The first half century of national independence was an unhappy time for the provinces formerly comprising the kingdom of Guatemala: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Tensions in the economic and social structures of the late colonial period led to bitter political struggles and civil war, and the high expectations expressed by Central American leaders at the beginning of the period were soon dashed on the hard rock of reality. Economic stagnation, class antagonism, political tranny and anarchy replaced the relative tranquillity and stability of the Hispanic era. Instead of a united and prosperous independent isthmian nation, a fragmented and feuding cluster of city states calling themselves ‘republics’ had emerged by 1870. Nevertheless, however disappointing the rate of economic and social change, some important and necessary steps had been taken in the transition from colonialism to modern capitalist dependency.

Historians of Latin America often pass rapidly over Central American independence with the suggestion that it came about merely as a natural consequence of Mexican independence. It is true that Central America was spared the bloody wars that characterized the struggles for independence in Mexico and Spanish South America. Central American Creoles did not seize control of the government following Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808. Peninsular rule continued in Guatemala City until 1821. And independence when it came was the result of an act of an assembly of notables who on 15 September 1821 accepted the fait accompli of Agustín de Iturbide's Plan of Iguala.

To develop valid general statements about Spanish American politics in the half century that followed independence is a formidable task. The countries were diverse in ethnic composition. Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala and (to a lesser degree) Mexico possessed large Indian populations that were only partially assimilated into the dominant Hispanic culture. Elsewhere the mestizo was more clearly predominant numerically and almost all of the population was culturally integrated into Hispanic society. These differences had implications for political behaviour. In those societies in which the lower class was largely composed of people culturally distinct from the Hispanic elite, that class was less likely to become actively involved in politics.

The countries also vary greatly geographically. Much of the population of Mexico, Guatemala and the Andean countries was locked into interior highlands, while in Venezuela, Chile and much of the Río de la Plata significant proportions of the population were located in coastal regions. This difference had important implications for the economies, and hence the politics, of these countries. The earlier onset of intensive trade relations with western Europe in the countries with coastal populations and resources enabled their governments, through customs collections, to develop firmer financial bases, and therefore somewhat greater stability, than was often the case in the landlocked countries.

Even here, however, there are not simply two patterns. In the 1830s and 1840s Chile's relative stability encompassed the entire area of the republic, while in the Plata region there were only pockets of order.

In the early 1850s Brazil's population numbered a little over seven and a half million. It was concentrated, as it always had been, along the eastern seaboard. Forty per cent lived in three south-eastern provinces – Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and São Paulo – and the capital city of Rio de Janeiro with its 180,000 residents. The north-east, the principal area of settlement in colonial times, still accounted for 44 per cent. Black and mulatto slaves probably numbered between two and two and a half million, that is, between a quarter and a third of the population. By 1872, at the time of the first national census, Brazil's total population had increased to ten million. The proportion in the north-east had declined to 40 per cent while the city of Rio had grown to 275,000. Twenty years after the end of the slave trade the number of slaves had fallen to one and a half million (15 per cent), and a larger proportion of the slave population was to be found in the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais. The rapid growth of coffee exports in the south-east, along with a relative decline of sugar, explains the regional shift in population from 1850 to 1870. Rio de Janeiro's commercial class prospered as the coffee trade linked planters to the international economy. Labour, however, whether slave or free, rural or urban, received little of the increased wealth.

Military and diplomatic necessity had made the vice-royalty of New Granada, the captaincy-general of Venezuela and the audiencia of Quito form one republic – the Republic of Gran Colombia – at independence. Its purpose was soon served, however, and its transience was apparent well before Bolívar's death in December 1830. The old imperial administrative divisions were not always clear, not always consistent in all branches of affairs, but they were supported by both common sense and local feeling. Distances were too great, provincial identity too strong, for government from Bogotá to last for long after final victory over the Spanish forces. There were no strong economic ties between the three provinces. Already by the end of the colonial period a sense of distinct identity was felt not only by the elite, but by a far wider section of opinion. As the early federalisms of the ‘Patria Boba’ era showed, these loyalties were more easily felt for a smaller compass than for that of the particular republic that was to emerge in 1830, but the larger entity did have some support in opinion, as well as in imperial tradition and in the geography of possible control. The common soldiers of the Venezuelan plains showed as early as 1816 what they thought of General Santander, calling this Bogotá-educated native of Cúcuta a ‘reinoso futudo’; General Santander reciprocated this distrust, and both as vice-president and later in opposition to Bolívar, many of his actions and utterances looked forward to a separate New Granada.

In the late eighteenth century the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the western third of the island of Hispaniola, was the most productive colony in the Antilles. It was also the one afflicted by the most complex economic and social problems. The foundation of Saint-Domingue's economy was sugar, although a certain amount of coffee, cotton and indigo was also produced. Production of sugar dates from the end of the seventeenth century after France had occupied some parts of the island claimed in its entirety by Spain. In the course of the eighteenth century the French planters went on to surpass the production of all the British West Indian colonies put together. By the end of the century, with production costs substantially lower than those of the British plantations, the French could undercut the British in the European sugar market. Their success became yet more marked after the independence of the British North American colonies which, once free of the British colonial monopoly, began to supply themselves with French West Indian products, particularly those of Saint-Domingue. It was precisely from 1783, when the War of American Independence drew to a close, that the French colony's already impressive rate of development accelerated, and the production of sugar reached levels never before attained.

