IN JULY 1795, the Council of the Indies in Madrid revised the charges that the General-Captain of Venezuela, Pedro Carbonell, made against Juan Bautista Olivares, a mixed-race pardo musician from Caracas who had been sent to Spain. Carbonell accused Olivares of disturbing the tranquil-lity of the region by reading seditious materials to others and writing texts in which he supposedly referred to revolutionary ideas. After analysing Carbonell's letters, the Council decided to follow the regular legal pro-cedure, appointing members of the Justice Chamber in Cádiz to conduct Olivares's trial.

The judges in Cádiz investigated Olivares's written correspondence and reading materials. They particularly inquired about his reading habits and preferences; they asked him if he had read, copied and circulated docu-ments on the French Revolution or about republicanism. He answered that he had not read any papers regarding this issue, except for ‘the Gaceta de Madrid and the testament of the King of France’. The judges were not surprised that Olivares had read about the French Revolution in the pop-ular Gaceta de Madrid, as many readers in Spain had learned about the Revolution through the pages of this peninsular official newspaper, widely read in different corners of the kingdom. A few months later, Olivares was released and able to return to Caracas; the judges in Cádiz could not con-firm that Olivares was in fact an insurgent planning to encourage insubor-dination in Venezuela.

Through the judicial investigation, Olivares showed that the sources of information he had consulted to learn about Atlantic politics were much the same sources that everyone in both Spain and Spanish America used and knew well. He also demonstrated that reading Spanish official news-papers was not a crime and not even an act of defiance towards colonial authority. However, local authorities in Venezuela felt threatened by Oli-vares's readings and knowledge and, as a result, officials fabricated all kinds of accusations to call the attention of imperial officials to a situation that was getting out of control: the increasing circulation of news about the French Revolution and the Saint-Domingue rebellions and the danger that the spread of this information represented for the tranquillity and peace of the Spanish possessions in America.

Focusing on a comparative study of diverse socio-political movements and rebellions that developed in the Caribbean coast of New Granada and Venezuela during the last decade of the eighteenth century, this chapter will analyze the complex and distinctive reverberations of Saint Domingue’s rebellion in the Spanish American mainland. The vast and exposed Caribbean coast of New Granada and Venezuela with its vibrant port cities and coastal towns allowed for the emergence of multicultural and multilingual hubs for Atlantic encounters and exchange. The open, varied, and dynamic configuration of port societies facilitated the flow of information about the Atlantic Revolutions, but especially about the Haitian Revolution. Of the three Atlantic Revolutions—the American, the French, and the Haitian—the Haitian one became the most tangible for the inhabitants of coastal Venezuela and New Granada, who used the impressions of the turbulent Caribbean insurgency as shared knowledge, an everyday reference point that was exploited by insurgents during negotiations with the colonial state and, at the same time, by those very elites and state agents to justify repression or, alternatively, to make concessions to “calm the spirits” of rebellion in the region.

This introductory chapter offers a synthetic approach to the current state of the field of study about Latin American independence and outlines the Companion’s contributions to that field. It does so by presenting a historical narrative of the process of independence to frame the Companion’s chapters and their specific thematic approaches to the intellectual, social, political, and economic changes brought about by the independence of Brazil and Spanish American in the nineteenth century.

This chapter analyzes the formation and expansion of social spaces for political debate and their impact on the formation of political identities as well as its entanglements with an increasing militarization of society. This chapter studies how the military quarters, the camps, and the campaign regiments transformed themselves into privileged spaces for public debate. During the process of Independence, the military forces engaged more in political debates, and members of these forces expressed their political opinions and affiliations in broadsides, manifestos, and printed proclaims. By bringing these often separated social and political spaces, we seek to analyze the impact and relevance that public opinion had in the processes of independence, paying particular attention to the formation of political identities, the emergence of a new political languages, as well as the diverse discursive strategies that leaders in different regions used to mobilize people militarily or to raise political awareness on soldiers. In this way, this chapter seeks to create original analytical connection between political knowledge and debate, and military mobilization in Latin America during the wars of independence.