New Countries. Capitalism, Revolutions, and Nations in The Americas, 1750-1870

new countries
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N ew
Countries
Capitalism, Revolutions, and Nations
in the Americ as, 1750–1870
john tutino, editor
Duke University Press Durham and London 2016

© 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Westchester Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tutino, John, [date] author.
Title: New countries : capitalism, revolutions, and nations in the Americas,
1750–1870 / John Tutino.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016022709 (print) | lccn 2016024859 (ebook)
isbn 9780822361145 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822361336 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822374305 (e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Industrial revolution—Europe. | Industrialization—
Latin America—History—19th century. | Industrialization—United States—
History—19th century. | Latin America—History—Autonomy and independence
movements. | Latin America—Foreign economic relations.
Classification: lcc hc240 .t826 2016 (print) | lcc hc240 (ebook)
ddc 330.97/004—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022709
To the
community of scholars
who worked together to build this new vision,
and to the families and communities
that sustain them.
contents
Acknowledgments—ix
Introduction: Revolutions, Nations,
and a New Industrial World—1
john tutino
part i. hemispheric challenges
1. The Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism—25

john tutino
2. The Cádiz Liberal Revolution

and Spanish American Independence—71
roberto breña
part ii. atlantic transformations
3. Union, Capitalism, and Slavery in

the “Rising Empire” of the United States—107
adam rothman
4. From Slave Colony to Black Nation:

Haiti’s Revolutionary Inversion—138
carolyn fick
5. Cuban Counterpoint: Colonialism

and Continuity in the Atlantic World—175
david sartorius
6. Atlantic Transformations and
Brazil’s Imperial Independence—201
kirsten schultz
part iii. spanish american inversions
7. Becoming Mexico: The Conflictive

Search for a North American Nation—233
alfredo Ávila and john tutino
8. The Republic of Guatemala:

Stitching Together a New Country—278
jordana dym
9. From One Patria, Two Nations in

the Andean Heartland—316
sarah c. chambers
10. Indigenous Independence in

Spanish South America—350
erick d. langer
Epilogue. Consolidating Divergence:

The Americas and the World a fter 1850—376
erick d. langer and john tutino
Contributors—387
Index—389
viii — Contents
ack nowl edgm ents
A project that aims to rethink the origins of New World nations in a context
of global transformations and that mobilizes diverse scholars over several years
creates g reat debts that can never be fully recognized and acknowledged. My
deepest debt, as stated in the dedication, is to the participant authors. In ad-
dition, Jonathan Brown joined us in our conversations at Georgetown and
lasa San Francisco, sharing an economic perspective and a view from Buenos
Aires that broadened our thinking. John McNeill was a key discussant at
Georgetown—and read so many versions of my introduction and chapter 1
that I worry that he deserves coauthor credit. He made me become clearer—
even when he does not share all my emphases.
Among our authors, David Sartorius began as a discussant at Georgetown
and the strength of his understanding led the group to decide we needed him
to write a chapter on Cuba. Jordana Dym argued that we needed to balance
my opening emphasis on economic change with a chapter on transatlantic His-
panic politics—leading to the recruitment of Roberto Breña to join our com-
munity and write chapter 2. Adam Rothman read my contributions from a U.S.
perspective, helping me see across borders and making me get clearer. Erick
Langer generated the key ideas that we developed together in the epilogue—
helping our volume look beyond 1870.
At Georgetown, the sponsorship and support of the Americas Initiative has
been crucial. It was founded and funded by Dean of College Jane McAuliffe,
who challenged us to look at key questions across borders and across the hemi
sphere. Dean Chet Gillis has kept us going through sometimes trying times.
Evan Chernack, a student of Latin America in the world, volunteered to help
finalize the manuscript. Most essentially, Kathy Gallagher has managed the ini-
tiative from its founding in 2006. She organized our gatherings and worked
through funding challenges that made this project possible from first imagining
to final publication. It is fitting that I write this on the same day that my wife
Jane and I take Kathy to dinner to lament and celebrate her retirement. The
Americas Initiative flourished for a decade thanks to her effective efforts and
constant cheer; it will not be the same without her—though we will find a way
to carry on.
Once again, Bill Nelson has produced maps with skill (and his good cheer)—
this time with the added challenge of working with multiple chapter authors.
His work makes our books better.
And it has been a pleasure to work again with Duke University Press. My
first inquiry about New Countries proved to be my last formal correspondence
with Valerie Milholland, on the eve of her retirement. She wisely passed the
project on to Gisela Fosado, who saw potential in the volume, found readers
that made us get better in many ways, and now leads us into production. I and
many of the chapter authors previously worked with Valerie and Duke; we are
pleased and honored to join Gisela as she keeps Duke’s innovative and critical
vision of the Americas alive.
x — Acknowledgments
Introduction
revolutions, nations, and

a new industrial world
John Tutino
From 1500 to 1800, the Americas w ere a key part of a world of empires and
global trades.1 In the 1780s, New Spain drove silver production to new heights,
concentrating wealth in Mexico City, by far the hemisphere’s leading center
of population and power. In the same decade, French Saint Domingue led the
Atlantic world in sugar production and the concentration of enslaved laborers.
Meanwhile, a fledgling United States was escaping British rule, building a re-
publican polity, and searching for commercial prosperity—its free people
enjoying solid well-being while a large enslaved minority saw bondage confirmed
in a new constitution.
By 1850, the United States, having just claimed in war vast territories long
tied to New Spain and then Mexico, was driving toward continental hege-
mony: southern cotton growers worked slave laborers to supply British mills
that ruled a new industrial world economy; New E ngland mills competed to
profit in that economy; and free settlers drove commercial farming across a vast
Mississippi basin into lands taken from displaced native peoples. At the same
time, Mexico, its once dynamic silver economy fallen in the face of war and
insurgency after 1810, faced endemic political conflicts while it searched for a
new economy in a shrunken territory. And Haiti, built by revolutionary slaves
in once rich Saint Domingue, consolidated a society of f amily cultivation and
limited exports—excluded from the new global industrial economy. All would
face political conflicts in the decades to come. But in the United States, Civil
War led to an expansive prosperity; for Mexico, Reform Wars led to growing
dependence on U.S. capital and markets; and in Haiti, internal conflicts came
with continuing poverty and commercial exclusion.
The dramatic changes that marked the emergence of the United States,
Mexico, and Haiti as nations only begin to illustrate the depth and complex-
ity of the larger and more diverse transformations that created new countries
across the Americas during the decades after 1770. After centuries in which Eu
ropean monarchs claimed sovereignty, diverse Christianities shaped the lives
of the powerful, the colonized, and the enslaved, and dynamic trades led by
Spanish American silver and Atlantic sugar and slavery made the hemisphere
central to global trades—everything seemed to change, creatively for some,
destructively for others.
During the century after 1750 people across the Americas fought and
negotiated, traded and labored to forge new polities and new economies—
thus new countries. In some regions, insurrectionary movements forced new
social relations: in Haiti, where revolutionary slaves ended slavery and took
the land; in core regions of Mexico, where insurgent communities took new
control of production; in diverse other places where indigenous peoples found
new autonomies as nations struggled to find political stability and commercial
prosperity. Elsewhere, old social relations endured: in expansions of slave labor
in Brazil, Cuba, and the U.S. South; in continuing political exclusions of many
native peoples across the hemisphere. Diverse p eoples came out of old empires
in unimagined ways. They built states with new boundaries, new citizenships,
new social relationships, and new ways of production.
While making new countries, the people of the Americas saw their his-
tories diverge in many ways. Many founded republics, yet Brazil became an
empire and Cuba remained a colony. Some former colonies joined together
to become United States; others fragmented into small nations, as in Central
America. And while forging such diversity, the new countries of the Americas
stayed tied to a rapidly changing world economy. They emerged during the rise
of a new industrial capitalism forged in E ngland after 1800 and soon replicated
2 — John Tutino
in the northeastern United States. The rest of the Americas adapted. Some
prospered while many struggled.
The aims and uncertainties of nation making are central concerns of every
national history.2 In this volume we analyze the emergence of nations (and
Cuba’s colonial persistence) across the hemisphere in the light of changing
global relationships. Too often, the conflicts that led to the new American nations
and the innovations that generated the British industrial revolution appear as
simultaneous but separate—the definition of historical coincidence. We see
them as simultaneous and inseparable. The Americ as played key roles in the
Atlantic conflicts that led to new nations and in the global transformation that
led to industrial capitalism. We explore how New World peoples both joined
in and adapted to key changes in the world economy after 1780, how they
engaged in forging liberal and republican polities, and how eight new coun-
tries navigated times of conflictive change: four coming out of Atlantic slave
colonies—the United States, Haiti, Cuba (a new country even as it remained a
colony), and Brazil; four built in Spanish American societies with indigenous
majorities—Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and Bolivia. We aim to understand how
new countries emerged and how they diverged while industrial capitalism rose
to shape the nineteenth-century world.
In Search of an Integrated History