To supply their labour needs, the planters of Saint-Domingue, predominantly white, were importing an average of 30,000 African slaves annually in the years that preceded the French Revolution. Initially the provision of black slaves for the sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue was in the hands of monopoly companies created by the French government during the second half of the seventeenth century.

The Spanish colony of Cuba in the mid-eighteenth century was a largely forested, half unmapped island. It was known both to Spaniards and their enemies among other European empires primarily as the hinterland to Havana. That famous port had been built in the 1560s in a natural harbour on the north of the island to act as a depot from whence the Spanish treasure fleet could pick up a large naval escort. The few intrepid travellers who penetrated into the interior would have observed that the fauna of Cuba was friendly: there were no snakes, few big reptiles and no large wild animals. The indigenous Indian population – Tainos or Ciboneys – was held to have been absorbed or had died out, though in the unfrequented East of the island a few Taino villages survived. Some ‘white’ Spanish (or criollo) families had some Indian blood – including the Havana grandees, the Recios de Oquendo family.

About half the Cuban population of 150,000 or so lived in the city of Havana, where malaria and yellow fever frequently raged. Most of the rest lived in a few other towns, such as Santiago de Cuba, the seat of an archbishop, Puerto Príncipe, which boasted a bishopric, Sancti Spiritus, Trinidad, Matanzas and Mariel. None of these reached 10,000 in population. Rising above these cities, or near them, were a number of sixteenth-century castles and churches. In Havana three fortresses – la Fuerza, el Morro and la Punta – had all been built to guard the port.

In the years between 1808 and 1825 a new relationship was established between the Spanish American economies and the world economy. In comparison with their much fuller incorporation into the expanding international economy which began around the middle of the century and became more pronounced from the 1870s, the changes which accompanied the achievement of political independence may well appear superficial and limited; nevertheless, they constitute a decisive turning-point in the relations between Spanish America and the rest of the world.

The old colonial commercial system had been breaking down since the end of the eighteenth century, but it was only after 1808 that Spain was finally eliminated as the commercial intermediary between Spanish America and the rest of Europe, especially Britain. The special circumstances prevailing both in Europe and the Atlantic economy as a whole at the time had important consequences for Spanish America's future commercial relations. The advance of the French armies into the Iberian peninsula, which triggered off the separation of the American colonies from Spain and Portugal, was intended to complete the closure of continental Europe to British trade. Increasingly isolated from its European markets, Britain was trying, with an urgency bordering on desperation, to replace them. Thus, the opportunity provided by the transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro to trade directly with Brazil for the first time was eagerly accepted. And as, following the overthrow of the Spanish crown in Madrid, the first political upheavals in Spanish America occurred, Rio de Janeiro became not only the entrepôt for an aggressive British commercial drive in Brazil itself but also in Spanish America, especially the Río de la Plata area and the Pacific coast of South America.

At a banquet in Valparaíso in 1852 the Argentine publicist Juan Bautista Alberdi proposed a toast to ‘the honourable exception in South America’. In one very important respect, the story of nineteenth century Chile was, it is true, a striking exception to the normal Spanish American pattern. Within fifteen years of independence Chilean politicians were constructing a system of constitutional government which was to prove remarkable (by European as well as Latin American standards) for its durability and adaptability. This successful consolidation of an effective national state excited the envious admiration of less fortunate Spanish American republics, torn and plagued as so many of them were by recurrent strife and caudillo rule. A good part of the explanation of Chile's unusual record undoubtedly lies in what can best be called the ‘manageability’ of the country at the time of independence, not least in terms of the basic factors of territory and population. The effective national territory of Chile in the 1820s was much smaller than it is today. Its distinctive slenderness of width – ‘a sword hanging from the west side of America’ – was for obvious orographical reasons no different; but lengthways no more than 700 miles or so separated the mining districts in the desert around Copiapó, at the northern limit of settlement (27°S), from the green and fertile lands along the Bío-Bío river in the south (37°S) – the area traditionally referred to as the Frontier, beyond which the Araucanian Indians stubbornly preserved their independent way of life.

Argentina became independent in the second decade of the nineteenth century with few of the assets considered essential in a Latin American state. It had minerals but no mines, land but little labour, commerce but few commodities. The economy of Buenos Aires emerged from its colonial past not as a primary producer but as a pure entrepôt. The merchants of Buenos Aires made their profits not by exporting the products of the country but by importing consumer goods for a market stretching from the Atlantic to the Andes, in exchange for precious metals which had been produced or earned in Potosí. The city's rural hinterland was little developed. At the time of independence pastoral products accounted for only 20 per cent of the total exports of Buenos Aires; the other 80 per cent was silver. Until about 1815–20 land exploitation continued to be a secondary activity, and cattle estates were few in number and small in size. As for agriculture, it was confined to a few farms on the outskirts of towns, producing barely enough for the urban market.

Independence altered this primitive economy. First, the merchants of Buenos Aires were squeezed out by foreigners. With their superior resources, their capital, shipping and contacts in Europe, the British took over the entrepreneurial role previously filled by Spaniards. Unable to compete with the newcomers, local businessmen sought outlets in land and cattle. Then the province of Buenos Aires, hitherto a poor neighbour of richer cattle areas, profited from the misfortunes of its rivals.