The eighteenth and early nineteenth century encompassed rapid political, social, and economic changes in the Atlantic world. The French Revolution and French expansionism under Napoleon Bonaparte accelerated the restructuring of the Hispanic world. Unfortunately, Spain had to navigate the challenging international period without the great enlightened monarch Carlos III (1759–1788), who had presided over a major intellectual transformation in the Spanish world. Ironically, for much of the period Spain and France cooperated to thwart British naval power in the Atlantic and its territorial ambitions in the Americas. The alliance devastated the Spanish economy and led to the defeat of the Spanish navy at Trafalgar.2 These disasters provoked public discontent, allowing anti-French factions in Spain to force the abdication of Carlos IV in March 1808. When Fernando VII became king, French troops were already on Spanish soil since his father had given Napoleon permission to cross Spain and occupy Portugal.

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 focuses on the oeuvre and actions of Virgilio Malvezzi, the Bolognese historian who had a prominent career in the service of Philip IV and the Count-Duke of Olivares. Following Malvezzi to the Low Countries and his small-scale diplomacy with French nobles conspiring against the King of France, it traces how in his letters he reflected on necessity and the moral legitimacy of political action. Through the ordering of information, he reported circumstances in such a way that they legitimized the application of unorthodox strategies such as dissimulation and pretence. As we can observe in the emergence of one of his published historical works from a newly discovered manuscript draft, the practice of ordering historical particulars and aphorism-like observations was also present in Malvezzi’s writing techniques. It shows how the method of ordering could also be at the base of a chronological narrative and how extenuating necessity could then be used in the context of an apologetic political history. The oeuvre and well-documented career of Virgilio Malvezzi thus provide a rare opportunity to address the limitations and opportunities of the continuity between theory and political practice in reason-of-state discourse.