Too often, all this has been studied separately. Yet the founding dynamism of
the early American silver and sugar economies, the late eighteenth-century
challenges of war and political innovation, the revolutionary destruction of key
colonies,3 and the strugg les to build nations in a changing global economy
demand integrated analysis if we are to understand the transformation of the
Americas after 1750—and how conflicts there contributed to the rise of British
and later U.S. industrial capitalism.4
It is a tall order, of course, to integrate the global and the local, the eco-
nomic and the political, along with social conflicts and cultural debates and
innovations—across a diverse hemisphere. There have been illuminating at-
tempts: In his classic study of The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826,
John Lynch linked hemispheric political processes and local conflicts in a work
that included most of the continent and the majority of its peoples—those
subject to Spanish sovereignty in 1800.5 Robin Blackburn soon followed with
the Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848, analyzing one pervasive conflict
central to the era of independence across the continent.6 Lester Langley took on
the entire hemisphere in his ambitious The Americas in the Age of Revolution,
Introduction — 3
1750–1850.7 Recently, in Empires of the Atlantic World, J. H. Elliott compared
key regions of Spanish and British America from their colonial origins through
independence,8 and Jeremy Adelman offered Sovereignty and Revolution in the
Iberian Atlantic, engaging Spanish and Portuguese South America from Carta-
gena to Buenos Aires.9 All make important contributions: Lynch by emphasizing
the local complexities of the Spanish American conflicts; Blackburn by focus-
ing us on the breadth and complexity of the problem of slavery; Langley by
demonstrating the necessity of a hemispheric analysis; Elliott by insisting on a
comparative vision set in a long historical perspective; Adelman by emphasizing
that within Spanish and Portuguese domains imperial breakdown preceded
the contested emergence of national goals and states.
Still, all remain limited: Lynch brought his regionally grounded and mostly
political vision only to Spanish America; Blackburn emphasized the demise
of slavery, downplaying its powerful expansions in nineteenth-century Brazil,
Cuba, and the United States; Langley understood Spanish American economic
systems and political processes but partially; Elliott compared the mainland
colonies of Spanish and British America—the former pivotal, the latter second-
ary to the eighteenth-century world—leaving key Caribbean plantation regions
aside; and Adelman remained in Atlantic South America, leaving others
to integrate the often-conflictive Caribbean, Andean, and Mexican–Central
American sequences. The search for an integrated vision of the transformation
the Americas from 1750 to 1870 remains a challenge.
In recent years, the challenge has become more complex. Three key histori-
cal advances have illuminated and complicated analysis of an era too long seen
either as an Age of Revolution or the Era of Independence: First, a turn to a
global view of history combined with a rethinking of the trajectory of the global
economy have combined to emphasize the centrality of Asia around 1500, the
importance of the Americas in global trades from the sixteenth c entury, and
the late rise of a European hegemony that only consolidated a fter 1800. Sec-
ond, new understandings of the Haitian Revolution and of insurgent roles in
Mexican independence have brought popular demands and the changes they
forced to the center of key conflicts in the age of revolutions. Third, a new ap-
preciation of the interplay of war, political conflict, and liberal innovation in
the Hispanic world a fter 1808 has brought Spain and its Americas to the center
of new analyses of the origins of regimes of popular sovereignty. Recognition
of each innovation underscores the importance and the difficulty of the larger
analytical challenge.
Through most of the twentieth century, economic history offered a clear
and too simple vision: the industrial capitalism that shaped the world a fter
4 — John Tutino
1800 was a natural, almost inevitable result of Anglo-European-Protestant cul-
ture and institutions. England, Western Europe, and the United States led—
and the world followed. Then, in the context of the shift to globalization in
the 1990s, new studies challenged the presumptive reign of Anglo-European
primacy in global economic history. A series of studies, led by Kenneth Pomer-
anz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern
World Economy, have shown that China led the world economically around 1500
and that European industrial eminence came a fter 1770—precisely during the
decades of New World transformation.10 Then economists Ronald Findlay and
Kevin O’Rourke gave us Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy
in the Second Millennium, confirming the early dominance of China and India,
the late rise of industrial Europe—and the importance of New World silver in
linking and stimulating Asian and European economies a fter 1550. They, too,
confirm the late rise of Europe—and emphasize the importance of the Euro-
Atlantic wars of 1750–1830 in the rise of Anglo-American industrial hegemony.11
And now Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton details the rise of industrial capitalism
during the same pivotal decades as a transatlantic process tying a long develop-
ing “war capitalism” built on empire and slavery to a rising industrial system in
England, in the process transforming the world.12
Our analyses w ill suggest that to begin to grasp the radical reconstruction
of the world from 1750 to 1850, we must see the collapse of the silver capital-
ism that was grounded in Spanish America and integrated the Americas, Asia,
and Europe from 1550 to 1810.13 We must also recognized the challenges to and
persistence of the war capitalism of slave-based production and trades that con-
tinued to supply essential cotton and complementary sugar and coffee to in-
dustrializing Europe and North America past 1850. And we must see all that as
linked to the technological innovations and capital accumulations that drove
the industrial revolution beginning in western Britain.14
Meanwhile, scholars have also been rethinking the historical importance
and impact of popular revolutionary movements in Saint Domingue (as it
became Haiti) and New Spain (as it became Mexico). Carolyn Fick began the
process in The Making of Haiti, showing that armed ex-slaves forced not only
the abolition of slavery, but also the collapse of the plantation economy so piv-
otal to French participation in Atlantic trade and European power politics.15
In Avengers of the New World Laurent Dubois broadened and confirmed the
emphasis that adamant and armed former slaves ended Saint Domingue’s role
as the largest and most profitable producer of sugar and the greatest purchaser
of slaves in the Atlantic world.16 Meanwhile, I began to understand that the
silver economy of New Spain continued to soar at historic levels, stimulating
Introduction — 5
global trades (and funding wars) to 1810—when the Bajío, the leading New
World center of silver mining, textile manufacturing, and irrigated commer-
cial cultivation, exploded in a popular rising that lasted a decade. Insurgents
undermined silver production and turned a commercial economy to family
production (as did the slaves in Haiti).17 Now, in En el espejo haitiano, Luis
Fernando Granados has detailed how the popular power first forged in revolu-
tionary Haiti proliferated across diverse American regions to culminate in the
insurgencies that transformed the Bajío beginning in 1810.18
It is now clear that by 1804 Haitian revolutionaries had destroyed war capi-
talism in Saint Domingue and crippled France’s chances to join in the early
rise of industrial capitalism. The same revolution drove war capitalists working
slave laborers to expand sugar production in Cuba, sugar and coffee in Brazil, and
cotton cultivation across the U.S. South—the latter an essential component of
the industrial revolution. Soon a fter, beginning in 1810, Bajío revolutionaries
took down the silver capitalism that had long integrated global trades, bring-
ing China to crisis and opening the way for the rise of the industrialism so
celebrated for its British innovations—while so many try not to see its role in
expanding slavery. On a global scale, silver capitalism and war capitalism rose
together from the sixteenth c entury to shape early global commercial capital-
ism. Then when silver capitalism collapsed and industrial capitalism r ose in the
early nineteenth c entury, the war capitalism grounded in slave labor persisted
to enable the transition. In the process, the economies of Spanish America saw
global importance give way to the marginalities later called underdevelopment.
Haitians grappled with new autonomies that locked them into poverty. Cuba
and Brazil found new prosperities in expanding slave production for industrial-
izing markets. And the United States mixed the expanded war capitalism of a
South built on slavery with the emerging industries of an industrial North and
a westward expansion of commercial cultivation into lands taken from natives
and Mexicans to become the New World hegemon of a new global industrial
capitalism.
While these fundamental socioeconomic conflicts and changes were under
way, political movements, conflicts, and revolutions moved the Americas and
the Atlantic world toward new polities. Empires of divine right faced chal-
lenges; nations proclaiming popular sovereignties rose to reshape the Amer
icas a fter 1810. A vast scholarship on Europe and the Americas between 1765
and 1830 has focused on these important developments.19 Yet too often, ana-
lysts imagine a derivative and imitative process in which political innovations
forged in Anglo-American domains and reenergized in French revolutionary
6 — John Tutino
worlds imposed themselves on Iberian Americans when they came late to na-
tion making.
Since the 1990s, scholars have reanalyzed the histories of independence in
Iberia and the Americas with new studies of the Hispanic political revolution
that led to the Cádiz Constitution of 1812. That charter aimed to hold Spain
and its Americas together in opposition to Napoleon’s 1808 invasion and
occupation of Spain. Mostly implemented in the Americas (most of Spain was
occupied by the French), it contributed in complex and conflictive ways to the
eventual rise of new republics. And while including some parallels with Anglo-
American and French developments, the Cádiz process had deep roots in His-
panic traditions of popular sovereignty as old as those in England and France.
The new scholarship about Ibero-American independence began with
François-Xavier Guerra’s Modernidades e independencias20 and culminated
in Roberto Breña’s El primer liberalismo español y los procesos de emancipación
de América, 1808–1824.21 The work came just in time to shape an explosion
of studies focused on the celebrations of independence in the bicentennials of
1810. A vision of Cádiz liberalism as pivotal to Spanish American independence
marked conferences often funded by national states implementing neoliberalism.
At times, war and trade, strongmen and insurgents faded from view. Still, the
scholarship on the rise of a deeply Hispanic liberalism within the conflicts that
led to Spanish American independence was mostly positive—and further fueled
the need to rethink the transformation of the Americas between 1750 and 1850.
From the sixteenth century, peoples across the Americas lived within Eu
ropean empires while tied to trades that spanned the globe. A fter 1760, they
joined in unprecedented political conflicts shaped by new visions of popular
sovereignty and electoral participation. Many broke with empires and built
new polities—while an unprecedented industrial concentration rose in Britain
and reshaped the world economy. Nation builders claimed different resources,
engaged distinct indigenous and colonial traditions, and found uncertain op-
portunities in a world facing rapid economic change. Economic, political, and
social outcomes diverged everywhere. How did broad hemispheric participa-
tion in shared economic and political challenges and opportunities lead to new
countries with diverging trajectories in a nineteenth-century world driven by
industrial capitalism? No one scholar is ready to take on that pivotal analytical
challenge.
To accelerate the conversation a group of scholars who had already written
deep studies of key regions and questions illuminating the era of independence
across the Americas met at Georgetown University u nder the auspices of the
Introduction — 7
Americas Initiative. We began with a challenge: without losing sight of the po
litical, social, and cultural dynamics of the nation making we knew so well,
how had each region experienced the changing economic dynamics of the era?
The chapters that follow emerged from a process of sharing, discussion, and
revision. We engage common questions, but we offer no single thesis to explain
the emergence of new countries across the Americas after 1750 and their diverse
roles in the nineteenth-century world.
Common themes do link our studies: Imperial legacies shaped conflicts
and debates everywhere. In Atlantic plantation colonies, slavery was always
a key question: would it end, persist, change, or expand? In highland Span-
ish America, the role of the indigenous republics that gave native majorities
land and limited self-rule, and held them in subordination, focused pivotal
debates. And of course, imperial rule itself was debated. That it ended almost
everywhere should not mask the enduring strength of groups that preferred
to stay in the empires: Tories in the United States fled to Canada; Mexico’s
1821 Plan de Iguala mobilized a coalition that led to independence by calling
Spanish king Fernando to Mexico; Brazil, home to Portuguese regent and then
king João from 1808 to 1821, became independent in 1822 by proclaiming his
heir, Prince Pedro, emperor of Brazil. And Cuba remained the “most loyal” of
Spain’s American colonies.
Old regimes did not fall without a fight; wars were everywhere. They
were international and internal, often at the same time. They w ere political and
social, with popular risings sometimes furthering political leaders’ agendas, some-
times limiting the fighters and resources available for state making. The U.S. war
for independence was an international war; its rebels w ere backed by France
and funded by Spain (with pesos from New Spain). The Wars of 1793 to 1815
set off by the French Revolution and Napoleonic expansion were inseparable
from the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. acquisition of Louisiana, the flight of
the Portuguese court to Brazil, the opening conflicts of the Spanish American
wars for Independence, and the consolidation of U.S. independence in the War
of 1812. Within the wars, popular insurgencies were most powerful in Haiti,
Spain, and New Spain—yet they played roles nearly everywhere.
New visions of republican government and liberal institutions were also
everywhere—discussed, debated, and fought about while variously defined.
Famously, the first New World war for independence was fought to end Brit-
ish rule and forge republican governance in the United States. The Haitian
Revolution began amid a search to bring constitutional order and universal
rights to a French monarchy facing bankruptcy while deeply dependent on its
hugely profitable and exploitative slave colony in Saint Domingue. And when
8 — John Tutino
Napoleon’s 1807–1808 invasion of Iberia sent the Portuguese court to Rio de
Janeiro and deposed the Spanish Bourbons, guerrilla conflicts across Spain and
debates about sovereignty there and in the Americ as energized a traditional
Spanish process of seeking sovereignty grounded in the pueblos (the towns).
The resulting Cortes of Cádiz wrote the liberal charter of 1812; it was endlessly
debated while it helped remake politics and governance in Spain, Portugal, and
their Americas.
International and political wars mixed with insurgencies, all laced with
movements for popular sovereignty in government, which stimulated demands
for popular rights—freedom from slavery, access to land, and more. And all
that combined in complex ways to promote a changing world economy—
sometimes to force, sometimes to facilitate, sometimes to limit adaptations
to an emerging industrial capitalism. The Haitian and Bajío revolutions took
down the two American engines of eighteenth-century global trades. Haitians
turned to family production and faced exclusion from the Atlantic economy;
Mexicans tried to forge a nation while searching for a new economy—newly
grounded in f amily production. Meanwhile, Cuba and Brazil took advantage
of the commercial withdrawal and then exclusion of Haiti to expand pro-
duction of coffee and sugar, importing more slaves to do the work. The United
States drove the planting of slave-grown cotton across an expanding South to
supply the rising industrial economy of England—and soon New England.
Meanwhile, Spanish Americans from Mexico through the Andes struggled to
make nations and find prosperity in a new world economy.
The common theme of our studies is divergence—on three different levels.
Most obvious is the divergence that created more than a dozen new American
nations out of lands long integrated into four European empires. And we must
not forget that while the United States claimed independence, Canada and the
British Caribbean did not; while slaves forced emancipation and independence
in Haiti, Guadalupe and Martinique remained French and returned to slavery.
While most of Spanish America broke away to become diverse nations, Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, which had delivered New World silver to
Asia, did not. And if all of Portuguese America became a Brazilian empire, it
separated from Angola and other regions of Portuguese Africa that sustained
the slave trade—while the trade carried on. National independence was nei-
ther universal nor inevitable. It led to diverse new nations while it left diverse
other regions within old empires that had to change. Thus Cuba could both
remain a colony and become a new country.
The second level of divergence was the rise of diversity—and sometimes of
powerful separatist movements—within emerging American nations. Examples
Introduction — 9
are legion. The historic integration of the Andean highland core under Inca
rule and Spanish colonialism broke apart to create Peru and Bolivia. The co-
lonial Kingdom of Guatemala that ranged from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
to the Isthmus of Panama took independence as one—and then in decades of
conflict broke into five nations and the Mexican state of Chiapas. The Guate-
mala that remained struggled to integrate three distinct social, cultural, and
economic regions. The fragmentation of Spanish America is legendary, furthered
by the economic challenges of the era. Brazil famously held together, but not
without strong forces for separation in the Northeast and South—strong at-
tempts suppressed by military force backed by British naval power. And it is
worth remembering that Texas’s secession from Mexico spurred the war that
took the vast Mexican North and its assertive indigenous peoples into the
United States, in time leading the United States to split into two nations in
1860—only reunited by a devastating and deadly Civil War.
While nations struggled to consolidate and often fragmented, many indig-
enous peoples found new independence. The Comanche r ose to become the
dominant power for decades in western North America.22 Once-colonized
communities found new autonomies across Spanish American highlands. Our
studies of the emergence of new countries detail how local innovation and en-
during differences emerged from shared historical challenges. Against dreams
of E Pluribus Unum, we found the opposite: from a hemisphere of four empires
came a proliferation of diverse countries marked by divergences—and often by
conflicts—within.
Their creation, with all their conflicts and diversities, contributed in funda-
mental ways to the third divergence we emphasize: the “great divergence” that
brought the demise of China and South Asia; the collapse of the global trade in
silver and new challenges to the sugar and slave economies that had long linked
Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia; and the rise of a new industrial capital-
ism in which production and power concentrated in northwestern Europe
and the northeastern United States, while the rest of the world was pressed to
supply staples—pivotally, cotton grown by slaves in the U.S. South—and to
buy manufactures—cotton cloth central among them. The creation of diverse
new countries across the Americas was a foundational part of the history of
the rise of the North Atlantic, Anglo-American axis that s haped the world in
the century after 1800. The new countries of the Americas were born within—
as both cause and consequence of—the great divergence that brought a new era
of global history.23
10 — John Tutino
Shared Challenges, Diverging Outcomes
To analyze the emergence of diverging new countries across the Americas, we
present ten studies. Part I offers two chapters on processes that impacted histo-
ries across the Americ as. In “The Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism”
I outline how the silver economies of Spanish America and the sugar and slave
economies of Atlantic plantation colonies became pivotal to global commerce
after 1550. Silver, centered in the Andes from 1550 to 1650 and then soaring in
New Spain from 1700 to 1810, made Spain’s Americ as essential to trades linking
China, India, the Islamic world, and Europe. Sugar and slavery, pioneered in the
Spanish Caribbean, consolidated between 1570 and 1640 in Brazil, and domi-
nating the British and French Caribbean after 1680 drove trades tying Europe
and Africa to the Americas. Eighteenth-century competition led to wars and
revolutions that began to destabilize the global economy around 1780. Revolu-
tions in Haiti and the Bajío saw popular forces destroy the leading engines of
New World economic dynamism a fter 1790. Meanwhile E ngland, while fight-
ing long wars to claim European, Atlantic, and global hegemony from France
and Spain, built mechanized industries that took off and forced every New
World region to adapt in the nineteenth c entury. Chapter 1 offers a framework
to understand how diverse regions of the Americas lived that complex global
economic transformation.
Amid the transformations driven by wars and revolutions, political actors
and ideologues worked to design new polities based on rising notions of popu
lar sovereignty and electoral participations. These designs and debates were
essential to the Thirteen Colonies’ break with British rule to become United
States; they were central to the French Revolution, which set the stage for the
Haitian Revolution—which focused on more fundamental liberations. Com-
ing out of European political debates since the seventeenth c entury and recent
decades of enlightenment thinking, republican projects in Britain, the United
States, and France are deeply studied and well recognized.24 Less recognized
and studied only recently are the parallel seventeenth-century roots of a His-
panic popular sovereignty that mixed with enlightenment innovations and
revolutionary adaptations to generate the world’s first self-defined liberalism in
Cádiz between 1810 and 1812—and to influence the debates of nation making
across Iberia, Latin America, and beyond.25
Because most readers are familiar with the rise of regimes of popular sov-
ereignty in Anglo-Atlantic and French domains (or can easily gain access to
key studies), yet few will know the pivotal role of Cádiz liberalism in Spain,
Portugal, and the Americas, we present Roberto Breña’s chapter 2, “The Cádiz
Liberal Revolution and Spanish American Independence.” It explores the deep
Introduction — 11
and complex historic roots of Hispanic liberalism, its consolidation amid the
struggle against Napoleon from 1808 to 1814, its limited role in Spain under
French occupation, its wide if uneven implementation across Spain’s Ameri
cas, its abrogation in 1814, and its return in 1820 in both Spain and its Amer
icas. Designed to create a constitutional monarchy to hold Spain’s empire
together, Cádiz liberalism fueled debates about sovereignty that generated
movements for regional autonomy. Many evolved into conflicts that led to na-
tional independence, in the process often limiting the sway of liberal ways as
men on h orseback took power. Breña’s study of Cádiz liberalism underlines its
transatlantic importance and contradictory reverberations to help frame our
analyses of Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, and the Andes.
Part II presents four chapters analyzing the emergence of new countries in
the slave societies of Atlantic America. We begin with Adam Rothman’s study
“Union, Capitalism, and Slavery in the ‘Rising Empire’ of the United States”
because the mainland British colonies from New England to Georgia w ere
the first to break colonial bonds, and b ecause after decades of expansion and
conflict culminating in the deadly war of 1860–1865, the United States held
together to become the New World country that adapted most profitably to the
world of industrial capitalism. Rothman brings a new hemispheric vision to
the intensely studied and still debated process that forged the United States.
The war for independence that created the United States was most innova-
tive in proclaiming popular sovereignty and opening electoral rights—rights
limited by expanding slavery and enduring racist exclusions. Emerging from
marginality in the first world economy, the United States latched onto Brit-
ish industrialization; southern states became key providers of cotton (raised
by slaves while Britons proclaimed opposition to slavery). During Napoleonic
wars (including the War of 1812 against Britain), northern states turned reluc-
tantly to industry. To gain land to expand cotton and slavery, from the 1820s
southerners colonized Mexican Texas. Texans seceded from Mexico in 1836,
helping provoke the war that took the lands from Texas to California in the
1840s. The challenge of balancing slave states and free states in regions taken
from Mexico led to the Civil War that kept the union together, ended slavery,
and opened a diverse continent to rapid agro-industrial expansion—while
deferring questions of justice for freed blacks, invaded Native Americans, and
expropriated Mexicans. The making of the United States both opened and cul-
minated hemispheric processes with global ramifications.
Carolyn Fick’s “From Slave Colony to Black Nation: Haiti’s Revolution-
ary Inversion” analyzes the second American society to break with imperial
rule. Haiti did not copy the United States, but in many ways inverted its tra-
12 — John Tutino
jectory. French Saint Domingue was the driving engine of the Atlantic sugar
and slave economy after 1770. Its expansion led to extreme polarizations; its
population included a huge majority of recently arrived African slaves, when in
1790 promises of popular sovereignty arrived from revolutionary Paris and set
off conflicts among the few p eople of European, mixed, and African ancestry
who were free and might claim rights proclaimed as universal and granted to
Frenchmen. Fick details how slaves took arms to control the outcomes of years
of debate and conflict—by 1804 ending slavery, French rule, and most planta-
tion production. She goes on to offer an essential new analysis of how early
national rulers committed to sustaining a state and military capable of surviv-
ing in a world of hostile powers faced a populace committed to household pro-
duction and staunch in refusing plantation labor. The result was a nation of
military rule, family self-sufficiency, and commercial poverty. Haitians rejected
slavery, enabled f amily autonomy, and faced deep and enduring difficulties in a
world shaped by rising industrial capitalism.
Cuba appears the antithesis of Haiti. David Sartorius’s “Cuban Counter-
point: Colonialism and Continuity in the Atlantic World” shows how Cuba
became new while remaining Spanish. It did not become a nation in our era of
transformation, yet became a new country. It turned to sugar and slavery in
the late eighteenth century. The Haitian Revolution opened new markets for
Cuban planters and new access to slaves, including some brought from Haiti by
fleeing planters. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, Spanish Cubans re-
mained loyal to the Cádiz liberal regime, gaining new rights and participations
(which Cádiz liberals carefully denied to people of African ancestry). When
mainland Spanish America turned to independence in the 1820s, Cuba held
loyal to Spain—a reenergized slave country in a transatlantic Spanish nation.
Sartorius shows that Cuban loyalty, strategic to planters’ defense of sugar and
slavery in a world of British antislavery, also came with deep engagements in
debates about liberal rights and monarchical legacies. Cubans, at least free
Cubans, joined the free peoples of the United States in prospering by expanding
slavery between 1800 and 1860. The contrasts with Haiti—and the similarities
with Brazil—are striking.
Brazil perhaps experienced the least conflict and the most seamless change
of all the regions that broke with colonial rule before 1825. Yet it too became
a new country, facing the conflicts and uncertainties of creating politics while
facing changing links to the world economy. In “Atlantic Transformations and
Brazil’s Imperial Independence” Kirsten Schultz explores how Portuguese colo-
nies that had proven the global possibilities of sugar and slavery in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries became leading producers of gold and diamonds
Introduction — 13
a fter 1700 (still relying on slave labor). Portuguese rule rested ever more on
Brazilian production linked to British markets—and through the eighteenth
century, Lisbon aimed to prosper by both limiting and taxing those links.
When revolution cut Haitian exports of sugar and coffee and imports of slaves,
sugar and slavery revived in Brazil’s Northeast, while coffee and slavery began
to remake Rio de Janeiro’s hinterland. Rising Brazilian trades sustained Portu-
gal and Britain in times of war after 1793. When Napoleon took Lisbon in 1807,
the British navy helped ferry the Portuguese monarchy to Rio, tightening ties
with England. With Napoleon gone in 1814, King João stayed in Rio—until
Lisbon liberals turned to the Cádiz model seeking new ways to restore their
transatlantic power. They began conflicts that drew João back to Portugal—
and to Brazil’s separation in 1822 as an empire under Prince Pedro, who would
rule as Pedro I. Regional separatist movements faced military forces funded
by strong export earnings and backed by British navies. Vast Portuguese
colonies—and claims to a larger Amazon—held together within a Brazilian
empire. By 1830 Brazil was an expanding continental country sustained by cof-
fee and slavery, which w ere tied to rising British industry. Like the U.S. republic
and still-colonial Cuba, imperial Brazil expanded slavery to prosper in the new
world of industrial capitalism.
The former colonies that expanded slave-made exports after 1800 found
commercial prosperity and relative political stability u ntil the 1860s. Then
all faced conflicts over slavery—none more destructive than the U.S. Civil
War. In contrast, Haitian slaves claimed liberty and land in revolution; from
1800 they faced continuous challenges of state making and exclusion from the
world economy—while former slaves and their families lived better for gen-
erations. The new countries made out of Atlantic slave colonies lived enduring
contradictions.
Part II looks at nation making in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Before Eu
ropeans came, these were regions of strong indigenous states sustained by
cultivating communities. A fter 1500 they w ere reshaped by disease and demo-
graphic collapse, Spanish rule and silver economies. The Andes led the mining
that drove global trades from 1550 to 1650; New Spain, including Mesoamerica
and regions north, dominated silver production after 1700. Across mainland
Spanish America, the era of independence brought the fall of the silver econo-
mies and difficult searches for new ways to prosper in the emerging world of
industrial capitalism, while elites sought new political systems and many com-
munities, indigenous and mixed, pursued local autonomies. Social, political,
and economic challenges and conflicts shaped diverse new countries across
14 — John Tutino
Spanish America—countries that struggled for decades to find stable polities
and prosperous places in the new industrial world economy.
In “Becoming Mexico: The Conflictive Search for a North American Na-
tion” Alfredo Ávila and I explore the most radical economic transformation
and one of the most complex and conflictive political transitions in Spain’s
Americas. New Spain remained economically dynamic and socially stable to
1810; strong silver production stimulated global trades and funded European
wars during the era of U.S. independence and the French and Haitian Revolu-
tions. Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain broke sovereignty across the empire,
setting off political conflicts in New Spain, leading to popular insurgency t here
in 1810. From 1812 to 1814, authorities implemented Cádiz liberalism’s partici-
patory openings aiming to c ounter insurgency; they offered local autonomy to
regional elites and indigenous republics, aiming to hold loyalty to Spain in the
fight against France. Scattered political insurgents refused the offer, fighting for
greater autonomy and even independence until 1815. Popular insurgents in the
key mining, manufacturing, and cultivating region of the Bajío remained in
arms to 1820; pacification came with a collapse of mining and a turn to f amily
production reminiscent of Haiti.
When Spain returned to liberalism the same year, men who had fought in-
surgents and independence for a decade led an alliance of the powerful calling
Fernando VII to New Spain (unsuccessfully) and then proclaiming a Mexican
monarchy in 1821. They imagined a continental empire reaching from Costa
Rica to Texas and California. But the collapse of the silver economy left the
imagined Mexico to search for both a polity (republican from 1824) and a new
economy. The result was a mix of creative and conflictive politics (often rooted
in Cádiz legacies), economic uncertainty, empty treasuries, political wars, and
social instability—combining to favor independence in the provinces, the
autonomy indigenous villages, and the prosperity of family cultivators. Texas
seceded in 1836 to preserve slavery for waves of Euro-American immigrants
growing cotton on rich coastal plains, aiming to profit by supplying British
industry. Decades of conflict culminated in the 1840s when the United States
invaded to take Mexico’s North, including California, where gold drew a west-
ward rush and gave new capital to a newly continental United States. Mexico
was left to search for a polity with shrunken economic potential; the United
States (after the Civil War) found unprecedented hemispheric hegemony.
The colonial Kingdom of Guatemala extended from highland Chiapas to
lowland Costa Rica. Far from centers of silver production, the Maya p eoples
of Chiapas and Guatemala held onto land and local autonomies in indigenous
Introduction — 15
republics; more mixed p eoples to the south mostly lived by ranching. The one
important eighteenth-century export was indigo, raised in Pacific lowlands
around San Salvador and sent to Atlantic markets by Guatemala City mer-
chants. As Jordana Dym details in “The Republic of Guatemala: Stitching To-
gether a New Country,” the kingdom enjoyed limited prosperity and general
stability to 1808. It engaged Napoleon’s incursion and the Cádiz experiment
with only a few conflicts, political and social. Mexico’s turn to an imperial in
dependence in 1821, which aimed to include the Kingdom of Guatemala and
sent an army to press the point, brought the break with Spain—and then from
Mexico in 1822.
Decades of political experiment followed. A Central American federation
was possible (minus Chiapas, which stayed in Mexico) while many regional
leaders pursued local interests. The indigo economy around San Salvador gave
way to cochineal, a red dye raised by ladino (mixed) growers in eastern Guate-
mala. By the 1840s Guatemala began to consolidate, combining Maya western
highlands, central valleys around the capital where merchants, landlords, and
professionals concentrated, and the ladino eastern uplands that produced the
nation’s only export. El Salvador separated—as did Honduras, Nicaragua, and
Costa Rica (while dreams of federation lived). Guatemala emerged from the
kingdom of the same name, a new and smaller country with a Maya majority
and great internal diversity, linked to industrial Britain by one valuable dye.
Only the late nineteenth-century rise of coffee in Pacific hills and bananas in
Atlantic lowlands built a Guatemalan state with the power to rule assertive
Maya communities.
The Spanish Andes led the first global silver economy, centered at Potosí
from 1550 to 1640, by mobilizing and commercializing indigenous ways of rule,
production, and work. Silver revived in limited ways in the eighteenth century,
while the Spanish regime took growing exactions in times of war and global
competition. Social conflict escalated from the 1740s, culminating in the great
risings led by Túpac Amaru and others in the 1780s. They were contained, yet
left those who ruled wary of indigenous rights and participations for decades
to come.
To explore independence and nation making in the Andes we offer two chap-
ters, one on political processes, one on indigenous assertions. In “From One
Patria, Two Nations in the Andean Heartland,” Sarah Chambers emphasizes
that new countries were neither inevitable nor always grounded in traditional
unities. As capital of the Inca empire, Cuzco had dominated and integrated
the highland regions that are now Peru and Bolivia. When Potosí became the
leading center of global silver production in the sixteenth c entury, Cuzco and
16 — John Tutino
the nearby highlands became key sources of supplies and labor. When Madrid
reformers kept Cuzco tied to Lima while assigning Potosí to a new viceroyalty
at Buenos Aires in 1776, the separation inhibited the response to the 1780s up-
risings that spanned the region. A fter pacification, while the formal split con-
tinued, the Andean heartland remained integrated in many ways.
The Napoleonic incursion and the Cádiz experiment set off local conflicts
in the Andes, but no adamant risings, political or social. The powerful preferred
stability—and feared another rising of the native majority. Yet the question
of independence could not be avoided. Amid the liberal revival in Spain, San
Martín led armies from Buenos Aires and Chile to liberate Lima in 1821;
Bolívar came in 1822 with forces from Caracas and Bogotá to lead battles that
finalized independence in Upper Peru in 1824—founding Bolivia. Chambers
shows how during that process and for decades after, the separation of Peru
and Bolivia was contested. A union of the heartland linking Cuzco and Po-
tosí held possible. The ultimate division of Peru, ruled by more Spanish Lima,
and Bolivia, with an indigenous majority in search of an economy, came out
of uncertain conflicts. Peru eventually found political stability in an economy
of wool and nitrate exports. Bolivia struggled to revive mining and lost the
chance of coastal export development in war with Chile. It remains a nation
with an indigenous majority searching for a role in the world.
Erick Langer’s concluding chapter, “Indigenous Independence in Spanish
South America,” focuses on native peoples in the Andes and nearby lowlands.
It explores an outcome also noted in Ávila and Tutino’s analysis of Mexico and
emphasized in recent studies of Comanche power in North America: while
empires fell and new countries struggled, native peoples often claimed new in
dependence in local rule, production, and trade—at times finding more effec-
tive independence than young nations facing industrial powers. Langer details
how natives across Andean highlands took new control of local production and
trade, and how p eople in eastern lowlands found a greater independence paral-
lel to the Comanche and o thers in the North American West. He shows how
they used that autonomy to their benefit for decades, until export economies
tied to industrial capitalism solidified national regimes a fter midcentury. Then,
native peoples faced rising threats to political autonomies and the lands essential
to their economic independence. National consolidations u nder export econo-
mies ended indigenous independence. Still, for generations after 1820, native
peoples across the Americas found relief from political powers and economic
impositions. Deep contradictions shaped decades of transforming divergence.
In an epilogue, Langer and I outline how the rise of export economies after
1860 brought the consolidation of politically oligarchic and commercially
Introduction — 17
liberal republics across Spanish America along with the decline of indigenous
independence there (and in the U.S. West)—while the longer flourishing At-
lantic export economies faced the conflicts (most intense in the United States
and Cuba) that ended slavery. New countries built in conflicts and contradic-
tions from 1750 to 1870 finally consolidated—retaining polarities within, di-
vergences across the hemisphere, and limited roles in the world of industrial
capitalism. Only the United States claimed power in that world—and it con-
centrated in the Northeast. Many in the South, Midwest, and West saw them-
selves as struggling in export economies ruled by an industrial-financial core in
a nation that was also a continental empire. The United States thus replicated
within its expanding boundaries the larger relationships (including indigenous
subordination and Spanish American dependence) that tied all of the Ameri
cas to the North Atlantic core of industrial capitalism after 1870.
Our histories link global processes, regional challenges, and local conflicts
to understand the hemispheric divergences that created new countries. Across
Atlantic America, we emphasize the close link between the expansion of export
economies grounded in slavery and early political stability—often seen as “suc-
cess” in the world of early nations. Brazil and the United States held together
to expand as continental nations; Cuba remained in the Spanish empire. All
expanded slavery to prosper as exporters tied to a rising industrial capitalism;
all later faced difficult conflicts to end slavery—and deal with racial inequities.
The contrast with Haiti is striking: there, armed slaves ended slavery and most
export production; they lived better for generations while their insistence on
farming for sustenance led to commercial “failure” and national poverty.
Across highland Spanish America, the collapse of once dynamic silver econ-
omies during the wars set off by Napoleon’s occupation of Spain and the op-
portunities of Cádiz liberalism led to republics that began in the 1820s. They
faced openings to new polities while struggling to find new economies. Politi
cal conflicts persisted while the dimensions of new nations were contested and
native peoples claimed new independence. Spanish Central America and the
Andes broke into nations searching for coherence and new roles in an indus-
trializing world. They consolidated after 1860, as they found export economies
sending staples to England, Europe, and the United States.
Mexico held together (after losing Central America), experimented with
industry in the 1830s, and then lost its North in war to an expanding United
States—a conflict that also sealed the fate of the Comanche empire. Both North
American nations faced civil wars in 1860s. It was only a fter Union victory held
the nation together and ended slavery that the United States rose to continen-
tal and later global industrial hegemony. In Mexico, liberals triumphed in the
18 — John Tutino
War of Reform and outlasted French occupation in the 1860s to rule a strug-
gling nation increasingly tied to U.S. expansion in a new industrial world.
The new countries of the Americas faced many challenges in the internal, na-
tional, and global divergences that came with their conflictive origins. Amid the
rise of popular sovereignty, politically, socially, and culturally complex nations
(and enduring colonies) became part in a new industrial world. Long marginal
mainland colonies of British North America become a hegemonic continental
nation. The once pivotal silver economies of Spanish America and sugar and
slave colonies of Atlantic America became uncertain and often contested na-
tions searching for new f utures. There are many histories in this history of new
countries.
Notes
1 The importance of sugar and slavery is the subject of a huge literature, best syn-
thesized in Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso,
1997). The earlier and larger role of the silver economies of Spanish America is em-
phasized in Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763
(New York: HarperCollins, 2003), and John Tutino, Making a New World:
Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011).
2 Spain’s war for independence against Napoleon and the importance of Cádiz liberal-
ism have received their due in studies beginning with François Xavier-Guerra, Mod
ernidades e independencies: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Mexico City:
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), and culminating in José Gregorio Cayuela
Fernández and José Ángel Gallego Palomares, La guerra de independencia: Historia
bélica—pueblo y nación en España, 1808–1814 (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad
de Salamanca, 2008), and Roberto Breña, El primer liberalismo español y los procesos
de emancipación de América, 1808–1824 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México,
2006).
3 The new history of the Haitian Revolution began with Carolyn Fick, The Making of
Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennes-
see Press, 1990), and culminated with Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World:
The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005).
4 This wave was ably synthesized in C. H. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World,
1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
5 John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 2nd ed. (New York:
Norton, 1986).
6 Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776–1848 (London: Verso,
1990).
7 Lester Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1996).
Introduction — 19
8 J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–
1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
9 Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2006).
10 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the
Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
11 Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World
Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2007).
12 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).
13 See Tutino, Making a New World, in the context of Man Huang Lin, China Upside
Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
14 On war capitalism and industrial capitalism, see Beckert, Empire of Cotton.
15 Fick, The Making of Haiti.
16 Dubois, Avengers of the New World.
17 On the Bajío and New Spain’s silver in the world economy, see Tutino, Making a
New World; on collapse after 1810, Tutino, “The Revolution in Mexican Indepen
dence: Insurgency and the Renegotiation of Property, Production, and Patriarchy
in the Bajío, 1800–1855,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78:3 (1998), 367–418.
18 Luis Fernando Granados, En el espejo haitiano: Los indios del Bajío y el colapso del
orden colonial en América Latina (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2016).
19 On the politics of U.S. independence, Gordon Wood, The Creation of the Ameri
can Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969),
remains the classic; on the transatlantic rise of popular sovereignty, see Edmund
Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and
America (New York: Norton, 1989); and on the inseparability of slavery and nation
making, see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of
Colonial V irginia (New York: Norton, 1975). On the French Revolution, see François
Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1810 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); on Haitian inter-
actions with revolutionary France, see Dubois, Avengers of the New World.
20 Guerra, Modernidades e independencies, built on the pioneering work of Nettie Lee
Benson, The Provincial Deputation in Mexico: Harbinger of Provincial Autonomy,
Independence, and Federalism (published in Spanish, 1955; reprint, Austin: Univer-
sity of Texas Press, 1992).
21 Breña, El primer liberalismo español; on the complex mix of war and insurgency
against Napoleón in Spain, see Cayuela Fernández and Gallego Palomares, La
guerra de independencia: Historia bélica.
22 Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2008), and John Tutino, “Globalizing the Comanche Empire,” History and Theory
52:1 (February 2013), 67–74.
23 To add another divergence to integrated global processes, if Europe and the Amer
icas forged nations at the foundations of industrial capitalism in order to spread
that capitalism, the European powers l ater forged a second generation of empires
20 — John Tutino
spanning the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. See Bayly, Birth of the Modern
World.
24 Again, see Morgan, Inventing the People, and Dubois, Avengers of the New World.
25 The last work of the great historian of Russia Richard Stites details the impact of
Cádiz liberalism from Spain to Naples, Greece, and Russia. See The Four Horse
men: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
Introduction — 21
part i
hemispheric
challenges
1
the Amer icas in the Rise of

