Historical ruptures are most often understood as outward manifestations of underlying conflicts between irreconcilable forces, from antagonistic economic groups to rival technological paradigms, from contending ideologies to clashing identities. Spanish America's break with Spain is no exception. Benedict Anderson, for example, explains it as a result of the sense of “nation-ness” that Spanish American “creole communities” had developed by the dawn of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Michael Doyle argues that Spain's “surrender” of its empire to Napoleon in 1808 was a betrayal of Spanish America and broke the “links of legitimacy” between metropole and periphery.

But the forces underlying the rupture were not so stark, either in the consciousness of protagonists or in the events that flowed from their actions. Then, as now, political actors may not be embarked on a ship of fools, but they are still likely to lack an aerial view of their changing world. Early nineteenth century creoles, to be sure, made one sharp distinction: They distinguished between the Crown and Spaniards. But they remained faithful to the former even as they moved, in most cases hesitatingly, toward independence from the latter. Indeed, contrary to Doyle's claim, the Napoleonic crisis in Spain actually fortified the ties between creoles and the Crown.