spanish American independence movements) has not received the historiographic attention it deserves; a situation that has changed in the last couple of decades.

This chapter focuses in the collapse of the Spanish Empire in continental America in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, focusing on the viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, which was replaced by four independent republics: Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The essay explains this outcome by integrating into a single narrative a political history that is quite often accounted for separately by each national historiography. It also stresses the revolutionary nature of this process: the creation of new states was only one of the novelties of the period, which witnessed major political, economic, and cultural changes. This was also a social revolution. Although the elites led the process, the decisive involvement of many peasants, rural laborers, artisans, urban plebeians, enslaved people, and members of the indigenous communities granted them an opportunity to pursue other goals. The chapter starts with a brief description of the region in late colonial times, and then analyses the imperial crisis in the beginning of the century, the coming of revolution and the war that ensued, the emergence of rival revolutionary projects, the crooked way into independence, and the fall of the revolutionary regimes, which opened a new period.

The aim of this chapter is to study the main political-military events of the struggle for independence in the Southern Cone, specifically in current Buenos Aires, Santiago and Lima. These three cities experienced both a profound political revolution, and a bloody civil war in the period 1808-1824. The fact that this revolution was also a military conflict in which a significant number of South Americans participated on both sides of the battlefield suggests that independence was not a struggle for national liberation. A second hypothesis proposes that independences were consummated in the early 1820s once the three fledgling countries declared their sovereignty not only in relation to Spain, but also to their neighbors. Those who once fought together against the Madrid authorities gradually distanced themselves from each other, which is why the “Americanist” projects (both of José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar) lost legitimacy as time went by. Understanding the loss of that legitimacy is key when analyzing the origins of the South American national states. Indeed, thinking about Argentina, Chile and Peru requires not taking their existence for granted.

This chapter offers an overview of the Luso-Brazilian World in the Age of Revolutions. It surveys key episodes culminating in the independence of Brazil, including the transfer of the Portuguese Court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal and its long-term political implications, the creation of a Reino Unido (United Kingdom) from 1815 and the resistance that this reconfiguration of the Portuguese empire provoked. The chapter then traces the impact of the 1820 liberal revolution in Portugal, which sought not only to establish a constitutional monarchy, but to return the seat of the monarchy to the Peninsula. This effort to return to the status quo ex ante was rejected in Brazil and precipitated independence. Far from a denouement, however, Portugal and Brazil continued to influence each other’s political evolution in the aftermath of formal empire.

Mexican independence was the result of a complex process initiated in 1808 due to a problem of dynastic legitimacy and ended in 1825 with the surrender of the last Spanish fortress in Veracruz. In 1810, armed uprisings began, led by hundreds of clergymen who rejected the authorities that were supposedly foisted on the colonies by orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. In the absence of an army capable of subduing the rebels, the government had to form it with armed civilians. Without a political and government program to define the course to be followed by the rebels, little by little the territories they controlled fell into the hands of the king’s defenders. In the territories affected by the war, governability was guaranteed through civic-military self-governments. Everything changed after 1820, with the reestablishment of the Constitution of Cadiz, when the militarized self-governments gave way to liberal governments. The military reacted against them a year later with the military pronunciamiento led by Agustín de Iturbide. He proposed an independence subordinated to the House of Bourbon. In the end, a republic was imposed as the form of government in Mexico.

This chapter synthesizes the history of the monarchy in Brazil from the Portuguese court’s 1807 exile to Rio de Janeiro to the end of the Regency in 1840. It addresses the European threats to the Portuguese monarchy, its successes in Brazil, and its adaptation to the Atlantic revolutionary era. It focuses on the actions of two monarchs, João VI and Pedro, João’s heir in both the old Portuguese kingdom and the new Brazilian one, which Pedro made independent and transformed into the Empire of Brazil, in 1822. It goes on to discuss Pedro I’s struggle (1822-1831) for domination against the Brazilian elite, and the results, through the Regency (1831-1840) following Pedro I’s abdication. Of particular significance in all of this are international and social issues bound up with the continued expansion of African slavery and its Atlantic trade. In both the diplomacy between João VI and his crucial English allies, the abolition of that trade loomed large. It was central, too, in the struggles between Pedro I and his parliamentary opposition. Indeed, slavery’s maintenance as foundational to the economy, the society, and those who dominated both, as well as the state, is made clear in analyzing the monarchy’s politics during 1822-1840. Slavery affected the monarchy’s survival, transformation, and the nature of party formation and ideology in the constitutional monarchy that emerged by 1840.

The death of Spain’s sickly and heirless King Carlos II in 1700 began the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), which brought the French House of Bourbon to the Spanish throne and initiated a series of wars that would shape much of Spain’s eighteenth century. Spanish-British conflict was at the center of the subsequent War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1749); and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). The desire to control Spanish American markets for consumer goods and for African slaves were at the center of these conflicts, and also shaped the eighteenth-century reform agenda known as the Bourbon reforms, which included measures designed to liberalize trade within the Spanish empire, streamline imperial administration, and transform indigenous Americans into productive workers and consumers of Spanish goods. The chapter also examines the early Age of Revolutions in Spanish America, surveying the indigenous rebellions in Peru that are often referred to as “the Túpac Amaru rebellion,” but were actually three separate, overlapping conflicts. It briefly examines Spain’s contributions to the American Revolutionary War, and concludes by discussing Spain’s involvement in and reaction to the Haitian Revolution.