Industrial Capitalism
John Tutino
In 1500, the Americas were home to powerful states concentrated in western

highlands, cultivating communities along Atlantic coasts and in eastern wood-
lands, and diverse hunting, gathering, and farming peoples in vast interiors. The
peoples of the hemisphere faced war and trade, production and migration—yet
lived in a world of their own. They w ere only connected to Europe, Africa, and
Asia after Iberians arrived in the 1490s, an accident of Europeans’ search for
new routes to trade with Asia. China produced silks and porcelains, South Asia
made printed cotton cloth, and Southeast Asia provided pepper, cinnamon,
and other spices—all coveted by European consumers. Asians sought little
made by Europeans; rather, they demanded payment in money, gold and silver,
for their fine manufactures and rare commodities. China and South Asia were
economic powers around 1500. Europe could charitably be called an emerging
region.1
Trade between Asia and Europe had a long history. Overland excursions
departed Krakow and other towns in Eastern Europe with silver to swap for
silks and other luxuries. Traders from Venice and Genoa sailed through the
Bosporus and across the Black Sea to meet overland caravans heading east.
Others landed in the eastern Mediterranean to deal with Muslim merchants
who moved money and goods across the Levant and on to South Asia and
China. The old trades w ere limited in two ways: Europe produced little gold
and limited silver, the latter mostly in Germanic lands; and land routes and sea
lanes required traders to deal with intermediaries aiming to profit and states
demanding revenue for protection. Still, trade flourished for centuries.
When fifteenth-century Portuguese mariners, often funded by Genoese
bankers, aimed to sail around Africa to trade directly with South Asia, their
goal was to enter established trades while limiting the involvement of mer-
chants and monarchs along the way. When Columbus, a Genoese mariner sail-
ing for Castile, headed west across the Atlantic, his goal was the same—however
poor his global geography. For a time, the Americ as became an obstacle in the
search for direct trade with Asia (while Columbus insisted he had already ar-
rived there). Soon enough, however, the hemisphere, long a world to itself, be-
came a key producer of commodities that accelerated trades that for the first
time were truly global. Spanish American gold and especially silver stimulated
trade everywhere. Meanwhile, the Atlantic Americ as produced rising quantities
of sugar, sending the sweet that was also a preservative and in time became a
staple to Europeans in exchange for growing numbers of enslaved Africans—
people who were made commodities of trade, drawing their continent ever
deeper into global circuits of profit and degradation.
The incorporation of the Americ as into four European empires—first Span-
ish and Portuguese, later British, and French—grounded the first world econ-
omy. The empires spread European ways of rule and promises of justice; they
promoted Christianity (with diverse emphases), and promised salvation to
those who embraced new truths. They also aimed to subordinate native Ameri-
can majorities—while the smallpox and other diseases that came as fellow trav-
elers from the Old World decimated indigenous numbers. Then, to replace the
dying and replenish laboring populations, Europeans turned to buying young
African men (and w omen too), setting them to work in pursuit of profit—
justifying their enslavement with racial and religious legitimations.
The taking of the Americ as into the European empires inserted the hemi
sphere in global trades—the founding moment of the world economy. In the
sixteenth century and long after, the pivotal exchange was Asian manufactures
for bullion—drawing Asian wares to Europe. The gold and silver that stimu-
26 — John Tutino
lated expanded trades came primarily from Spanish America. Most went to
Spain, passed through Western Europe and Mediterranean cities, often sent to
Muslim ports, and then on to South Asia and China—drawing Asian goods
in return flow. After 1570, an important second flow sailed from Acapulco to
Manila, where a Chinese merchant community assembled wares from across
Asia—Chinese silks and porcelains, Indian cottons, Island spices—for ship-
ment across the Pacific to Spain’s America, which thanks to booming silver
economies had means to buy them. After 1600, transpacific trade took up to a
third of American silver for the next c entury—evidence of a truly global com-
mercial economy. Meanwhile, sugar made by slaves sold out of Africa s haped
Brazil in the seventeenth c entury, the greater Caribbean in the eighteenth. Sil-
ver, sugar, and slaves made the Americas pivotal to a new world economy for
centuries—until everything changed around 1800.2
The Americas in the World Economy: The Challenge

A new and more global understanding of the economic history of the world
has emerged in recent decades. Through the twentieth century, the rise of
European—or, better, Western European and North American—hegemony
was presumed, and mostly explained by cultural characteristics and innovative
efforts within European domains in analyses ranging from Max Weber’s The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism3 to the works of Douglass North,
beginning with The Rise of the Western World (with Robert Paul Thomas)4
and culminating in Understanding the Process of Economic Change.5 The rise of
China in the 1990s opened scholars to new visions. Asia was rediscovered, and
the era of European hegemony was recognized as relatively brief—beginning
about 1800 and of uncertain longevity as the twenty-first century began. The
new understanding began with recognition of the long historic primacy of
Asia in Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient6 and Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great
Divergence.7 In different ways, they emphasized the economic dominance of
Asia in the sixteenth century and the late rise of Europe as the nineteenth
began. The new challenge focuses on explaining, not presuming, the rise of
Europe—a task begun by Pomeranz and continued by many, including Prasan-
nan Parthasarathi in his bluntly titled Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did
Not.8 The new vision gained powerful synthesis in Ronald Findlay and Kevin
O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the
Second Millennium.9
The Americas are everywhere in the new vision: the stimulus of New World
silver from the sixteenth century; the Atlantic economy of sugar, slavery, and
Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 27
more from the seventeenth. Pomeranz explains the rise of British hegemony
around 1800 by two factors: access to local coal for energy and to American
lands for raw materials and markets. Still, the place of the Americas in global
economic history comes late in Pomeranz and remains limited in most synthe-
ses. They focus on a shifting balance between China and Western Europe, with
the Islamic world and South Asia as essential participants and intermediaries.
The Americas appear often as suppliers of silver and sugar, but rarely as major
participants in the world economy—until the rise of the United States toward
industrial hegemony in the late nineteenth century.
Here, I sketch an emerging understanding of global economic history a fter
1500—pointing to ways that the Americas w ere pivotal participants. I then
turn to the two great economies tying the Americas to global production
and trade—silver; and sugar and slavery—and to the links integrating them.
With that foundation, I explore the ways that wars and shifting trades rooted in
global strategic-economic changes helped set off the conflicts that led to new
countries across the Americ as after 1760 and how t hose conflicts w
ere pivotal
to accelerating the global turn that consolidated the British-ruled industrial
capitalism that shaped the nineteenth century. I conclude by surveying the
very different opportunities and challenges faced by the emerging countries
of the Americas in the new industrial world. Brazil, Cuba, and the United
States prospered for decades supplying staples raised mostly by slaves; all
ended slavery after 1860—but only the United States found industrial power
in late nineteenth century. In contrast, the silver economies of Spanish Ame
rica collapsed as Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia became nations. They struggled for
decades. So did Haiti—where slave revolution led to withdrawal and then ex-
clusion from global trades—and Guatemala, which had never lived the stimu-
lus of silver and contributed only dyestuffs to the new economy of the early
nineteenth century.
The transformation of the global economy and the rise of new countries
across the Americas between 1750 and 1870 were inseparable processes. Yet
their integration is little understood, in good part because scholars of New
World nation-making focus insistently on internal (and sometimes transatlan-
tic) social and political developments while globally oriented analysts of eco-
nomic history attend minimally to the Americ as. This essay aims to deepen
understanding of—and expand conversations about—the integration of the
Americas in the world in a key era of global change.
28 — John Tutino
The Americas in the World Economy: An Emerging Vision
It is a truism that a global economy could only develop in the sixteenth century
when European empires began to incorporate the Americas into trade net-
works linking Europe, Africa, and Asia. Still, it is important to recognize the
importance of long-distance trade before 1500. For centuries, trade linked
Western Europe and East Asia, sometimes passing overland, sometimes taking
mostly water routes from the Middle East via South Asia to China. Luxuries
such as spices and silks generally traveled west, exchanged for silver or furs or
other primary goods. Those trades also touched Africa via the Indian Ocean
and across the Sahara. Luxury goods of high value to low weight ruled early
commerce, generating wealth for traders, revenue for rulers, and prestige for
rich consumers. Diff erent ports and centers of trade, diverse producers and con-
sumers, were favored or prejudiced over time. Throughout, Europe mostly
produced primary goods and bought luxuries; centers of innovative production
and trade moved around the Islamic world, South Asia, and China, while trade
linked diverse Eurasian societies.10
A second “world economy” integrated much of the Americas before 1500.
Dependence on archaeology has left knowledge of the hemisphere focused on
sites of power and symbols of rule and religion along with material products
from crops to pottery. We lack the travel and trade narratives that tell so much
of what we know about early Eurasian exchanges. Still, recent studies show that
during the first millennium (ce) trade linked diverse peoples from the high-
land basins of central Mexico ruled by the g reat city of Teotihuacan, through
Gulf lowlands where Olmecs had earlier ruled, highland Oaxaca led by Monte
Albán, to the Maya zones of Yucatán and Guatemala. Imperial centers rose and
fell—as in Eurasia—but trade persisted, as did war. War and trade s haped both
Eurasia and Mesoamerica through the first millennium.11
Commercial integration drove north from Mesoamerica in the second mil-
lennium. After the fall of Teotihuacan, Tula and its Toltec rulers consolidated
power in central Mexico, keeping trade alive with Mayas far to the south-
east while pressing northward. Centers of power and enclaves of cultivation
reached the upper Río Grande Valley (now greater New Mexico), linked by
trade and cultural exchange to central Mexico. Waterborne trade followed the
Gulf Coast and went up the Mississippi to bring Mesoamerican trade, goods,
and cultural contacts to Cahokia—a state emerging near the confluence of the
Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers. The spread of maize, Mesoamerica’s
great contribution to the Americas and the world, across North America to
coastal New England long before 1500 reveals very wide exchanges.12

While trades within Mesoamerica and linking that region to North Ame
rica are best known, there is evidence of ties to South America as well. Maize
became a major crop in Andean valleys in the first millennium; the Tarascan
regime of western Mesoamerica resisted Mexica (Aztec) expansion in the fif-
teenth century in part thanks to copper metallurgy gained from Andean con-
tacts.13 In the Andes, the Inca state remains famous for pressing power and
exchange outward from Cuzco, integrating regions now highland and coastal
Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia and reaching southern Columbia and northern
Chile and Argentina. Scholars insist that exchange was not trade inside the
Inca domain and that it operated through hierarchies of reciprocity organized
by local, regional, and imperial lords. Still, exchange was everywhere, tied to
military power and regime rule, and legitimated by claims of reciprocity (that
masked and perhaps limited inequities). Seen in its larger function, Inca ex-
change was not radically different from Eurasian trades, where military power
was always a factor, state sanction essential, and claims of mutual benefit constant.
The Inca perhaps took the fusion of regime and exchange to an extreme, but
the integration was far from unique.14
Before 1500—and long after—the Eurasian and American “world econo-
mies” were what Findlay and O’Rourke call polycentric. No single city, regime,
or region of power dominated. Places of rule might be pivots of trade; often
they w ere separate—as when inland capitals dealt with coastal ports of trade.
Over time, political regimes rose and fell; commercial nodes and trade routes
shifted too. Still, trade persisted, stimulating production of luxury goods, pre-
cious metals, and more; profiting merchants and funding regimes and their
militaries on land and sea. B ecause of high transport costs, long-distance trade
focused on goods of high value and low weight. Trade thus stimulated produc-
tion, generated wealth, and sustained powerful states; yet every center of power
and trade in the early world economies had to be supplied with food, cloth,
combustibles, and building materials by local and regional producers.
While trade promoted continuing exchanges and constant wars, the local
economies that supplied trades and sustained regimes varied widely. Produc-
tion might depend on small growers and artisans, large-scale producers, or a
mix; labor could be bound, drafted, or negotiated, paid well, poorly, or not at
all. Cities and ports might draw sustenance by trade, tributes, or taxes. Local
markets might be vibrant or limited. Concentrations of profit and power could
be great or limited; inequities and exploitations could be limited or deeply de-
bilitating. The key is that in polycentric commercial economies, trade linked
centers of power and production across long distances, over time favoring some,
30 — John Tutino
weakening others. Commerce stimulated and sustained local and regional di-
versities of power and production—while all interacted in war and trade.
Polycentrism continued to mark the larger world economy that began when
Europeans linked the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa after 1500. The inclusion of
the Americas brought rising flows of silver after 1550, of sugar after 1600—and
the growing trade in slaves they stimulated. American silver paid for Chinese
silks and porcelains, Southeast Asian spices, and Indian cottons; sugar and sil-
ver stimulated the soaring demand for slaves. And in the profitable process,
European and Euro-American merchants found newly pivotal roles while
demanding and funding protection by newly powerful European regimes
becoming oceanic empires.
Europeans were not suddenly dominant, as too many histories suggest. But
they shifted from struggling as marginal participants often subject to Islamic
and other intermediaries to gain Asian wares, to become traders in control of
key commodities and linking American, Asian, African, and European markets
and producers. Portuguese, Dutch, and English traders sailed directly to South
and East Asian ports; Spanish American merchants delivered silver to Chinese
merchants entrenched at Manila, exchanging it for wares from China, the is-
lands, and South Asia. Into the eighteenth century, industrial primacy in silks
and porcelains remained with China; South Asia made cotton goods coveted
in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Europeans became traders of rising im-
portance thanks to control of the world’s primary sources of silver, the profits
of Atlantic sugar and slave trades, innovations in sailing technology, and rising
naval power.
Competition among Europeans, and between Europeans and Asians, set off
escalating conflicts that became a crisis in the late eighteenth century. From
that time of conflict and crisis came a new British industrial, commercial, and
imperial hegemony that ended the long era of polycentric economic interac-
tions. In what Findlay and O’Rourke call a new era of global specialization, the
industrial capitalism that developed in England a fter 1780 led to a new world
economy: power and industrial production concentrated in one pivotal region,
in time spreading to a very few others; the rest of the world provided raw mate-
rials, foodstuffs, stimulants—and markets. The era of conflict and transforma-
tion from 1750 to 1870 was more than the rise of British power grounded in
new techniques of production. It was the end of a long era of wide competition
for power and profit in a polycentric world economy and the rise of a new
industrial-commercial-imperial hegemony based in E ngland, Western Europe,
and the northeastern United States.

The rest of the world was not left out; most of the Americas, Africa, and
much of Asia were locked into roles as dependent suppliers of primary prod-
ucts, raw materials and foodstuffs that w ere mostly land and labor intensive.
The importance of a commodity to industry, or to feeding industrial popula-
tions, the quality and extent of land or mineral deposits, the plenty and mobility
of labor all varied. Some regions—and many regimes and traders—prospered
supplying industrial inputs and sustenance. Few beyond the North Atlantic
axis of industrial concentration contended for power and primacy in the world
of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism.
The global shift from polycentric commercial competition and integration
to Anglo-centric industrial capitalism shaped the possibilities and constraints
facing new countries across Americas after 1800. Most analysts see a global
transformation driven by events in Europe—powered by the intersection of
war, revolution, and technological innovation t here. The conflicts that broke
the dominance of the European empires in the Americ as and led to the birth of
diverse new nations appear as simultaneous, yet largely separate, developments.
As the new countries of the Americas emerged in the 1820s, British dominance
of a new industrial world seemed set. People and nascent states across the
Americas had no choice but to respond.
Analyses that see the rise of industrial capitalism as external to the Ameri
cas tend to exclude the Americas from the analysis of that pivotal transforma-
tion—an unfortunate deficit in the generally persuasive synthesis of Findlay
and O’Rourke in Power and Plenty. New World silver, so pivotal in studies of
world trade a fter 1550, disappears from their discussions of conflict and trade
after 1770—even as New Spain’s silver output reached historic peaks.15 The
sugar and slave trades so central to studies of the eighteenth-century Atlantic
too often become marginal to analyses of the years a fter 1800, especially when
the goal is to explain industrialism in Europe and its global impact. Yet we
know that Atlantic sugar and slave trades were radically disrupted by the Hai-
tian Revolution in the 1790s and that silver collapsed as a New World stimulus
to world trade after 1810, undermined by insurgency in the Bajío region of New
Spain. Popular risings abruptly destroyed the two leading engines of American
participation in world trade.16
The two New World risings and their economic consequences are the most
obvious evidence that the global economic transformation and the emergence
of new countries across the Americas were not separate processes. The rise of
industrial capitalism usually appears a European triumph; the emergence of new
American nations too often seems a tragedy—with the celebrated exception of
32 — John Tutino
the United States. An integrated analysis of the Americas from 1750 to 1870
will show that triumph and tragedy were inseparable—across the Americas and
around the world.
American Silver and the First World Economy

Two primary economies tied the Americas to the world in the eighteenth
century: a silver economy based in mainland Spanish America and the sugar
and slave economy in Atlantic colonies from Brazil through the Caribbean.
Regions not directly shaped by t hese core trades often supplied one, the other,
or both. Th ere were exceptions: the gold (and slave) economy of the early
eighteenth century in southern Brazil and the fur trade of inland North America.
The latter reminds us that many p eoples remained independent, uncolonized,
in American interiors, yet they too joined rising trades. Still, the silver of Span-
ish America and the sugar and slavery of Atlantic America powerfully s haped
global trades and defined the hemisphere’s place in the world in the eighteenth
c entury.
Silver rose first. In the wake of the early sixteenth-century incursions that
destabilized Mesoamerican and Andean states and brought diseases that set off
devastating depopulations, the g reat mountains of silver encountered at
Potosí and Zacatecas in the 1540s fed China’s soaring demand for silver (de-
creed the only specie for taxation and large-scale and international trade there
in the 1550s). The profits of silver stimulated new ways of production and con-
solidated European rule across Spain’s Americas. Taxco near Mexico City pio-
neered silver mining from the 1530s; Potosí and the Andes led the mining that
fueled world trade between 1550 and 1650; Zacatecas and northern New Spain
took off around 1600. A fter a slowdown during the second half of the seven-
teenth century, Zacatecas and Guanajuato led New Spain to global leadership
in the eighteenth century, while Potosí and the Andes struggled to regain ear-
lier dynamism.17
In the process, three variants of silver societies developed in Spanish Ame
rica. In the Andes, the Inca led the largest and most consolidated state in the
Americas in 1500. After Inca rule collapsed and during the years that Old World
diseases devastated native communities, regional native powers carried on as
silver rose. Perhaps because of long wars and a slow consolidation of Spanish
rule while native population fell by more than 80 percent, regional native
lords (kurakas, sometimes renamed caciques) remained pivotal to colonial
rule and the silver economy. So did the mitá, the Inca labor draft adapted to

N
Boston
St. Louis New York

VIRGINIA
San BRITISH
Francisco Santa Fé NORTH
Charleston
AMERICA AT L A N T I C
San Antonio New Orleans OCEAN
Zacatecas Havana
Guanaiuato SAINT DOMINGUE
CUBA SANTO DOMINGO
Mexico City
VICEROYALTY CAPTAINCY
OF NEW SPAIN OF GUATEMALA Caracas
Bogatá
VICEROYALTY
OF NEW GRANADA
Quito
PORTUGUESE BRAZIL Recife
Lima Cuzco Salvador
VICEROYALTY
OF PERU Potosí
PA C I F I C Rio de Janeiro
OCEAN
Santiago
Buenos Aires
VICEROYALTY
OF RIO DE LA PLATA
0 500 1000 1500 mi
0 1000 2000 km
Map 1.1. The Americas, ca. 1780

send workers to Potosí. Yet as the city of silver high in the Andes rose to global
eminence—its population reaching 150,000 after 1600 while the wider Andes
fell to less than a million—Europeans seeking wealth and natives seeking
chances together forged (unequally, of course) new commercial ways around
mines that drove global trade.
The silver economy of Andean Potosí built on—and commercialized—
indigenous precedents more than other regions of Spanish America. Lima be-
came the Andean center of government, finance, religion, and education, while
nearby Callao sent silver into world trade; in Ecuador, Guayaquil built ships
for Pacific trade while Quito made cloth sold across the Andes; regions now in
northwestern Argentina sent livestock to Potosí; Chile provided a European
diet of wheat, wine, and olive oil to t hose who ruled the Andean boom in Lima
and Potosí. All that prospered to 1650, laden with exploitations and cultural
conflicts, then collapsed and struggled to revive in the eighteenth century. The
limits of the revival and rising Spanish revenue demands made the Andes a
region of escalating conflict from 1740 to the 1780s.18
New Spain developed two distinct silver societies before 1650. Warring Mex-
ica, Tarasco, Zapotec, Maya, and other states contested rule in Mesoamerica
around 1500. Conquest proved more rapid there, thanks to deep local divisions
and the disease-driven depopulation that devastated the region from the 1520s.
When silver mining rose near Mexico City at Taxco in the 1530s and Pachuca
in the 1550s, indigenous ways of rule and work faced challenges. By 1600, few
native lords still held roles parallel to those claimed by Andean kurakas. The
repartimiento labor draft, built on the Mexica’s cuatequil levy, was fragmented
and less pivotal than the mitá, declining rapidly around Mexico City from the
1630s. Still, the silver economy there depended on the hundreds of native com-
munities reconsolidated a fter 1550 as indigenous republics—ruled by councils
of native notables and holding lands that sustained local governance, religion,
and family production. After 1600, as population fell to 10 percent of precontact
levels, increasingly commercial market and labor relations linked communities,
silver mines, and the city together—and to rising global trades.19
North of Mesoamerica, commercial dynamism s haped everything. Before
1520, Mesoamerican states had faced fiercely independent hunting, gather-
ing, and sometimes cultivating Chichimecas in the region called the Bajío.
When Europeans arrived, the fertile basin was a conflict zone; neither states
nor communities accustomed to sustain them ruled there or in regions north.
After silver was found at Zacatecas in 1546 and Guanajuato in 1555, a flood of
migrants—Europeans seeking profit, Mesoamericans looking for opportunity,
and Africans bound to work—set off decades of conflict with Chichimecas
struggling to stay independent. After pacification in the 1590s, the Bajío and
the North saw the construction of a thoroughly commercial social order (few
communities gained rights as republics). With Chichimecas devastated by war
and disease, and marginalized in missions and mountain enclaves by the 1590s,
Spanish North America grew as a thoroughly commercial domain of mines,
cities of trade and textiles, irrigated estates, and grazing properties.
New Spain, which integrated Spanish Mesoamerica and North America
through its capital city of Mexico, remained second to the Andes in silver be-
fore 1650; but as production collapsed at Potosí, it revived at Parral, far north
of Zacatecas, in the 1640s. Spanish North America ruled world silver produc-
tion during the eighteenth century, led again by Zacatecas and Guanajuato.
The Bajío, mixing mining at Guanajuato, trade, textile, and tobacco production
at Querétaro, and irrigated commercial cultivation across rich bottomlands, be-
came the most dynamic capitalist region of the Americas. Facing a brief decline
of Chinese demand for silver and rising Spanish revenue demands in the 1760s,
Guanajuato mine workers protested new taxes and militia recruitment. They
were crushed in 1767. Then, silver drove to new heights in the Bajío and regions
north from 1770 to 1810. Thanks to Bourbon trade policies and rising demand,
most of that silver went first to Europe, funding wars and commercial expan-
sion t here. But ultimately the production of silver that peaked in New Spain a fter
1770 responded to record demand and purchases in China from 1775 to 1808.20
Mexico City replaced a shrunken Potosí as the largest New World city, pass-
ing 130,000 around 1800. (Other leading cities—New York, Guanajuato, and
Querétaro in North America, and Lima, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires in
South America—hovered around 50,000–60,000.) The principal center of
government, finance, and trade in the Americas, Mexico City integrated the
silver economies of Spanish Mesoamerica and Spanish North America, linking
them to Spain, Europe, and China. The cities and the mines along New Spain’s
silver routes—from the Gulf port of Veracruz through Puebla to Mexico City
(with an extension to Acapulco on the Pacific), then north through Querétaro
and Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosí to regions from Texas to Cali-
fornia (after 1770)—generated the most dynamic economy in the Americas,
sustaining with grains, sugar, cloth, tobacco, and livestock the production of
silver that drove global trade.
In contrast, southern Mesoamerica, less tied to the stimulus of silver, re-
mained a region of small and scattered Spanish towns surrounded by indigenous
communities that sustained themselves and sought commercial gain when they
could. In highland Oaxaca, Mixtec villagers made cochineal dye sent to native
weavers, colonial cloth makers, and European industries. Farther south, in the
36 — John Tutino
figure 1.1. In the heights of silver capitalism: The Rayas Mine and
Mellado Church, Guanajuato, Mexico. Author photo
Kingdom of Guatemala, growers around San Salvador raised indigo, another

dye sent to cloth m akers in worlds old and new. In warm basins and coastal
lowlands, native growers raised cotton for artisans across New Spain. Offshore,
Havana built ships and provided military protection against European inter-
lopers. The soaring revenues of New Spain’s silver economy paid for Spanish
rule from Yucatán to California, in Manila where Chinese merchants traded
Asian wares for American silver, and in Havana and New Orleans—with sur-
pluses sent to the always-strained treasury in Spain.21
While the silver economy of the Andes struggled and faced resistance that
culminated in the great rebellions of the 1780s, followed by years of repres-
sion and reconstruction, the silver economy of New Spain soared through
the eighteenth century—and peaked after 1770.22 Social pressures mounted
there too. But across Mesoamerica, they were negotiated by enduring indig-
enous republics and mediated by colonial judges—keeping most conflict in the
courts and workers in mines and fields.23 In northerly regions of Spanish North
America, social pressures were moderated before 1750 by persistent population
scarcities that favored workers and tenants, forcing mine entrepreneurs and
estate operators to offer fair remunerations and solid securities. A fter 1770,
population pressures in the pivotal Bajío allowed entrepreneurs in mining and
commercial cultivation to press new exploitations in a region where commu-
nity rights and lands w
ere scarce and judicial mediation less accessible. Social
pressures deepened, exacerbated by cultural conflicts provoked by enlightened
elites who increasingly maligned popular religious ways. Still, Chinese de-
mand drove an economic boom that sustained social peace and soaring pro-
duction in the Bajío to 1810—when everything collapsed in a revolutionary
conflagration.24
The Atlantic Economy: Sugar and Slavery

The Atlantic sugar and slave economy developed in parallel with the Spanish-
global silver economy. There were early experiments in sugar and slavery in
Spanish Santo Domingo, but once silver flourished, capital flowed to the main-
land. Enclaves of sugar and slavery emerged along New Spain’s Gulf Coast, in
lowland basins south of Mexico City, and later on the coast of Peru, but they
were adjuncts to silver economies.25 Sugar became the primary product, and
enslaved Africans essential laborers, in Atlantic America. Starting in Portu-
guese Brazil, Europeans turned to sugar to compete with the power silver gen-
erated in Spain’s America.
Sugar and slavery had a long history. The pairing began to help fund the
Crusades in the eastern Mediterranean. Profitable, the combination migrated
west across the inland sea and took hold on eastern Atlantic islands in the fif-
teenth c entury. Africans became the primary slaves—and a growing commod-
ity in trade. Still, sugar production, the African slave trade, and the European
markets and profits they stimulated remained limited. The great expansion
came when the complex crossed the Atlantic in the sixteenth century. After
experiments in the Spanish Caribbean, Brazil led the rise of sugar production
in the Americ as—and the shift to bound African labor on a mass scale.26
After 1550, the Portuguese regime’s drive for revenues, settlers’ search for
profit, and Genoese financiers’ readiness to invest made the northeast coast of
Brazil home to an expanding sugar industry. The climate was perfect; coastal
lands were ample, fertile, and well watered. The challenge was labor. At first,
planters used few enslaved Africans—usually skilled craftsmen purchased in
the Atlantic islands to oversee planting and refining. Most permanent workers
were bound Tupí and other natives taken in raids into the interior; harvest
labor came from free natives congregated in Jesuit mission villages. The com-
38 — John Tutino
bination provided flexible labor at low cost; it built the industry and showed
its profitability. But the early labor system proved short-lived; natives drawn
into regular contact with Europeans suffered the same diseases that devastated
people across Spain’s Americas. As the profitability of sugar was proven, the
first labor system that sustained it in Brazil collapsed. The Portuguese with
Genoese financing turned to the African slave trade, escalating its numbers to
sustain a promising second Atlantic economy.27
In the decades after 1600, Portuguese Brazil (under Spanish sovereignty
1580–1640) proved the potential of sugar and slavery. The Dutch, at war
with Spain’s Hapsburgs, invaded to claim the rich coasts around Recife in the
1620s. With ample capital and maritime capacity, once the Dutch mastered
sugar production and the slave trade, they helped transfer the combination
to the Caribbean, where the British and French learned quickly. Sugar (not un-
like silver) lives cycles of boom and decline; the crop exhausts the nutrients in
once-rich soils a fter eighty to one hundred years. Brazil made the industry a sta-
ple of Atlantic America from 1570 to 1650 (coinciding with the Andean silver
cycle at Potosí). Brazil’s decline helped British Barbados rise after 1640, soon
followed by Jamaica. As European markets widened, French Saint Domingue
expanded sugar and slavery a fter 1720. When British Islands began to falter in
the 1760s, Spanish Cuba found new openings.28 As colonies rose and decayed,
sugar production moved to fill demand in Europe—drawing growing numbers
of slaves from Africa. A fter 1750, Saint Domingue became the leading Atlantic
sugar and slave economy. Production along with planter and slave trader profits
soared; so did slave numbers as degradations deepened.29
Like silver, sugar and slavery stimulated widespread commerce. Early on, the
Brazilian interior provided sugar plantations with staples and livestock. From
the seventeenth century, the farming, fishing, timbering, and shipbuilding of
New E ngland sustained British sugar and slave colonies.30 Before 1765, Louisi-
ana supported French Saint Domingue; then under Spanish rule it took a simi-
lar role sustaining sugar and slavery in Cuba. Sugar islands might be small—but
their dynamic industry stimulated the slave trade that took millions of people
out of Africa and promoted linked economic activities across far regions of
Atlantic America.
Sugar—which found expanding European markets as a sweet, a preserva-
tive, and later as a quick energy substitute for protein in popular diets—made
the slave trade possible and profitable on a large scale.31 The trade made slaves
available to other colonial producers. Southern Brazil boomed with an econ-
omy of gold, diamonds, and slavery from 1695 to 1750, stimulating a frontier
of settlement and staples production based in São Paulo, driving west, and also
grounded in slave labor.32 In Atlantic North America, environments too cold
for sugar saw the rise of rice, indigo, and slavery in South Carolina, and tobacco
and slavery around the Chesapeake. Slaves labored on Hudson Valley estates
and Long Island farms, producing staples often exported to the Caribbean. The
plains around Caracas built an economy of cacao and slavery. Planters found
profit and regimes took revenues.33 Slave labor spread across Atlantic America
while sugar and slavery, profit and degradation, peaked in Saint Domingue.
When Paris revolutionaries proclaimed liberty and equality and shook colonial
rule, slaves in Saint Domingue rose after 1790 and took freedom and justice as
they saw them.
Silver and Sugar and Slavery: Global Integration

The silver economies of Spanish America and the sugar and slave economies of
Atlantic America often appear separate. They developed in different regions
of the Americas, under different empires, with different ways of production,
labor relations, and cultural conversations. Yet they developed in parallel: both
had beginnings before 1550; both rose to global importance between 1570
and 1650; both faced lulls from 1650 to 1700—and both soared to unpre
cedented heights during the eighteenth century. While the leading centers
of production shifted from the Andes and Brazil between 1550 and 1650 to
New Spain and the Caribbean from 1700 to 1800, the parallel trajectories held.
More than parallel: the two New World economies were linked.
Most obviously, the two great early American economies were linked in the
competition for geopolitical economic primacy among European powers. Early
on, the bullion of Spanish America favored Hapsburg power. When Phillip II
claimed the Crown of Portugal in 1580, he vastly enlarged Hapsburg domains
and trades by adding the emerging sugar economy of Brazil and trading ports in
Africa and Asia. The original Potosí silver and Brazilian sugar booms not only
came simultaneously from 1570 to 1640—they peaked u nder a common Span-
ish sovereignty that in the early 1600s ruled all of Europe’s Americas (but for a
few marginal British and Dutch settlements). That unprecedented accumula-
tion of American domains and wealth in global trades set Dutch republicans
(who rebelled against Hapsburg rule in 1564), British and French monarchs,
and merchants everywhere in search of parallel domains and trades. Without
gaining revenues and riches in the new global economy they could not com-
pete in a transformed world of power.34 The Dutch became key intermediaries
in the rise of competing British and French Atlantic empires in the seventeenth
century. With no access to silver, the latecomers settled on sugar and slavery.
40 — John Tutino
The larger ties linking the silver and sugar and slave economies become clear
when we see them in global context. It has finally become commonplace to
emphasize the centrality of New World silver to Europeans’ ability to trade in
Asia—to buy Chinese silks and porcelains, island spices, and Indian cottons.35
Now Prasannan Parthasarathi has focused analysis on the key link tying sugar
and slavery to silver. Fine printed cotton cloths from India w ere the leading prod-
ucts demanded in Africa as the price of slaves—and Europeans only gained
those cloths with silver from Spain’s Americas.36 In the era of the foundation of
the New World economies, common sovereignty facilitated Portuguese trad-
ers’ access to Andean silver, delivered to India to purchase cloth taken to Africa
to buy slaves shipped to Brazil and Spanish America from 1580 to 1640. After
1700, British merchants of the monopoly East India Company took growing
quantities of Indian cotton goods, paid with rising flows of New Spain’s sil-
ver (gained through the asiento contract to supply slaves to Spain’s Americas),
to purchase people bound as slaves to labor in Atlantic sugar production and
related enterprises.37 Spanish American silver also funded allied French mer-
chants’ ability to sell Africans in Saint Domingue. We now see why British
and French merchants and regimes did all they could in war and trade, legally
and illegally, in open and clandestine transactions, to gain New Spain’s silver.
They worked through factors in Seville and Cádiz; they smuggled in Carib
bean ports and Buenos Aires. And we understand why Spain insisted that its
ships and merchants must monopolize silver, ensuring that silver would profit
Spaniards and Spanish revenues in the Americas and Europe—while allowing
loopholes large enough to enable silver to find its way to pivotal global trades.38
New Challenges, 1750–1790