The aim of the chapter is to show the profound semantic transformations undergone by four key political concepts - citizenship, constitution, federalism, and liberalism - in the Spanish Atlantic at a time of imperial revolutions such as the first decades of the nineteenth century. Naturally, the great controversies surrounding these concepts and their associates that took place in those immense territories can only be summarized at the cost of a stylization of the most important changes. To this end, this essay draws on the results of the collective research project known as Iberconceptos, in which we set out to compare the trajectories of some twenty basic concepts in the Iberian territories on both sides of the Atlantic. The work emphasizes the inevitably experimental nature of the decisive political changes that took place in those years, and highlights the point of view of the actors, who faced with the conceptual tools available the imperative need to find answers to the extremely serious constitutional challenge triggered by the sudden displacement of the monarch considered legitimate (Fernando VII) from the throne of Madrid. This exceptional situation led them to propose new legal-political concepts and to try out new institutional arrangements.

This chapter investigates the reverberations of the Oporto liberal revolution and Brazilian independence on the Portuguese colony of Angola in West Central Africa. Angola was the largest supplier of enslaved labor for recently independent Brazil, yet the ties between the two regions stretched well beyond the transatlantic slave trade. A cultural and social continuum connected the South Atlantic World, and the chapter argues that such ties acquired a political dimension in the wake of the Oporto revolution and Brazil’s secession from Portugal. To trace how Angola’s coastal elites responded to the end of Portuguese colonialism in Brazil, the chapter reconstructs the trajectory of a single individual, the Luanda born Domingos Pereira Diniz, who became the president of the Benguela Junta, a governmental body which endorsed a petition in which Benguela’s elite requested the right to become an overseas province of independent Brazil.

The revolutionary processes that led to the dissolution of the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas formed an entangled process. The states that emerged from these processes built their new national identities around the heroes and the deeds of the independence period from roughly 1760-1830. These hero myths are still important markers of identity today. The chapter explores the main interpretations of Spanish American independence, presents conflicting periodizations, and then discusses the events from the crisis of the empire, colonial reactions to the different phases of independence (1810-1814 and 1814-1830). Finally, it demonstrates that many revolutionary promises remained unfulfilled. Everywhere in the Spanish possessions the motivation for revolution was the problem of legitimacy arising from the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. The individual experiences of revolution, however, were very different and ranged from popular uprisings to elite-led exchanges of ruling oligarchies. The ethnic dimension, which overlapped with the social problem, was a unique feature of the Spanish American revolutions of independence. It contributed to boosting the ideas of freedom, equality and self-determination. Until 1830 and long after, this explosive force could not yet unfold. What remained was the promise of the revolution.

The history of Central America during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions poses a conundrum. Between 1808 and 1821, the kingdom of Guatemala failed to display any sustained or widespread opposition to the Spanish colonial order. This apparent lack of engagement with the Atlantic revolutionary experience suggests that the colony was an anomaly in an empire that witnessed multiple examples of revolutionary sentiment. However, like the majority of the Spanish Empire, the isthmus did not confront the political chaos produced by the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy with either equanimity or unanimity. Here, as elsewhere, peninsular authorities hunkered down in a defensive stance, fearing both foreign subversion and creole pretensions. Here, as elsewhere, local grievances flared into ill-defined uprisings and regional interests gained ground against the metropolitan and colonial capitals. Here, as elsewhere, opportunists manipulated the crisis to advance personal agendas, while idealists sought to sow the seeds of real revolution among the wider population. Yet, here, as elsewhere, a popular majority failed to mobilize against the established order and preferred to either keep faith with colonial institutions or hold out hope for the possibility of imperial reform until independence became the only viable option.

As elsewhere in the Atlantic World, the revolutionary processes in France and the French Antilles of the late eighteenth century had a tremendous impact in Iberian America. It was particularly intense in the Caribbean and the circum-Caribbean, but it could also be noticed in regions as distant as Chile and Brazil. Given the different geographical emplacements and the diverse socio-racial composition of the Iberian-American societies, that impact experienced great variations in time, nature, and scope. Bearing this in mind, this chapter studies the different echoes, entwinements and connections between Brazil and the Spanish-speaking territories with the French Atlantic during the revolutionary period and beyond. Particular attention is paid to the way those ties and links affected or influenced the local political ideas and sentiments, especially regarding the racial scope of citizenship and the debates on slavery.

Contrary to the long-standing historical view that describes Brazilian independence (1822) as a peaceful pact among elites dominated by Emperor Pedro I, this chapter examines popular participation in this conflictual process. Recent scholarship has shown how elite divisions opened space for popular political actors, as did conflicts and military mobilizations in several provinces. The public sphere expanded by Portuguese constitutionalism encompassed broad sectors of society. Slaves understood the Portuguese constitution as a liberating document and used military mobilizations to pursue their interests. Indians under Luso-Brazilian rule demanded rights used the new language of citizenship to demand relief from labor and militia service while semi-autonomous groups aligned themselves with the contending parties to defend their claims to land. Widespread worries about the “classes of color” indicate the diverse ways in which free people of color’s demands rights and inclusion in the new polity threatened the status quo. While these popular challenges were largely defeated by 1825, they profoundly shaped the independence process and left a long legacy.

This chapter offers a narrative and an analysis of the process of independence in Brazil between 1807 and 1831 from a general perspective, but with a still little-known focus: the influences this process received from Spanish America, which, during the same period, was also becoming independent. The narrative follows the flow of the most relevant political and social events in both realms, revealing how Spanish America as a whole and its many regions in particular were “read” in Brazil, and how the country created its political options, among other factors, from its continental neighborhood, then becoming independent from Portugal and starting its formation as a sovereign state and nation. Far from the traditional – and still current – idea of Brazil as an exception in the American context of the nineteenth century, the ways in which Brazil and Spanish America shared a scenario and historical unity are shown, which cannot be properly understood separately. In addition to that, the drawing of this common plot will be developed with a general description of the inverse movement, lesser known in the historiography, i.e., of how Brazilian independency impacted parts of Spanish America.