Wars escalated across the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. European
empires fought for hegemony at home and wealth in the Americ as and around
the world. Our new understanding of the linked importance of the two New
World economies to European power and global trade places that time of con-
flict and its escalation a fter 1750 in new light—light essential to understanding
the role of the Americas in the conflicts of 1790 to 1825 that accelerated the
global transformation to industrial capitalism.
The War of Spanish Succession begun in 1700 set Bourbons on the Span-
ish throne, cementing a dynastic and commercial alliance between Spain and
France and giving the latter favored access to Spain’s American trade and silver.
The Methuen Treaty of 1703 tied Portugal to Britain, assuring the latter privi-
leged access to the gold beginning to flow from southern Brazil. Then the Treaty
of Utrecht that ended the war in 1713 compensated Britain with a monopoly of
the slave trade to Spain’s Americas, tightening the linkage of New Spain’s silver,
Indian cottons, and African slaving as English traders supplied both British
and Spanish America.
The first half of the eighteenth c entury proved an era of rising global trades.
New Spain’s silver and Brazil’s gold soared simultaneously, the former stimulat-
ing the world and especially China, the latter notably benefiting Britain. Only
a strong expansion of trade could sustain booms in both metals. Then around
1750, Brazilian gold production dropped as Chinese demand for silver fell.
Gold production declined through the rest of the c entury. Silver revived in
the 1770s, flowing more fully t oward Europe, then on to India to buy cottons
to trade for African slaves, and finally on to China.39 With less Brazilian gold
after 1750, British merchants and their regime backers sought greater access to
Spanish American silver in their drive toward global commercial hegemony.
Wars came quickly.
The Seven Years’ War of 1757 to 1763 is perhaps better named the First World
War, as it was fought in Europe and across the Americas, India, and the Philip-
pines, and the sea-lanes that linked them. Early on Britain mobilized North
American colonials to claim Canada from France—a conquest of much cost
and little immediate economic value. More revealing, British forces took Ha-
vana and Manila in 1762 and 1763, demonstrating the military vulnerability
of Spain and the strategic-commercial importance of New Spain’s silver. Sil-
ver regularly accumulated in Havana before sailing west to Europe; the Pacific
flow landed in Manila to be traded with Chinese merchants for Asian wares.
Taking the ports was possible, claiming the silver a challenge—the precious
commodity could be held in New Spain to the end of the war or diverted to
other channels. By the Treaty of Paris, Britain kept Canada and gained Florida,
consolidating rule in eastern North America. It returned Havana and Ma-
nila to Spain, which also gained Louisiana—reinforcing its control of the silver
economy of New Spain and North America west of the Mississippi. From a
war often i magined a g reat British victory Britain gained l ittle in the Americ as,
where Spanish power was reinforced. Britain did win European recognition of
its rising hegemony in India.40
In the near term, the primary result was that all the empires faced g reat
debts. Their first response was to make colonials pay. Spain’s Bourbons de-
manded new taxes, militia recruitment, and administrative controls beginning
in 1764, provoking riotous resistance in and around the mines of Guanajuato
and regions north in New Spain. There, colonial entrepreneurs quickly backed
the regime in a mix of repression and accommodation. Peace was reestablished
42 — John Tutino
in 1767 and silver production rose to hold at historic peaks from 1770 to 1810
thanks to renewed Chinese demand. Parallel demands for revenues and power
struck the colonies of British North America from Massachusetts to Virginia in
the 1760s. Th ere, however, key colonial merchants and planters saw no reason
to pay; they led resistance demanding limited taxation and self-rule that cul-
minated in U.S. independence—declared in 1776 and accomplished in 1783.41
Simply stated, the silver economy made the link between Spain and New
Spain so valuable to Bourbon rulers and colonial entrepreneurs that they col-
luded to maintain the colonial relationship. In contrast, the mainland colonies
of British America w ere a costly burden to imperial officials while the revenue
demands of the 1760s and 1770s made imperial rule unacceptable to many co-
lonial merchants and planters. New Spain remained Spanish because its silver
economy was uniquely valuable; the United States became the first New World
nation in good part because its economy was a peripheral adjunct to Caribbean
sugar and slave economies, where planters and merchants continued to profit
and proved slow to imagine independence.42
Still, the war that enabled U.S. independence had global ramifications. France
sent troops and a navy, the latter pivotal to Washington’s victory at Yorktown—
generating debts that led to calling the Estates General in 1789 and the out-
break of revolution in Paris. Spain provided British American rebels with sus-
tenance and funds—mostly silver pesos from New Spain (which became the
basis of the U.S. dollar). Amid the conflict, with Spain distracted and backing
Anglo-American independence, 1780 saw the outbreak of the g reat risings led
by Túpac Amaru and the Kataris in the Andean heartland (where the silver
economy struggled). Mass violent demands for native rights and social justice
were contained only when colonial elites again rallied to Spanish colonial rule
in devastated uplands. Britain lost its mainland colonies south of Canada;
Jamaica, its leading Caribbean sugar and slave colony, lost dynamism. Mean-
while, French Saint Domingue soared to new heights of sugar, coffee, indigo,
and slavery.
The First Great Transformation

It is often said that U.S. independence turned Britain’s imperial attention to
India. It is now clear that Britain, in an unplanned shift in which merchants,
manufacturers, and regime officials both competed and colluded without set
goals, transformed cotton manufacturing, global trades, and capitalism. From
1780 to 1820, while wars and revolutions raged across Europe and the Americas,
a new world economy dominated by Britain r ose. Every region of the Americas
and the world had to adapt—sooner in the new countries of the Americas and
old empires of Asia, later in regions less tied to global trade around 1800.43
The rise of Britain to global industrial hegemony has been honored as a tri-
umph of British entrepreneurship and technological innovation—and it was
both in pivotally important ways.44 The development of w ater-and steam-
powered ways of spinning cotton thread during the late eighteenth century
transformed production and work in ways that would go on to transform the
world. The achievement is clear—and well emphasized. The goals at the begin-
ning are now equally clear—thanks to Parthasarathi. A group of British inven-
tors and manufacturers backed by merchants outside the East India Company
aimed to displace Indian cotton goods in the world economy. Why? British-
produced cotton cloth would not require silver. Success after 1780 required
technological innovation and new sources of cotton, which first came from
Brazil and then increasingly from the newly independent United States. As
Beckert shows in Empire of Cotton, early industrialism linked British industry
and U.S. plantations to compete with the eoc and Indian producers in world
cotton markets. Still, British and Indian-e oc production held strong past 1810,
until silver production collapsed—favoring British industries and U.S. planters
as the Napoleonic wars ended in British triumph. In time, British power in
India used taxes and prohibitions to inhibit South Asian cloth from compet-
ing with British manufactures.45 The rise of British industrial hegemony was
both a technological triumph and an unplanned outcome of complex global-
imperial wars, insurgencies, and trades. They w ere simultaneous, essential, and
inseparable.46
In the process, the balance of economic power in the Americ as and the world
shifted. British manufacturers and traders aimed to mechanize production of
cotton wares in E ngland in order to replace Indian cloths in markets in Eu
rope, Africa, and the Americas. With success thanks to mechanical innovation
and imperial power, they reduced the need for New Spain’s silver to purchase
the South Asian cloth much in demand in European and American markets,
and essential to buying African slaves. The detailed ramifications await careful
study, but key developments seem clear.
Chinese demand for silver had dropped briefly a fter 1750, and then rose to
new heights in the 1770s.47 With the growth of British cotton production and
the displacement of Indian cloth in British trade, British traders might spend
less silver in India and send more directly to China. We know that the value in
pesos (identical to U.S. dollars a fter 1780) of silver production in New Spain
rose into the 1750s, fell in the 1760s, then soared to new heights from 1770
to the mid-1780s—to dip slightly, stabilize, and fluctuate at historically high
44 — John Tutino
levels from 1795 to 1810.48 During the era of escalating European warfare after
1793, Britain and France competed for access to New Spain’s rising flows of
silver.49 To the extent that British merchants needed less silver to buy South
Asian cotton goods to trade for African slaves, they could seek direct trade
with China where demand held strong. While the French monarchy faced the
debts created by supporting U.S. independence, French merchants still needed
New Spain’s silver to access the cloth needed to send rising numbers of Africans
to Saint Domingue in the 1780s. While debt crisis led to political revolution
in Paris, the flood of recently arrived Africans, often young men enslaved after
fighting as soldiers, fed the extreme polarities of Saint Domingue—extreme
even compared with other Caribbean slave colonies—that exploded in revolu-
tion in the 1790s.
Crucible of Conflict, 1790–1825

There was, of course, no direct and s imple causal line from the rapid expansion
of slavery in Saint Domingue to the Haitian Revolution, nor from deepening
pressures on Bajío producers to insurgency in 1810. War and politics inevita-
bly intervened. Better, the decades from 1780 to 1820 proved the inextricable
linkages among global trades, geopolitical conflicts, regional economies, so-
cial relations of production, popular risings, Euro-American monarchies, and
Asian regimes as old empires fragmented, new nations rose, and popular com-
munities pressed gains when they could. The challenge—and necessity—is to
seek an integrated history of the Americas while the polycentric global econ-
omy of 1500 to 1800 gave way to the industrial concentration that s haped the
nineteenth century. British industrial innovation, French political revolution,
Haitian total revolution, Bajío popular insurgency (an apolitical revolution?),
Indian economic demise and Chinese collapse—all caught up in decades of
geopolitical conflict and shifting global trades—were all essential elements of
the transformation that reshaped the world as the nineteenth century began.
The peace that ended the War of U.S. Independence in 1783 proved brief.
The French monarchy faced debts it could not pay, in large part resulting from
its support of British American rebels. Seeing no other recourse, Louis XVI
called long-dormant Estates General, and that assembly became the site and
source of a French Revolution that promised new liberties and participations to
French p eople—who, now proclaimed citizens, deposed and killed the king—
and eventually led to Napoleon’s rule, first in France, then across Europe. Early
proclamations of citizenship and liberty set off debates and armed conflicts in
Saint Domingue, leading to slave risings that ended slavery, broke with France,
and in 1804 founded the second nation in the Americas—Haiti.50 In the pro
cess, armed ex-slaves took the land for family production and destroyed the
leading sugar and slave economy of Atlantic America. By the mid-1790s, Saint
Domingue no longer sent sugar or profits to France, nor did it buy slaves.
The collapse of Saint Domingue did not end the importance of sugar and
slavery in the Atlantic world. Production quickly revived in Brazil, as did de-
mand for slaves in Portuguese colonies still tied to Britain. Sugar and slavery
also rose in Cuba, still a Spanish colony, yet in times of war dependent on Brit-
ish acquiescence and U.S. neutral shipping to sell sugar and buy slaves. War
and revolutions in France and Haiti shifted the focus of sugar and slavery in
the Americas, sustaining continuing conflicts over trade and revenues. Silver
production in New Spain, after dipping in the late 1780s, rose to new heights
in the early 1790s and held near those peaks to 1810 thanks to Atlantic war and
Chinese demand.51 Saint Domingue lost its leading role—and ended slavery.
In the early 1800s, France lost power in the Americas as it expanded in Europe.
Spain struggled in the geopolitics of Europe—but New Spain flourished; Cuba
rose as a sugar and slave colony; and Buenos Aires found new trade supporting
revived Brazilian plantations.
From the 1790s, U.S. merchants had profited as the only seafaring neutrals
in the Atlantic in times of shifting conflicts—while cotton production rose
across an expanding South to supply British mills. Able to increase the number
of slaves without imports, southern planters developed a growing cotton and
slave economy—without dependence on New Spain’s silver to obtain labor.
Britain, favored by industrial innovation, maritime power, and insular location
faced constant conflicts, always away from home, that brought gains at the in-
tersection of war, trade, and industrial development. In the Americas, the lead-
ing role of New Spain’s silver economy and the dynamism of sugar and slavery
(away from Haiti) persisted to 1810. The polycentric world economy held on.
In 1793, on the pretext of defending monarchy after the killing of the Louis
XVI, the European powers led by Britain and including Spanish Bourbons and
Austrian Hapsburgs turned to war against revolutionary France. With Paris
in disarray and Saint Domingue in flames, it was a chance for the remaining
old regimes to crush a struggling contender for Atlantic power. The attempt
to restore monarchy failed (until 1815), however, thanks to the revolutionary
regime’s ability to mix nationalist visions, new participations, and the end of
feudal taxes and fees and successfully call a levée en masse that mobilized vast
armies to defend the revolution. In 1802, when the Peace of Amiens brought
a respite from war, Britain ruled the seas and global trade, and continued to
industrialize; France dominated its continental neighbors, having lost the trade
46 — John Tutino
and revenues of Saint Domingue; and Spain still held New Spain, the source of
silver that still fueled global trades and funded European regimes. Carlos Mar-
ichal has shown how France and Britain disputed the peak silver flows from
1796 to 1810—a conflict as pivotal as any battle. By deals among regimes, mer-
chants, and financiers, far from the public eye, about two-thirds of New Spain’s
record production benefited a renewed French-Spanish alliance. An important
third funded British war and trade.52 Still, nearly all eventually passed in trade to
China—and British merchants increasingly ruled that profitable commerce.
The world had changed enormously since the 1550s, but Spanish American silver
remained pivotal to the global geopolitical economy in 1808, even as industrial
innovation and threats to the slave trade eroded its role.
With the loss of Saint Domingue to ex-slave soldiers backed by yellow fever
and malaria that devastated European troops sent to the tropics,53 Napoleon
faced embarrassment in the world of European armies and a loss of trade and
the revenues it made. That marginalization was completed in 1805 when the
British navy destroyed the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar.
New Spain’s silver could only reach Europe via deals brokered by British foes. It
still came, as e very power needed funds in times of war—but France’s reliance
on its primary foe for access to key specie created a debilitating dependence.
From 1805, Britain ruled Atlantic sea-lanes, thus Europe’s access to the
Americas, New Spain’s silver, and the profits of still flourishing China trades.
Attempting to counter by controlling continental Europe, Napoleon took the
gamble of invading Iberia in 1807, taking Lisbon, then turning on Madrid early
in 1808. The Portuguese monarchy escaped to Brazil, escorted by a British
fleet, ensuring that plantations there (booming again after the collapse of Saint
Domingue) would benefit Britain’s trade and revenues.54 So Napoleon turned
to invade his Spanish ally, provoking divisions in the monarchy—until he cap-
tured both contenders to rule and in May 1808 saw the p eople of Madrid rise to
challenge his armies, setting off wars for independence in Spain and diverging
responses across the Americas.55
In Spain, resistance to Napoleon concentrated in Seville and then Cádiz,
leading to the liberal constitution of 1812 that offered new but limited rights to
colonials, hoping they would remain in the empire.56 In New Spain, two years
of debates focused in Mexico City from 1808 created deep rifts, dividing those
loyal to the regime emerging in Seville from o thers who preferred to claim
regional autonomy awaiting the resolution of the conflicts in Europe.57 Those
divisions led to the revolt led by Miguel Hidalgo in the Bajío in September
1810. The rising mobilized regional elites, Guanajuato mine laborers, and rural
workers and tenants to take control of the Bajío in the fall of 1810. Early in 1811,
the political movement collapsed, Hidalgo and other leaders were captured,
and most mine workers returned to the mines. But the rural majority returned
home to the Bajío to press a popular, redistributive insurgency from early in
1811. In a decade of conflict, they took the land from the commercial estates
that had ruled their lives and sustained the silver economy for centuries, turn-
ing to family production. The parallels with Haiti are clear.
The Bajío insurgency strangled silver mining by raising the costs of supplies
and transport and breaking the integration of the Bajío with Mexico City and
the larger economy of Spanish North America.58 Popular insurgency, civil war,
and economic disruption led to a decade without investment in the mines that
made the world’s money. Infrastructure and production both collapsed. From
1795 to 1810, New Spain sent over 20 million pesos of silver yearly into the
world economy. From 1811, silver production was cut in half, and with limited
fluctuations held at 10–12 million pesos yearly to 1840. It was a devastating
collapse for the economy of New Spain as it became Mexico in 1821. The fall of
silver at the hands of Bajío insurgents also transformed global trades.59
Since the 1780s, the rise of British industrial textiles had begun to limit the
need for New Spain’s silver to buy Indian cotton cloth to pay for African slaves.
But war, rising Atlantic trade, and Chinese demand had kept demand for silver
high. When from 1811 the silver flowing from New Spain fell by half, the global
reverberations proved extensive and enduring.
For two and a half centuries, silver was a key commodity and money in an
expanding polycentric world economy. Its sudden scarcity after 1810 struck
trades already challenged by constant war from 1750 to 1815. Fernand Braudel
dated the end of eighteenth-century global economic growth to 1812—without
seeing the link to the collapse of New Spain’s silver mines.60 Now, Man-Houng
Lin has shown that the sudden fall of Chinese production and participation in
global trade resulted directly from the dearth of silver. She sees Latin American
independence wars as the cause; within those wars, it was the decade of popular
insurgency in the Bajío that undermined New Spain’s silver production and the
global trades it fueled.
The sudden scarcity of silver, amid war and commercial disruption, both
stimulated and enabled Britain’s acceleration of textile industrialization, limit-
ing its need for silver to buy Indian cottons, replacing them in global markets
with cloth made in British mills. In a radical reorientation of Asian trade, Brit-
ish merchants began to sell South Asian opium in China, extracting silver in
payment. The silver that had flowed into China for centuries began to flow out,
demonetizing the economy, inhibiting commercial life, cutting state revenues,
stimulating political instability—and spreading all the liabilities of a proliferat-
48 — John Tutino
ing opium culture among the Chinese. China became the “silver mine” that met
India’s demand for silver as the new Mexican nation learned its mines would
not recover for decades. And China lost economic dynamism as it exported
raw silk (rather than fine silk cloth) and tea, along with its stores of silver—in
exchange for opium. Once a dynamic engine in a polycentric world economy,
China became a commodity exporter, a society Europeans would later see
as “underdeveloped”—ignoring their own profitable role in creating that
underdevelopment.
Meanwhile, Britain protected itself at home by shifting to gold as primary
money. It had relied increasingly on gold since gaining favored access to Brazil
after 1700. Amid the wars of 1790–1815 it turned to a de facto gold standard,
tied to developing paper monies. After the wars it shifted explicitly to a gold
standard in the 1820s, insulating its industrializing economy from the difficul-
ties linked to continuing scarcities of silver.61
While revolutionary slaves destroyed the plantation economy of Haiti,
popular insurgents undermined the silver economy of the New Spain, and Brit-
ain rose to industrial eminence between 1790 and 1820, other regions of the
Americas adapted as they could. The rise of sugar and slavery in Cuba, and of
sugar and coffee and slavery in Brazil, are widely recognized. Both experienced
relatively stable adaptations to the new world of British power a fter 1820. The
young United States lived more complex and conflictive adaptations during
the decades of war and global transformation.
In the 1790s, deep debates divided the new republic. One vision, promoted
by Thomas Jefferson, saw an agrarian and export-driven future, honoring yeo-
man farmers while presuming slave production on southern plantations (de-
spite Jefferson’s dreams of emancipation and deportation). The alternative
pressed by Alexander Hamilton preferred commercial ways focused in north-
ern trading cities. Both w ere sustained a fter 1793 by northern traders’ ability
to prosper as neutrals in Atlantic wars. They sold farmers’ grains to diverse
Europeans and planters’ cotton to British industries; they traded in New Spain
to keep silver flowing into global commerce. Jefferson’s taking the presidency
in 1800 suggested a triumph of his vision—though the election was very close
and contested.
War soon proved decisive to the adaptive rise of the U.S. economy. With
the end of the Peace of Amiens in 1804 and British victory at Trafalgar in 1805,
Britain aimed to monopolize Atlantic commerce while France consolidated
power on mainland Europe. U.S. merchants saw opportunity in trading be-
tween the Americas and Europe—an opportunity Britain aimed to stop with
embargoes and naval power. Rising conflict at sea led Jefferson to impose his
own embargo in 1808—hoping to stop costly naval contests, and perhaps to
consolidate a republic grounded in cultivation. Of course farmers could eas-
ily continue to feed themselves and the residents of small port towns, but
planters committed to cotton lost outlets in Britain.
While merchants and planters protested the embargo, New Englanders
invested in mechanized cotton mills, using the southern slave-grown staple
earlier sold to Britain. Under the embargo from 1808 to 1812 and war with
England from 1812 to 1814, the Northeast became an industrial producer. A fter
the peace, new industrialists demanded tariff protection against British im-
ports. The wars of 1790 to 1825 were as pivotal to the rise of U.S. power as they
were to the Haitian Revolution, which destroyed France’s role in the Atlan-
tic economy, and to the Bajío insurgency, which brought down New Spain’s
silver economy. As the 1820s began, the United States balanced southern and
northern interests in the Missouri Compromise, enabling the expansion of a
continental economy now grounded in northern commerce and industry and
southern cotton and slavery; speculators and settlers pressed a westward expan-
sion that displaced native p eoples to generate staples in the Ohio basin and
cotton (and slavery) in a new Southwest focused on Louisiana.62
Of course, the greatest economic transformation of the age was under way
in Britain between 1790 and 1820. The one pivotal participant in three decades
of war that never saw destructive conflicts at home, Britain kept trade alive
while entrepreneurs accelerated industrial innovation. Meanwhile, wars on the
European mainland inhibited industry in France while counterinsurgency in
Spain from 1808 to 1814, fought by Spaniards backed by Britain, destroyed
the mechanized cotton industry that had begun in Calatuña in the 1780s.63
When the era of war closed in the 1820s, Britain was positioned to rule a world
economy dominated by industrial textile production and supplied by slave-
grown U.S. cotton, taking soaring profits from the trades they stimulated.
Breaking Away
In 1820 in the Americ as, only the United States and Haiti were independent;
in Spanish America, only Buenos Aires and Caracas were committed to in
dependence. The political future of the hemisphere was far from set. But the
first global economy had fallen, leaving people everywhere searching for new
futures. And 1820 brought new uncertainty to questions of sovereignty in the
Spanish empire when military forces in Spain forced Fernando VII to rein-
state the liberal Constitution of 1812. As economic change accelerated, Spanish
Americans faced new debates that led to five years of renewed conflict and the
50 — John Tutino
emergence of new polities. By 1824 all Iberian America had claimed indepen
dence, except Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. Brazil held together
as a constitutional monarchy, while Spain’s domains fragmented into diverse
republics.
Buenos Aires and Caracas consolidated independence by sending armies led
by José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar, respectively, to break Spanish rule
in the Andes. Bolívar finished the work by creating the republic of Bolivia, in-
cluding Potosí, long ago the heart of the global silver economy, in 1824. Loyal-
ists in New Spain were pacifying the last popular insurgents in the Bajío in 1820,
when Spain’s return to liberal rule set Agustín de Iturbide, who had fought to
defend Spain for a decade, to forging an alliance of the powerful that founded
Mexico in 1821 as an empire that quickly collapsed and became a federal re-
public in 1824. Portuguese King João remained in Rio de Janeiro into 1821,
then returned to Lisbon to deal with a Cádiz-inspired liberal movement aim-
ing to return Brazil to colonial status. His son Pedro broke with Portugal in
1822, crowned emperor of a Brazil that remained a monarchy until 1889.
Spanish America turned to building republican nations between 1821
and 1824; Brazil worked to forge a constitutional monarchy. All joined the po
litical processes of the age, grounding new regimes in variants of popular sover-
eignty and offering new electoral participations. Across the Americas, diverse
new countries converged in turning to the politics of popular sovereignty, open-
ing processes that proved long, conflictive, and repeatedly coercive—including
in the United States, where the war of 1860–1865 proved the bloodiest con-
flict of all. Yet history repeatedly reports the United States as a most creative
and successful republic, while seeing Latin Americans as incapable, repeatedly
turning to military-authoritarian rule. The dichotomy was never so clear. To
understand the diverging trajectories of the new countries that emerged across
the Americas in the first half of the nineteenth century, we must see their dif
ferent possibilities and responses in new times of industrial capitalism. The new
countries of the Americas converged—and never simply copied, as Roberto
Breña emphasizes—in pursuing politics of popular sovereignty. They diverged
as regions with diverse resources and populations adapted to a rapidly and radi-
cally changing world economy. The result was mostly divergence.
Divergence in Atlantic America

Haiti diverged most. The armed slaves’ assault on sugar and slavery transformed
its economy; withdrawal and exclusion from trade led to economic isolation.
Haitians struggled on, committed to personal liberty and family production
while facing exclusion in the world of nations and trade. Limited coffee exports
earned some revenues, minimally funding regimes decried as too military—
yet that acquiesced in the turn to family sustenance that was the first interest
of the emancipated populace. The revolutionary fall of sugar and slavery in
Haiti did not end that long-profitable relationship in the greater Caribbean.
It expanded in Cuba, on smaller islands, and in mainland zones such as Brit-
ish Demerara, where in 1823 slaves attempted to follow Haitian’s example in
a rising that did hasten the end of slavery in Britain’s empire.64 Older British
and French islands saw sugar production and profits wane as soils exhausted
and slavery ended between 1830 and 1850. They remained colonies (even if of-
ficially part of a French nation) searching for economies. Ironically, p eople of
African ancestry across the British and French Caribbean, long enslaved, lived
by economies of sustenance through most of the nineteenth century. By dif
ferent means, they ended where Haitians had fought to get. The parallels w ere
limited, however. Haitians often held their own land, yet faced international
exclusions aimed to punish black revolutionaries; islanders under British and
French rule usually lived as tenants, while gaining some access to education and
trade: the small rewards of not being revolutionary.65
Cuba was different, not because it was Spanish and remained a colony, but
because its expansion of sugar and slavery came on fresh soils a fter 1750, to ac-
celerate in the 1790s when the Haitian Revolution opened markets. Into the
nineteenth century Cuba was economically prosperous for local planters and
merchants in Havana, Spain, Britain, and the United States. Many of the latter
profited by delivering growing numbers of slaves, despite proclaimed opposi-
tion and the illegality of the trade in Britain and the United States after 1807.
Slaves paid for Cuba’s rise during and after the conflicts that led to Haitian and
Latin American independence. Masters and merchants profited while ideo-
logues worried about Haitian precedents; together they aimed to keep slaves less
than a majority. Cuba’s sugar and slave boom, the last of the cycles that s haped
Atlantic America, generated limited resistance during decades of expansion.
Deepening conflicts came in the 1860s, ending slavery in 1886 and Spanish rule
in 1898.66
Brazil, where sugar and slavery first flourished in the Americas, lived impor
tant continuities as it diverged from other former slave colonies a fter 1820. Its
sugar, gold, and diamond economy had linked to Britain (via Portugal) in the
early eighteenth c entury. Exports fell after 1750, despite the Marquis de Pom-
bal’s enlightened policies. The economy struggled through the 1780s, until the
Haitian Revolution opened markets for a revival of northeastern sugar and
slavery and the beginning of coffee and slavery around Rio. The 1808 arrival of
52 — John Tutino
CANADA
Montreal
Chicago Boston
UNITED STATES Philadelphia New York
Denver
San Francisco St. Louis Washington, DC
Santa Fé
AT L A N T I C
Charleston
OCEAN
San Antonio
New Orleans
MEXICO
Zacatecas Havana
Guanaiuato CUBA
HAITI
Mexico City BELIZE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
HONDURAS
Guatemala CARIBBEAN SEA

GUATEMALA Caracas
EL SALVADOR
NICARAGUA VENEZUELA
COSTA RICA
Bogatá
PANAMA
COLOMBIA
Quito
ECUADOR
PERU BRAZIL Recife
Lima Cuzco Salvador
BOLIVIA
Potosí
São Paulo
PA C I F I C Rio de Janeiro
OCEAN PARAGUAY
ARGENTINA
Santiago URUGUAY
CHILE Buenos Aires Montevideo
0 500 1000 1500 mi
0 1000 2000 km
Map 1.2. The Americas, ca. 1850

the royal court in Rio definitively linked a revitalized slave economy to British
merchants and markets.67
Brazil avoided a long, destructive war for independence. When the regime
broke with Portugal in 1822, it fought regional conflicts to expel the last Portu-
guese forces, to hold northeastern and southern regions in the empire based in
Rio, and to block limited slave resistance.68 Thanks to export profits and Brit-
ish naval support, Brazil held together as a monarchy (with new constitutional
participations) committed to slavery (in this it was like Cuba, in a Spanish
empire struggling toward constitutional ways). Sugar declined in the face of
Cuban expansion in the 1820s, but coffee and slavery grew to sustain a Brazil-
ian empire linked to Britain. Slave imports held strong to 1850, when British
opposition turned from rhetorical to naval. The empire of coffee and slavery
promised popular sovereignty and electoral competition in a regime shaped
by entrepreneurial power and patronage politics. Facing political uncertainties
and periodic conflicts into the 1840s, Brazil proved the most stable regime in
the Americas until slavery and empire collapsed together in 1888–1889. Through-
out, Brazil sustained British power and prosperity.69
The same can be said of the southern United States to 1860. Slavery was
long established around the Chesapeake and near Charleston, serving tobacco,
indigo, and rice growers. A war for independence and early national politics
led by slaveholding planters guaranteed the endurance of slavery, facilitating
the rise of cotton and slavery to supply British industry from the 1790s. Slav-
ery expanded numerically and geographic ally, making cotton to sustain British
production. The United States proved the rare region where slave populations
grew without imports, assuaging British opposition to the oceanic slave trade
while its industry, power, and prosperity depended on slave-grown cotton.70
Still, the rise of the United States was more complex. As noted, trade em-
bargo and war between 1808 and 1814 brought a reluctant turn to industry in the
North. New England became a consumer of slave-grown cotton and an emerg-
ing competitor to British manufacturers. New Englanders depended on the
slave South while promoting wage labor in industries at home. Contradiction
was everywhere. After the Missouri Compromise of 1820 an economy of con-
tinental contradictions drove west, taking land from independent natives to
expand cotton grown by slaves and staples raised by free farmers. In 1835 south-
erners facilitated the secession of Mexican Texas to expand cotton and slavery.
From 1846 to 1848 they pressed a war begun to take Texas into the Union—and
ended by taking a vast new West, including California’s gold.71
The United States claimed a continent of unparalleled resources—a repub-
lic of popular sovereignty, committed to slavery, slowly opening electoral rights
54 — John Tutino
for free white men. Its expansive prosperity generated conflicts that deepened
after war with Mexico brought vast new lands into the Union—Texas, grounded
in cotton and slavery; California, producing vast riches in gold; and all the
lands between. A devastating and not very civil war ended slavery in 1865, con-
firmed the triumph of northern industry, and set the reunited continental na-
tion on course to become Britain’s great competitor for global hegemony.72
Britain ruled the world of concentrated economic power that shaped the
nineteenth century by building industry at home, drawing resources and sell-
ing cloth in markets across the globe, and emerging unchallenged from the wars
of 1790–1825. The United States later built a parallel power, concentrating
industry in its Northeast, while drawing resources and selling in markets across
a continent taken into a huge nation populated by people fleeing Europe—at
the cost of slaves, Mexicans, and native Americans. Both the enormity and the
fragility of Britain’s rise became clear as it faced the competition of a United
States with continental foundations after 1880.73
The Atlantic America created by sugar and slavery—Beckert would call it
war capitalism—found diverse adaptations in the nineteenth-century world
of concentrated industrial power. Haitians withdrew for their own very good
reasons—and paid with poverty. Brazil deepened its ties with Britain and pros-
pered as a key commodity producer—while growing numbers labored in slav-
ery. Cuba remained a colony to become the last sugar and slave economy of the
Americas. The United States took advantage of early independence to prosper
from trade and then industry during the wars of 1790–1820, sustaining Brit-
ish power with expanding cotton and slavery to 1865, while northeastern mills
competed with British industry. Haitians made a revolutionary choice to end
slavery and exports. Brazil, Cuba, and the United States, in contrast, expanded
slavery, found commercial success, and a fter 1860 faced conflicts grounded in
the contradictions of their slave-based export successes.
Inversions in Spanish and Indigenous America

The continental regions of Spanish America broke ties with Spain after 1820
and quickly broke apart to create more than a dozen new countries. Following
three centuries of pivotal global importance thanks to the silver, no region of
Spanish America would contend for power, and few found prosperity in the era
of North Atlantic industrial capitalism. Spanish America and China had been
linked for centuries in silver-fueled global trades. The fall of silver left both to
grapple with economic challenges and political conflicts—in inevitably differ
ent ways.
figures 1.2 and 1.3. At the base of industrial capitalism:
Scenes on a cotton plantation
The Andean silver economy had stimulated global trade as it commercialized
social relations still grounded in Inca and indigenous ways from 1550 to 1650,
also stimulating a broad commercial integration linking regions that would
become northern Argentina, central Chile, and Ecuador to Lima, Potosí, and
the Andean heartland. As New Spain became the center of silver production
and global trades in the eighteenth century, Andeans struggled as rising state
demands provoked social conflicts that culminated in the 1780s. Madrid tried
a cure by shifting Andean silver toward the Atlantic via Buenos Aires in 1776,
helping set off the risings of the 1780s and contributing to disruptions that
continued through a repressive aftermath. Most of the powerful in the Andean
heartland resisted independence until the 1820s; then, caught between Spanish
liberalism and armies from Buenos Aires and Caracas, they built fragmented
republics—Peru and Bolivia in the heartland; Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, and
Venezuela in outlying regions. All searched for new economies and polities;
none succeeded until they found export links to the industrial world after
1850: Chile stabilized first when it provided foodstuffs to gold rush California;
coastal Peru and Chile (in regions taken by war from Bolivia) profited when
they sent guano and nitrates to fertilize commercial fields in Cuba and else-
where; Colombia and Venezuela prospered late when they joined the stimulant
economy of coffee exports later in the century.74
Buenos Aires and the Río de la Plata provide a revealing history of a region
that was geographically Atlantic, not grounded in sugar and slavery, but instead
long linked to the Andean silver economy in peripheral ways. The area faced
complex changes from 1790 to 1825 and endured deep political conflicts long
after. Still, while struggling to become nations, the ports and peoples of the
Plata and the Pampas found prosperity sustaining the rising power of Britain.
Buenos Aires was founded in the late sixteenth c entury to block Potosí sil-
ver from trading outside preferred imperial channels; the name of the estuary,
the River of Silver, shows that silver found its way to the Atlantic there. For
two centuries, the city survived by smuggling just enough silver to profit t hose
sent to limit smuggling. The opening of the port in 1776 and the new viceroy-
alty set there with jurisdiction over Potosí aimed to promote silver production
and ease its arrival in Atlantic trade (as eighteenth-century flows were drawn
increasingly east toward Europe before heading to India and China). But the
risings that rocked the Andean heartland in the 1780s guaranteed that Buenos
Aires would never become a great silver exporter.
Instead, the South Atlantic port found new opportunity during Haiti’s rev-
olution and the shifting production and trade it opened. As Brazil revived sugar
and slavery in the Northeast and began coffee and slavery in the South, the
58 — John Tutino
Pampas became a source of salted beef and other foodstuffs to sustain growing
numbers of slaves. Buenos Aires became a center of trade, shipping, and pro
cessing; its population grew toward sixty thousand around 1800—including
large numbers of African slaves made available and affordable by the closure
of Saint Domingue. In his transforming study Workshop of Revolution: Ple
bian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776–1810, Lyman Johnson details
how the city became a center of production and social tension that fended off
British invasion in 1806 and quickly turned to seeking independence when
Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808. The merchants and artisans, growers and
grazers of greater Buenos Aires sought access to the world to continue to
prosper.75
Decades of war—first within and then against the Spanish empire, later
among neighbors along the Río de Plata—followed as a region facing new eco-
nomic prospects struggled to consolidate states and political systems. Buenos
Aires eventually became the center of an emerging Argentina that prospered
first by sustaining slaves in Brazil and Cuba, then by sending wool, leather,
wheat, and beef to Britain. Uruguay became a small replica of Argentina, set up
by Britain to create a buffer with Brazil.76 Paraguay turned inward to become
a mostly Guaraní nation, rejecting trade to preserve economic autonomy and
indigenous ways—until a deadly war funded by Britain set an alliance of Ar-
gentina, Brazil, and Uruguay against Paraguay, forcing it open to the world in
the 1860s, consolidating a nation of enduring Guaraní poverty.77
Paraguay’s creation as a Guaraní nation was the extreme case of a common
outcome of the conflicts and transformations of 1790 to 1825 in South Ame
rica. As new nations struggled to build polities and new economies, indigenous
peoples often found new autonomies that endured for decades. In regions once
at the heart of the silver economy, indigenous republics found economic open-
ings while facing fragile and contested national political powers. Other native
peoples who had lived free at the margins of empires, yet dealt with traders for
the horses, arms, tools, and other goods that enabled independence, found new
ways of assertion as new states struggled after 1810. The spread of indigenous
independence across the Andes and adjacent lowlands frustrated those who
presumed native subordination. But that independence was real—if, outside
Paraguay, never recognized in the world of nations—long into the nineteenth
c entury.78 Only the consolidation of export economies tied to British hege-
mony and rising U.S. demand a fter 1860 enabled South American states to so-
lidify and then curtail native independence—and crush Paraguay.
The transformation of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, which in its largest
sense stretched from Costa Rica to California, followed a different path. Still,
it too ended with disintegrations, struggles to create new polities, searches
for new economies, and indigenous independence—all facilitating the ris-
ing power of the United States. What made New Spain different was the
strength of its silver economy to 1810—and the depth of the insurgent-driven
collapse that followed. The fall of silver was clear in 1811, and entrenched by
1820 when Spain returned to liberal rule, setting off a movement that aimed
to draw Fernando VII to Mexico City to rule all New Spain—including the
Kingdom of Guatemala (Central America) and Cuba in a North American
Bourbon monarchy. Fernando refused, Cuba never joined, and Guatemala
broke away.
Cuba remained a prosperous Atlantic colony of sugar and slavery; had it
joined Mexico, a mostly mainland nation would have gained the profits of
sugar, the problem of slavery (which it later faced in Texas), and the merchant
and naval power they sustained. The Kingdom of Guatemala had gained little
from the silver economy. It was linked to the world in the eighteenth century
mostly by the indigo raised around San Salvador and sent into trade by Guate-
mala City merchants. The region had little incentive to become subordinate to
a regime based in Mexico City. Guatemala led the kingdom away in 1822,
to soon face conflict and fragmentation into five Central American states. As
cochineal from the highlands east of Guatemala City replaced indigo as the
region’s primary trade commodity, El Salvador broke with Guatemala. Gua-
temala then reconstituted as a u nion of indigenous western highlands, ladino
(mixed/Hispanic) eastern uplands, and a capital region that concentrated
power.79 None of the Central American nations built solid states until they
found commodities to sell in the new economy of the late nineteenth c entury:
coffee in Pacific hills from the 1850s; bananas in Caribbean lowlands from the
1890s.
In Mexico, Agustín Iturbide, a commander noted for hard campaigns against
political rebels and Bajío insurgents, became emperor on Fernando’s refusal to
take a New World throne. When New Spain began to fragment as silver col-
lapsed, the empire gave way to a federal republic in 1824. Its central powers
faced an empty treasury as mine revenues plummeted and silver and internal
taxes went to the states. British lenders funded the regime for a few years,
opened Mexico to British cloth, and created debts that plagued the nation for
decades. To 1810 New Spain had exported revenue and capital; after 1820, the
Mexican state and entrepreneurs turned to British investors for capital and new
technologies. They sustained the state and drained some mines—but generated
few profits as silver production held low. Once the world’s source of money,
60 — John Tutino
Mexico became an importer of capital and technology—a debtor with an un-
certain future.
Across central and southern regions the residents of indigenous republics,
earlier granted land and self-rule to sustain the silver economy, found new au-
tonomies as the nation and commercial ways floundered. Families that had led
the decade of insurgency in the Bajío, taking down the silver economy, kept
control of often-irrigated lands, feeding themselves, supplying local markets,
enjoying autonomies that extended to new roles for w omen heads of rural
80
h
ouseholds. Popular gains held amid national troubles.
Decades of economic challenge and political conflict followed. Amid de-
bates over centralism and federalism, liberalism and conservatism, Zacatecas’s
mines came back to life in the 1820s; Guanajuato revived in the 1840s—when
silver production finally began to rise. British investors had left facing bank-
ruptcies; they also left steam pumps and other technologies that, adapted by
Mexican entrepreneurs to Mexican ways of production, began to revive min-
ing. Meanwhile, in the early 1830s, a government seeking a new economy set
tariffs on cloth imports to fund a national development bank that underwrote
mechanized industries in the 1830s and 1840s. Could Mexico combine revived
silver mining with mechanized industry to find new prosperity and political
consolidation? As the 1840s began, it seemed imaginable.81
Any consolidation, however, faced two threats from the north. The Coman-
che, like many South American natives, had lived on the margins of the Spanish
world, adopting horses and firearms to assert independent power. With the
fall of the silver economy and the instability of the Mexican republic, a Co-
manche empire r ose after 1810 on the lands between New Mexico, Texas, and
the United States. Mexican northward expansion ended as Comanche drove
south.82 Meanwhile, migrants from the United States expanded cotton and
slavery in Texas. In 1836 they took Texas out of Mexico, deepening Mexican
political conflicts.83 In 1846, expansionist U.S. southerners won incorporation
of secessionist Texas as a slave state, knowing the act would provoke war with
Mexico and allow the U.S to claim the land from Texas through California. The
war also helped end Comanche independence. Defeat and the loss of northern
territories renewed political and social conflicts in Mexico, inhibiting eco-
nomic revival for decades.84
The collapse of New Spain’s silver economy brought a difficult birth to Mex-
ico and favored the expansive power of the United States. When gold revived
an economy of bullion, irrigated cultivation, and commercial grazing in the
1850s, it came in California, stimulating the economic growth and westward

expansion of the United States. Yet the challenge of dealing with the expansion
of slavery into the lands claimed from Mexico led directly to the Civil War.85
Only after 1865 did the United States consolidate as a nation u nder northern
leadership, accelerating a westward expansion that often replicated the bullion
economy of Spanish North America in lands recently taken under U.S. rule and
increasingly emptied of long-resistant native peoples.86
Mexico did not find a political settlement or a new economy until the
1870s—in a liberal authoritarian regime that pressed against small producers,
favored capitalist agriculture, and welcomed U.S. capital to revive mines, build
railroads, and energize an economy increasingly tied to U.S. markets. In a great
North American inversion, the regions of New Spain that had driven global
trade via a flourishing silver economy before 1810, by 1870 were dependencies
of a rising United States. Irony upon irony: much of the “U.S.” capital that
came to profit in Mexico was generated in California, Colorado, and Arizona
mining booms. After 1848, lands once Mexican prospered by replicating the
silver economy of Spanish North America; they benefited from the work of
Mexicans, some long-established residents, o thers migrants newly arrived on
well-trodden trails or newly built rails.87 The United States that challenged
Britain for global hegemony around 1900 was favored by the collapse of New
Spain’s silver economy; it prospered by incorporating its northern lands, its dy-
namic ways, and many of its industrious peoples.
The world of concentrated industrial capitalism persisted into the early
twentieth century. After 1870, Britain shared and disputed hegemony with in-
dustries and empires rising in the United States and Germany. Both competitors
joined Britain on the gold standard in the 1870s, ending the long sway of that
metal-money—and ultimately prejudicing any revival of the silver economies
that once had made the Andes and New Spain central to global trades. A North
Atlantic axis of geopolitical economic power ruled militarily and industrially,
drawing commodities from and selling wares to an expanding and often colo-
nized “rest of the world,” u ntil the competitors for hegemony fell into brutal
war from 1914 to 1918, while key outliers—Mexico, Russia, and China—turned
to revolutions that became crucibles for imagining different ways of global and
national development.
Still, the world created between 1770 and 1830 limped forward to 1930—
when the Great Depression completed the collapse of the first global industrial
economy. Then, nations across the Americas turned to programs promising to
bring the benefits of industrialism home in projects of national development.
The attempt proved difficult, often impossible, in a mid-twentieth-century
62 — John Tutino
era of wars, revolutions, and technological innovation—this time bringing
population explosion, unprecedented urbanization, and a new postindustrial
globalization.88
Notes
1 These sketches of global trends are grounded in innumerable studies, synthesized
ably in Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and
the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007).
2 Again, t here are many sources. For a synthesis of Spanish America and the silver
economies, see Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–
1769 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); on the slave colonies, the best synthesis
remains Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso,
1997).
3 There are many editions. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism and Other Writings on the Rise of the West, trans. and introduction by
Stephen Kalberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
4 Douglass North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New
Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
5 Douglass North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
6 Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1998).
Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
8 Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Eco
nomic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
9 See Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty.
10 For a detailed summary, see Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, 43–142. On
early European marginality and the importance of trade between the Islamic world
with South and East Asia, the key work is Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European
Hegemony: The World System, ad 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989).
11 For different views converging on the same understanding, see William Sanders and
Barbara Price, Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization (New York: Random
House, 1968), and Ross Hassig, War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992).
12 This Mesoamerican–North American commercial integration is emphasized in
Francis Jennings, The Founders of America from the Earliest Migrations to the Pres
ent (New York: Norton, 1993), and Alfredo López Austin and Leonardo López
Lujan, El pasado indígena, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
2001).

13 See López and López, El pasado indígena. On Mexica political economy around
1500, see Ross Hassig, Trade, Tribute, and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century
Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1993).
14 See Thomas Patterson, The Inca Empire: The Formation and Disintegration of a
Pre-Capitalist State (New York: Berg, 1997). For a comparison of the Aztec and
Inca regimes, focused on religion but sustaining the emphasis on power and trade
offered here, see Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest, Religion and Empire:
The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984).
15 This is a focus of John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the
Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
16 Again, I emphasize the importance of Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The
Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1990), and Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revo
lution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), in the context of Tutino,
“The Revolution in Mexican Independence: Insurgency and the Renegotiation of
Property, Production, and Patriarchy in the Bajío, 1800–1855,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 78:3 (1998), 367–418.
17 On American silver and global trade, see Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez,
“Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origins of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World
History 6:2 (1995), 201–221, and “Cycles of Silver: Global Unity through the Mid-
Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13:2 (2002), 291–427. More recently,
my understanding of the changing role of silver in China has been been revised
thanks to Man-Houng Lin, China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideology,
1808 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
18 On the Andean silver economy, see Carlos Sempat Assadourian, El sistema de la
economía colonial: El mercado interior, regiones y espacio económica (Lima: Instituto
de Estudios Peruanos, 1982), and Enrique Tandeter, Coercion and Mining: Silver
Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1993). On Potosí, see Peter Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian
Labor in Colonial Potosí (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984),
and Jane Mangan, Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in
Colonial Potosí (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). On outlying regions,
see Karen Spalding, Huarochirí: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983); Brooke Larson, Cochabamba:
Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia, 1550–1900, rev. ed. (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1998); and Ann Zulawski, They Eat from Their
Labor: Work and Social Change in Colonial Bolivia (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1995). On eighteenth-century conflicts see Ward Stavig, The World
of Tupac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Charles Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and
the Creation of the Peruvian Republic, 1780–1840 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1999); Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish
64 — John Tutino
Rule in the Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003); and Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in
the Age of Insurgency (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
19 On early commercialization of production and community life in the regions
around Mexico City, see José Enciso Contreras, Taxco en el siglo XVI: Sociedad y
normatividad en un real de minas novohispano (Zacatecas: Universidad Autónoma
de Zacatecas, 1999); Sarah Cline, Colonial Culhuacan, 1580–1600: A Social History
of an Aztec Town (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986); and Gilda
Cubillo Moreno, Los dominios de la plata: El precio del auge, el peso del pode; los
reales de minas de Pachuca a Zimapán, 1552–1620 (Mexico City: inah, 2006).
My synthesis reflects those works and the classic studies of the Mesoamerican core
from Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1964), to James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
20 On Spanish North America, see Peter Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society
in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1971); D. A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico,
1763–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); and Tutino, Making a
New World.
21 The key study of New Spain’s late colonial revenues is Carlos Marichal, La bancar
rota del virreinato, Nueva España y las finanzas del imperio español, 1780–1810
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), now complemented by Barbara
Stein and Stanley Stein, Edge of Crisis: Wars and Trade in the Spanish Atlantic,
1789–1808 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
22 On Chinese demand for American silver and its demise around 1750, see Flynn and
Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver.” On peaking Chinese demand after 1770, increasingly
via British traders, see Lin, China Upside Down.
23 See William Taylor, Drinking, Homic ide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Vil
lages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), and Brian Owensby, Empire
of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1979).
24 Tutino, Making a New World.
25 See Antonio García de León, Tierra adentro, mar en fuera: El Puerto de Veracruz y
su litoral a Sotavento, 1519–1821 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011).
26 On early sugar and slave colonies: Stuart Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar
and the Making of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004).
27 The key study of Brazil is Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations and the Formation of
Brazilian Society, Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
28 For an overview of the sugar colonies: Blackburn, The Making of New World
Slavery. On the early British Caribbean: Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise
of the Planter Class in the British West Indies, 1624–1713 (New York: Norton, 1972);
on Jamaica: Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation
Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

29 On Saint Domingue, I rely on Fick, The Making of Haiti, and Dubois, Avengers of
the New World.
30 See John McCusker and Russell Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
31 See Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
(New York: Viking, 1985).
32 Kathleen Higgins, Licentious Liberty in a Brazilian Gold Mining Region: Slavery,
Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais (State College:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), and Alida Metcalf, Family and Frontier
in Colonial Brazil: Santana do Parnaíba, 1580–1822 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992).
33 Again, see McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America.
34 See Kamen, Empire, and Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty.
35 See K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic
History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), and Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty.
36 This understanding depends on the essential analysis in Parthasarathi, Why Europe
Grew Rich. On silver, textiles, and slaves, see pp. 21–50.
37 Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich, tables 2.1 and 2.2, p. 25.
38 On French and British penetrations of Spanish trade, see Stanley Stein and Barbara
Stein, Silver, War, and Trade: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern
Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
39 See Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 1450–1920 (London: Verso, 1984),
222–231 and appendix II, p. 351; and Flynn and Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver.” On
gold, its relations with silver, their linked importance, and how the decline of Bra-
zilian gold led to the conflicts after 1750, see Alfredo Castillero Calvo, Los metales
preciosas y la primera globalización (Panama City: Editora Novo Arte, 2008).
40 For studies of the war that emphasize British success, see Fred Anderson, Crucible
of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America (New
York: Knopf, 2000), and Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise
and Fall of the First British Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
41 Edward Countryman, The American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang,
2003).
42 This comparison is developed in Tutino, Making a New World, chap. 4.
43 I aim to bring the Americ as to the center of the transformation analyzed well by
Findlay and O’Rourke in Power and Plenty—except for an inability to see the
Americas outside the United States. The global adaptations that followed are syn-
thesized well by C. A. Bayly in The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003)—except for his difficulty seeing the Americas—including the
United States.
44 See David Landes’s classic, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and
Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969), and Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revo
lution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
66 — John Tutino
45 Parthsarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich, 89–262. The more complex understanding
I sketch here emerges from that work; Sven Beckert Empire of Cotton: A Global His
tory (New York: Knopf, 2014); and the timing of the triumph of industry a fter 1810
detailed in Allen, British Industrial Revolution. The fall of silver is clear in Tutino,
Making a New World, and Lin, China Upside Down.
46 And thus it is time to end the endless debates about which mattered most.
47 On the Manila trade, see Carmén Yuste López, Emporios transpacíficos: Comer
ciantes mexicanos en Manila, 1710–1815 (Mexico City: unam, 2007).
48 Tutino, Making a New World, table D.1, p. 550.
49 Stanley Stein and Barbara Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age
of Charles III, 1759–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
50 Again see Fick, The Making of Haiti, and Dubois, Avengers of the New World.
51 Tutino, Making a New World, table D.1, p. 550.
52 Marichal, La bancarrota del virreinato.
53 On tropical lowlanders immunological advantages in war against European
newcomers or American highlanders, see J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology
and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
54 On the shift of Portuguese rule to Rio and the consequences for Brazil, see Kirsten
Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in
Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (London: Routledge, 2001).
55 Nicholas Fraser, Napoleon’s Cursed War: Spanish Popular Resistance in the Peninsu
lar War, 1808–1814 (London: Verso, 2009), and José Gregorio Cayuela Fernández
and José Ángel Gallego Palomares, La guerra de independencia: Historia bélica;
pueblo y nación en España, 1808–1814 (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad, 2008).
56 The rise of liberalism in Spain is detailed in chapter 2, “The Cádiz Liberal Revolu-
tion,” by Roberto Breña; the conflicts of 1808 to 1810 and the emergence of the
Hidalgo revolt are detailed in chapter 7, “Becoming Mexico,” by Alfredo Ávila and
John Tutino.
57 That the conflicts that began in New Spain in 1808 were not seeking independence
from Spain is the focus of Jaime Rodríguez, “We Are Now the True Spaniards”:
Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of
Mexico, 1808–1824 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
58 See Tutino, “The Revolution in Mexican Independence.”
59 Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Comercio exterior de México (1853; rpt. Mexico City:
Banco Nacional de Comercio Exterior, 1967).
60 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3, The Perspec
tive of the World, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 77–79.
61 See Vilar, History of Gold and Money, 211–231, 309–319. For China and opium, see
Lin, China Upside Down.
62 See Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American
Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Drew McCoy, The
Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 1980); and Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution:

Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). None
shares my global emphasis; the War of 1812 remains minimized or viewed in na-
tional perspective. See the classic study of Roger Brown, The Republic in Peril: 1812
(New York: Norton, 1971), and the recent work of Alan Taylor, The Civil War
of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels and Indian Allies (New
York: Knopf, 2010). My understanding of this era is deeply influenced by Adam
Rothman’s Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
63 See Fraser, Napoleon’s Cursed War, and Cayuela Fernández and Gallego Palomares,
La guerra de la independencia.
64 Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebel
lion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
65 On postrevolutionary Haiti, see Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012); on the end of British and French Ca
ribbean slave regimes, see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery,
1776–1848, new ed. (London: Verso, 2011).
66 On sugar and slavery in Cuba, the classic history is Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El
ingenio: Complejo económico social cubano del azúcar (reprint, Barcelona: Edito-
rial Crítica, 2001); analysis in English begins with Franklin Knight, Slave Society
in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1970). On challenges to slavery and the persistence of sugar, see Robert Paquette,
Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between
Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990);
Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Gillian MacGillivray,
Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–1959
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
67 See Kenneth Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750–1808
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Schultz, Tropical Versailles;
Richard Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil, 1850–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Stanley Stein, Vassouras: A Brazil
ian Coffee County, 1850–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957);
Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories, rev. ed. (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
68 See Richard Graham, Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in
Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), and João José
Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
69 On imperial politics, see Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire, and Richard Gra-
ham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1990). On ties to Britain, see Graham, Britain and the Onset of
Modernization.
70 See Sellers, The Market Revolution. Studies of slavery’s expansion begin with Eugene
Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1965), and lead to
68 — John Tutino
Adam Rothman, Slave Country. The inseparable integration of southern cotton and
slavery and British industry is now the focus of Beckert, Empire of Cotton.
71 Sellers, The Market Revolution, remains essential: see also Paul Lack, The Texas
Revolutionary Experience: A Political and Social History, 1835–1836 (College
Station: Texas a&m University Press, 1995); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche
Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Brian Delay, The War of a
Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven, CT: Yale
72 On how war with Mexico led to Civil War, see John Ashworth, The Republic in
Crisis, 1848–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); that the Civil
War was fought over slavery, see Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was
Over (New York: Knopf, 2007); understanding the postwar United States begins
with Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New
York: Harper and Row, 1988).
73 This links this volume and Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty. After 1880
Britain built a new empire in Asia and Africa, while the United States expanded
beyond the continent, beginning in Cuba. France, Germany, Japan, and Russia
joined the scramble.
74 On Andean independence, see Walker, Smoldering Ashes, and Sarah Chambers,
From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
75 Lyman Johnson, Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic
World, 1776–1810 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
76 New studies of independence in the Río de la Plata began with Jonathan Brown, A
Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979); Ricardo Salvatore pioneered new visions of the postindependence era
in Wandering Paysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires dur
ing the Rosas Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), and now Lyman
Johnson has delivered Workshop of Revolution on developments before 1810.
77 For analysis placing Paraguay at the center of a history focused on t hose who
rejected British hegemony, see Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin Ame
rica in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
78 See Erick Langer, Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the
Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2009).
79 The conflicts that led to Mexico are synthesized in Alfredo Avila, En nombre de la
nación (Mexico City: Taurus, 2002); Jordana Dym, From Sovereign Villages to
National States: City, State, and Federation on Central America, 1759–1839 (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), brings new depth to understanding
independence and fragmentation in the former Kingdom of Guatemala.
80 On assertive indigenous communities after independence, see John Tutino, From
Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); on Bajío families after insur-
gency, see Tutino, “The Revolution in Mexican Independence.”

81 See Araceli Ibarra Bellón, El comercio y el poder en México, 1821–1864 (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998).
82 Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire; Delay, The War of a Thousand Deserts.
83 Lack, The Texas Revolutionary Experience.
84 This synthesizes John Tutino, “Capit alist Foundations: Spanish North America,
Mexico, and the United States,” in Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the
United States, ed. John Tutino (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).
85 John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 2 vols.
(1995; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
86 See Tutino, Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States.
87 Tutino, Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States. For a detailed
case history, see Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division
and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009).
88 I explore twentieth-century national projects, urbanization, and globalization in
John Tutino, “The Americas in the Twentieth-Century World,” chap. 1 in John
Tutino and Martin Melosi, “New World Cities,” in progress.
70 — John Tutino
2
The Cádiz Liberal Revolution

and Spanish American Ind ep end ence
Roberto Breña
Preamble
The new countries that came to define the modern Americas emerged within
the “Age of Revolution,” a historical period widely recognized, yet open to
diverse periodizations. Many focus on the half century from 1775 to 1825, em-
phasizing the revolution of the Thirteen Colonies (1776–1783), the French
Revolution (1789–1799), the Haitian revolt and independence (1791–1804),
and the Spanish American independence movements (1810–1824).1 Another
common vision sees the chronological span of the Age of Revolution as the
century that goes from 1750 to 1850.2 From a political perspective some his-
torians go as far back as 1688 (to include E ngland’s “Glorious Revolution”);
some are more “selective,” like Jacques Solé, who circumscribes this revolutionary
era to the period from 1773 to 1804,3 some like David Armitage and San-
jay Subrahmanyam prefer a “global” Age of Revolution from 1760 to 1840,4
and, finally, others have no problem extending this age to include the 1848
revolutions.5
In this essay, I focus my analysis on the political revolution that took place in
the Spanish-speaking world from 1808 to 1824. My main interest is to show the
decisive influence that the Cádiz liberal experience had on the Spanish Ameri-
can independence movements. Without understanding this experience it is al-
most impossible to grasp what went on politically and intellectually in Spanish
America during those sixteen years (with variations, of course, depending on
the region and the years in which we focus our attention). While the Spanish
American independence processes can be considered an integral part of the
Atlantic revolutions, their Atlantic character stems mainly from the peninsular
political revolution focused on Cádiz. This is not to say that the revolution in
the mundo hispánico did not share broad political principles, selected ideas,
and some debates with the other Atlantic revolutions; in this essay, however,
I emphasize the many particular, at times unique, visions, and programs that
defined political debates in the mundo hispánico between 1808 and 1824. They
make it clear that no revolutionary sequence, no “revolutionary wave,” began
in Boston, flowed to Paris, crashed in Port-au-Prince, and then flooded Mexico
City, Caracas, and Buenos Aires.
The Spanish American independence movements are unintelligible from
a political and intellectual perspective without understanding the events and
innovations that began in Spain in 1808. After decades of wars and trade con-
flicts, with France usually as an ally and Britain normally as an enemy, the up-
risings in several Spanish cities against Napoleon’s army in the spring of 1808
started the political crisis that turned the mundo hispánico upside down. In
the following years, peninsular Spaniards and Spanish Americans shaped a new
political vision that can be defined, albeit with varying emphases and connota-
tions, as “liberal” and that can be encapsulated, within the sociohistoric context
of the time, in the term “liberalism.” More precisely, I define it as liberalismo
hispánico. In the end, the crisis of 1808 led to the loss of all of Spain’s continental
territories in the New World; a loss suffered by an empire that had faced
political and military decay for more than a c entury (even as New Spain, Cuba,
and the Río de la Plata lived economic revivals); that had become increasingly
dependent on France; and that, as the b attle of Trafalgar definitively showed in
1805, had lost the military confrontation against England that had character-
ized European-Atlantic history since at least the War of Austrian Succession
(1740–1748). However, no conflict of the eighteenth century was as important
as the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) in showing the Spanish Crown the need
72 — Roberto Breña
to overhaul its full military, fiscal, and administrative structure in the New
World. The British occupation of the strategic port of La Habana in 1762 re-
vealed worrisome vulnerabilities.6 Yet Spain’s empire carried on. Its demise in
America during the first quarter of the nineteenth century was a protracted
process, with military and administrative weakness countered by economic re-
siliency. Social upheavals also marked the second half of the Spanish American
eighteenth century, as shown by the Quito insurrection of 1765 and the Túpac
Amaru rebellion of 1780 and related risings. Still—and despite the search by
so many “nationalist” historians to find precursors everywhere—the conflicts
and debates that began in Spain in 1808 and by diverse routes led to Spanish
American nations in the 1820s surprised everybody. The wars of independence
were completely unexpected (as many of its protagonists recognized).
The political crisis of the mundo hispánico began in 1808 with the Napo-
leonic invasion and occupation of most of Spain. Two years later, the futures
of Spain and Spanish America became inextricably linked to the city of Cádiz.
The reasons were mostly military: its geographical location on an isolated
peninsula with a very narrow access by land ensured that French armies could
not capture Cádiz—while British and Spanish ships could guard and supply
it from the sea. Safe from invading forces, Cádiz became the meeting place
of the approximately 260 delegates from the Peninsula and overseas (all from
Spanish America, but two from the Philippines) who gathered from Septem-
ber 1810 onward in the famous Cortes of Cádiz. From a political perspective,
this Parliament radically transformed the Spanish monarchy; first through a
series of decrees and then with its culminating work: the Constitution of Cádiz
or 1812 Constitution, sanctioned in March of that year.7 In January 1814 the
Cortes moved from Cádiz to Madrid, only to be dissolved by the recently
restored Fernando VII in May of that same year. The dissolution of the Cortes
ended the liberal revolution in the Peninsula and returned absolutism to Spain
and its empire. It did not end, however, the influence of Cádiz liberalism in the
mundo hispánico.
In the first section of this chapter I offer an overview of the Spanish lib-
eral revolution and its main intellectual sources. In the second I consider how
the revolution affected the Spanish American emancipation processes—which
gradually turned into “independence movements.”8 Finally, I explore the recent
historiography dealing with the mundo hispánico and the Spanish American
independence movements to emphasize that a more profound understanding
of Cádiz liberalism and the revoluciones hispánicas should lead to a more com-
plex understanding of the “Age of Revolution.”
Liberal Revolution and Spanish America — 73

The Spanish Liberal Revolution
The political and social turmoil that began in Spain in 1808 and soon spread to
its Americas began in the face of the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula by Napo-
leon’s army in the fall of 1807. Officially, this was not an “invasion” b ecause the
Spanish Crown had signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau in October, permitting
French troops to enter Spanish territory on their way to invade Portugal. Soon,
however, the supposed transit became an occupation: a tense calm lasted for
several months, u ntil the p eople of Madrid revolted against the French garrison
on May 2, 1808. Three weeks l ater, when the Gazeta de Madrid spread the news
to several other Spanish cities of the so-called “abdications” of Bayonne, a gen-
eral insurrection began.9 The presence of Napoleon’s army in Spanish territory
then became a full-fledged occupation. From that moment, the traditional alli-
ance between Spain and France that had persisted during almost all of the eigh
teenth century, formalized through several Bourbon pactos de familia, came to
an end. For the next six years the Peninsula was the scene of a war so harrowing
that Goya’s famous depiction of it (Los desastres de la guerra) became an endur-
ing symbol of the senseless and inexhaustible violence of all wars.
The war with France meant that the Spanish army and p eople had to face
the most powerful army of the time. Yet in an unexpected and unique way, the
military conflict became a political revolution. During the first two years
the revolution was led by a variety of local juntas, l ater coordinated with much
difficulty by a Junta Central that suddenly dissolved in January 1810 in the face
of political adversities and defeats against the French army. To that point, the
events taking place in the Peninsula did not have a political label. That changed
during 1810 when the political group with the upper hand in the Cortes that
gathered in Cádiz became known as liberales. The extent and depth of the
changes that the Cortes designed for Spain and Spanish America are so vast
that it is difficult to detail them in a few pages. I w
ill first outline important ele
ments of the political situation in the Peninsula between 1808 and 1814, then
proceed to engage the main political tenets of the “first Spanish liberalism,” and
finally explore key doctrinal and intellectual sources.10 Together, these three
elements should give a clear idea of the revolutionary character of first Spanish
liberalism while revealing of some of its tensions and ambiguities.
The liberal revolution of 1808 to 1814 derived some of its main traits from
key aspects of Spanish society at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The
extraordinary power wielded by the valido Manuel Godoy (Carlos IV’s first min-
ister for fifteen years) was increasingly resented; in fact, the Spanish Crown’s
legitimacy and power declined markedly during Godoy’s tenure. Legitimacy
plummeted for two main reasons. The first one was the Crown’s increasing
Caracas FRANCE
Cities in Spanish America that did not follow the Cadiz Constitution Bayonne
Madrid
PORTUGAL
Lisbon S PA I N
Seville
Cádiz
Boston
New York
San Francisco
UNITED
Santa STATES AT L A N T I C
Fe Charleston
OCEAN
San Antonio New Orleans
VICEROYALTY
OF NEW SPAIN
Zacatecas Havana
Guanajuato
Mexico City
CAPTAINCY GENERAL Maracaibo Coro

Santa Marta CAPTAINCY GENERAL
OF GUATEMALA Caracas OF VENEZUELA
Cartagena
Valencia
VICEROYALTY Bogota
OF NEW GRANADA Popayán
Quito
PORTUGUESE BRAZIL Recife
Lima Cuzco Salvador
VICEROYALTY
OF PERU
Potosí
PA C I F I C
Rio de Janeiro
OCEAN
KINGDOM
OF CHILE
Santiago Montevideo
Buenos Aires
VICEROYALTY
OF RIO DE LA PLATA
0 500 1000 1500 mi
0 1000 2000 km
Map 2.1. The Cádiz Constitution and Spanish America, ca. 1812–1814
dependence on Napoleon. The second one was the all too public confronta-
tion between Carlos IV, king since 1789, and his eldest son, Fernando. Th ese
confrontations led to the abdication by Carlos to his son after the so-called
motín (riot) of Aranjuez in March 1808 (a rising planned by Fernando’s sup-
porters).11 The Spanish monarchy was losing respect and legitimacy at the very
moment when the French army was occupying almost all of Spain’s peninsular
territory.
This uncertain legitimacy opened the way for the dos años cruciales (two
crucial years), as François-Xavier Guerra called 1808 and 1809. A profound
ideological transformation affecting the whole mundo hispánico began in the
biennium that preceded the Cortes of Cádiz and the beginning of the Spanish
American emancipation processes.12 Militarily, the years 1808–1810 brought a
long list of French victories on Spanish battlefields (notwithstanding the fa-
mous Spanish victory at Bailén in July 1808). In the political realm the Junta
Central had a difficult time constituting itself as the head of the numerous local
juntas while Fernando was a prisoner of Napoleon at Bayonne.13
For a long time, Spanish historiography presented these local juntas, that
organized the fighting against the French, as “popular,” that is, formed by mem-
bers of all levels of society, including the least advantaged. It is now clear that
the vast majority of them w ere formed by the notables of each city or town.
Still, the crisis of 1808 started as a popular revolt against the French and, in the
context of the moment, most juntas could not work without popular support.
At the same time, the Spanish war against French occupation made the term
“guerrilla” synonymous with armed popular resistance.14 This pivotal period of
Spanish history was therefore s haped in important ways by social movements
of popular origin. Such foundations w ere reflected, explicitly or implicitly, in
the ideology the liberals developed from 1808 through 1814; they w ere a central
element of Spanish patriotism during the war—and of an enduring Spanish
nationalism.
In January 1810, the Junta Central, overwhelmed by military defeats, without
economic resources, and facing a campaign of discredit by internal enemies,
dissolved itself. In the process, it first made its most important decision: to
summon the election of Cortes. The institution was no novelty: Cortes had
existed in several Spanish kingdoms since the Middle Ages, gathering repre-
sentatives of cities and towns to discuss, sanction, or limit royal decisions. But
there was novelty in the Cortes that gathered in Cádiz in 1810: the vast major-
ity of the members would be elected by much of the adult male population,
something unprecedented in Spain (or in any other part of the world). No less
important, the Americas w ere included in the new representative body (though
the method of electing them was different, to ensure that deputies from the
peninsula would hold a strong majority). As mentioned and although numbers
vary depending on the date and the issue u nder discussion, in total around 260
deputies participated in the extraordinary Cortes that opened in Cádiz in
September 1810. Of them, about sixty were Spanish Americans—though Span-
ish America’s population was larger than Spain’s.15
The participation of the American representatives in the debates was very
important; several topics would not have been discussed at all or would have
been debated very differently without the Americans’ presence. But they were
a minority, and they w ere defeated at every turn when votes came on the most
important economic or political issues (i.e., free trade or political autonomy
for their territories). Despite their active participation in several of the most
important debates, the direct contributions of Spanish American deputies to
the 384 articles of the final version of the Cádiz Constitution w ere limited. We
will return to the document later. At this point, it is important to look at Cádiz,
the city that became the head and the heart of the Spanish liberal revolution.
As mentioned, Cádiz was the seat of the Spanish government from 1810
to 1814 for purely geo-military reasons. Still, it is important to recognize the
exceptionality of the city within Spain. It was a port and by far the most impor
tant point of contact of the Peninsula with Spain’s Americ as. This brought a
constant circulation of goods, persons, and ideas from across the world, and the
presence of merchants, bankers, intellectuals, and politicians of diverse nation-
alities. Cádiz was a cosmopolitan city, a place used to “other” ways of thinking,
with the vitality of any port where business is vibrant—and in the eyes of many
visitors a very beautiful city. Lord Byron, for example, wrote in 1809: “Cadiz,
sweet Cadiz!—it is the first spot in the Creation. The beauty of its streets and
mansions are only excelled by the loveliness of its inhabitants.”16 Cádiz was not
a “traditional” Spanish city. How “untraditional” it was can be inferred by the
revolution it hosted and by the reaction of the majority of Spaniards when Fer-
nando VII returned to the Peninsula from his captivity in France and destroyed
all that the Cortes had done. In fact, in May 1814 the king issued a decree stat-
ing that Spaniards should behave as if the Cortes had never existed.17 Most
Spaniards, exhausted by six years of war and skeptical about the liberals’ politi
cal innovations, acquiesced in the fall of liberalism (until 1820, when liberals
returned to power and the 1812 Constitution was reinstated).
Still, what happened in Cádiz between 1810 and 1814 cannot be explained
mainly by the characteristics of the city, unorthodox as it was within the Spain
of 1810. What went on in the port has to be explained first by the men who
shaped the liberal revolution. They w ere, by any standard, a small group—in
fact, a very small group of men. Any list can be extended to include dozens of
names, but the main protagonists of the Spanish liberal revolution in Cádiz
were few: among the peninsulares, I would mention Manuel José Quintana,
Agustín de Argüelles, José María Queipo de Llano (better known as the count
of Toreno), Diego Muñoz Torrero, Álvaro Florez Estrada, and, with hind-
sight and from a distance (for he left Spain for England in 1810), José María
Blanco White. Among the Spanish American representatives with unequivo-
cal liberal perspectives, I would highlight José Mejía Lequerica, José Miguel
Ramos Arizpe, José Miguel Guridi, and Joaquín Fernández de Leiva. On this
short list, all but Quintana, Flórez Estrada, and Blanco White were deputies in
the Cortes. Four w ere priests (Muñoz Torrero, Blanco White, Ramos Arizpe,
and Guridi), five had studied law (Quintana, Flórez Estrada, Argüelles, Mejía
Lequerica, and Fernández de Leiva) and one was a noble (Toreno). Such a list,
revealing in some respects (for example, the weight of churchmen in the Span-
ish liberal revolution), is clearly insufficient. It ignores the hundreds of other
men who enabled key achievements and spread important ideas. Many depu-
ties contributed proposals, arguments, and votes to shape Cádiz liberalism,
although most did so in “selective” ways, depending on the issue u nder discus-
sion. On questions concerning Spanish America, Peninsulars and Americans
were often on different sides.
The men listed above could not have led the Cádiz liberal revolution with-
out the unprecedented situation created by the 1808 crisis. The absence of the
king, the occupation of most Spanish territory by the French army, the popu
lar turmoil provoked by the war against Napoleon, the British economic and
military support, the de facto freedom of the press that existed in the Peninsula
since the beginning of the crisis hispánica, and last but not least, the widespread
discontent with Godoy and the way he handled the monarchy for years, all
combined to create an exceptional “breeding ground.” Among these elements,
the liberty to publish political texts was paramount: from the spring of 1808 the
Spanish press became an open and vibrant political forum.18
Liberal leaders quickly established a direct link between the war against
Napoleon and the political revolution they were trying to forge—nuestra revo
lución (our revolution). A major political crisis, popular participation in upris-
ings all over the Peninsula, the religious character of the war against the French
(considered atheists by many Spaniards), and freedom of the press became an
explosive combination. If we add the unlimited devotion of the Spanish p eople
to the absent king Fernando (known as El Deseado, “the Desired One”), the con-
centration in the city of Cádiz of Spaniards looking for a political change, and
the fact that for the first time in Spanish history elected Cortes were in perma-
nent session working on a new constitution, we can get an idea of life in “sweet
Cadiz” during the liberal revolution.
In any case, while this revolution was the result of the participation of many
people, at its core was the small number of deputies identified as liberales. For
the first time, the term “liberal” defined a political group. From Cádiz, the term
extended to Spanish America, then across Europe and, eventually, to the rest
of world.19
The first Spanish liberalism mixed traditional and revolutionary elements.
In new historical circumstances, traditional elements gained strong reformist
connotations and led to revolutionary consequences. Karl Marx saw the am-
biguous nature of the Cádiz Constitution as a combination of the old and the
new in which the latter prevailed. For him, the document was a compromise
between the “liberal ideas of the eighteenth century” and “the obscure tradi-
tions of theocracy”; the fusion made him wonder how such a radical document
came out “of the old monastic and absolutist Spain.”20
The main tenets of the first Spanish liberalism are centered in the following
constitutional articles: national sovereignty (art. 3), protection of individual
rights (art. 4), purpose of government (“the happiness of the Nation and the
well-being of the individuals that compose it,” art. 13), division of powers (arts.
15–17), national representation (art. 27), indirect electoral system in three levels
(arts. 34–103), inviolability of individual liberty by the king (art. 172, section 11),
fair administration of criminal justice (arts. 286–308), inviolability of each
person’s home (art. 306), general taxation (art. 339), national education (arts.
366–370), and, last but not least, freedom of the press (art. 371). Many of these
stipulations may not seem new, to the extent they had precedents in the British
legislation emanating mainly from the “Glorious Revolution” (1688–1689), the
Constitution of the United States (1787), or the French constitutions that
came out of the revolution of 1789.
Still, some provisions of the Cádiz Constitution were revolutionary from
any perspective: for example, the wide extension of the franchise and the inclu-
sion of the Americas’ indigenous peoples as citizens. Ultimately, the revolu-
tionary character of any constitution comes from the prevailing sociopolitical
conditions in which it sees light. The Cádiz Charter came out of a global mon-
archy (including the Philippines) that had worked for time immemorial under
principles of divine right. In that context, the Constitution of 1812 brought a
revolutionary rebalancing of the power of God, the rights of the pueblos in
Cortes, and a p eople suddenly in arms against ungodly French usurpers. The
core political, social, and cultural values that sustained the Antiguo Régimen in
Spain and its empire for centuries were reworked in transforming ways.
Marx’s perception of the radicalism of the Cádiz Constitution was right; its
novelty built on traditional elements that explain the ideological ambiguity he
read in the document. The main argument against the constitution’s revolu-
tionary character has focused on article 12, establishing Catholicism as the ex-
clusive religion and forbidding any other. Other articles in the charter point in
the same direction: articles 35–58 on the organization of elections at the parish
level (thus overseen by local priests) and article 249, maintaining the legal priv-
ileges of the clergy. If simple claims of divine right ended with the declaration
of national sovereignty the Cortes made on its first day (September 24, 1810),
the recognition of God’s ultimate power and of Catholic rights held strong.
Many historians have focused on article 12 to question the depth of the first
Spanish liberalism. But if Spanish political traditions and new historical circum-
stances are taken into consideration, this position is untenable. It ignores Span-
ish history since at least the end of the fifteenth c entury. Limiting the power of
the monarch with a written constitution was a radical turn that did not require
a denial of God’s rights or the Church’s roles. And the Realpolitik of re-creating
government in the face of a foreign invasion and broad popular mobilization
also inhibited any explicit turn against the Church. As leading liberals like Ar-
güelles and Toreno argued years later to justify their less than radical position
regarding the Church, many of the changes pressed by the constitution were
going to face adversity within Spanish society (as was the case); a proclamation
of religious tolerance would have undermined the whole liberal project.21
Still, many decrees issued by the Cortes before the constitution was sanc-
tioned in March 1812 did diminish the power of the Church, seeking to reduce
its size and limit its power. The abolition of the Inquisition was a major liberal
accomplishment. The six articles of title IX (arts. 366–371) are equally impor
tant: education at all levels became the responsibility of the government and a
“General Direction of Studies” was created to review and control public edu-
cation (art. 369). Education came under the oversight of continuing Cortes
that will “legislate on everything that has to do with [this] important object”
(art. 370). Article 371 also guaranteed freedom of the press, ending Church
censorship. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of t hese articles in pro-
moting a secularization that can be considered timid only by t hose blind to the
role the Church and the power of Catholicism in Spanish society—historically
and still in 1810. Taking education from the Church was an indispensable step
toward the kind of society the liberales wanted for Spain and its overseas ter-
ritories.22 The 1812 Cádiz Constitution maintained Catholicism, but simulta
neously ended the exclusive role of the Church in education, the press, and
public discourse.
A good way to gauge what national sovereignty, political equality, separa-
tion of powers, individual rights, elections, and a national system of education
meant in peninsular Spain and its territories in America and Asia is the reac-
tion of the Church to the Cádiz Constitution. Clerical opposition could not
have been more adamant or more vocal. It is impossible to explain the recep-
tion of Fernando VII on his return to Spain in 1814 and the ease with which
he reinstalled absolutism without the total support of the clerical hierarchy.
(The same applies to the army; in fact, in the heat of the moment its support
was even more decisive for the return of absolutism.) It should be remembered,
however, that several priests played central roles in the Cortes, e ither designing
many liberal measures or supporting them wholeheartedly. Their participation
contrasts with the staunch and permanent antiliberal position of the Church
hierarchy in e very domain of political and social life (an opposition that con-
tinued throughout the nineteenth century, and beyond).
The actions of Fernando VII when he returned and reinstated absolutism in
1814 also give a good measure of the radical significance of the Cádiz Constitu-
tion. Much has been written about the alliance between “the Throne and the
Altar” in eighteenth-century Spain. The alliance was tested by the “regalist”
reforms of Carlos III; but after his death in 1788 and then in reaction to the
French Revolution, the Spanish Crown and Church grew closer u nder Carlos
IV. If we add the widespread belief among the Spanish people that the French
were anti-Catholic and the profound Catholicism of Fernando VII, it is no sur-
prise that the defeat of the French in 1814 brought a renewal of an intimate
alliance between king and Church in Spain.
This exploration of the complex relationship among Cádiz liberals, Ca-
tholicism, and the Church highlights the role of the 1812 Constitution as
revolutionary—within Spanish history and Spanish tradition. Analysts com-
ing from other traditions cannot claim that Cádiz liberalism copied Anglo-
American and French precedents—and malign it for not copying their
anticlerical examples. In this and many other ways, Hispanic liberalism was
uniquely revolutionary.
What w ere the main intellectual sources of the first Spanish liberalism? The
most important are scholasticism, the modern school of Natural Law, Spanish
historic nationalism (nacionalismo histórico), the Spanish Enlightenment, and
finally French constitutional thought (especially the Constitution of 1791).23
These currents reveal the eclecticism of Spanish liberalism. Let us briefly out-
line the importance of each.
On scholasticism, during the crisis hispánica of the early nineteenth c entury
it is better to refer to “neoscholasticism.” The main neoscholastic authors “present”
in the Cádiz Cortes were Francisco de Vitoria (1485–1546), Juan de Mariana
(1536–1624), and Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), thinkers often identified with
the School of Salamanca. As Quentin Skinner has shown, these authors led a
revival of Thomism that made very important contributions to the develop-
ment of modern political thought. They laid the foundations of social contract
theory and took the notion of consent to new levels of development.24 How-
ever, if Vitoria, Mariana, and Suárez w ere present in Cádiz, it was not mainly
because of the idea of consent, but regarding four related questions that w ere
on the Cortes’s agenda due to the French occupation: the ultimate locus of
power, the sovereignty of the pueblos (cities, towns, and other communities),
the subsequent limits of kingly power, and the consequent right of the pueblos
to resist any usurpation of sovereignty. The neoscholastics gave t hese topics dif
ferent connotations, but all insisted on the preeminence of the community as
the foundation of political legitimacy.25 Their presence in the debates of the
Cortes was in a certain way inevitable; Vitoria, Mariana, and Suárez were es-
sential to the curricula of e very Spanish and Spanish American university. They
were, in other words, part of the “intellectual baggage” of the vast majority of
the Cádiz deputies. The sovereignty of the pueblos, derived ultimately from
God, was an enduring and very much debated Spanish tradition; it did not
have to be imported or copied from anywhere.
The important exponents of modern Natural Law were many; the best-
known in Spain during the second half of the eighteenth c entury were Gro-
tius (1583–1645), Pufendorf (1632–1694), Barbeyrac (1644–1744), and Vattel
(1714–1767). The neo-Thomists rigorously maintained the traditional scholas-
tic hierarchy of Eternal, Divine, Natural and human law. For them, Natural
Law was a reflection of Eternal Law—an “implant” in men to understand the
designs of God.26 This understanding of Natural Law began to change when
Grotius saw it as a dictate of reason, of the rational nature of man; for him, the
key was not conformity with nature, but conformity with rational nature.27
Several proponents of modern Natural Law w ere introduced into Spanish
universities in the 1770s, shaping the visions of many political thinkers as the
nineteenth century began. In the Cádiz Cortes, two of the most important
theses of what Joaquín Varela Suanzes calls iusnaturalismo racionalista came up
in several debates, especially regarding the state of nature and the social con-
tract.28 Closely linked to rationalist Natural Law is another important source
of the first Spanish liberalism: the constitutional thought contained, implicitly
or explicitly, in the works of French thinkers like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and
Sieyès. These authors w ere also present in the Cádiz debates, albeit in varied
disguises. In the case of Rousseau, contemporary historiography is cautious
when calibrating his influence on Spanish liberalism. His literary and peda-
gogic ideas influenced the Spanish Enlightenment, no doubt; but his politics
were challenged, and become hard to discuss and assess since the French Revo-
lution and even more after the occupation by Napoleon’s army in 1808.
In this regard, the relative openness of the Spanish Crown to the books and
ideas coming from its Bourbon ally and neighbor came to a drastic halt in 1789.
The count of Floridablanca, one of the most important ministers of the pe-
riod, closed the border to stop revolutionary material from entering Spain. The
closure was not fully effective, but the political reaction of the Spanish gov-
ernment and its increasingly conservative stance toward revolutionary France
are evident. Between 1790 and 1792 the most “progressive” members of the
Spanish government lost their posts: Cabarrús, Jovellanos, Campomanes, and
Aranda. The French Revolution thus fortified the ideology, the interests, and
the political position of the Church and of the most conservative sectors of
Spanish society.
As Emilio La Parra showed in his biography of Godoy, it is true that on
questions of regalism and some economic goals there was no rupture of the
Spanish Enlightenment between Carlos III and Carlos IV. However, there is
no denying that in other aspects the arrival of Godoy to power in 1790 stulti-
fied winds of change that had flourished u nder Carlos III.29 As Antonio de
Maravall and Antonio Elorza showed long ago, some Spanish authors made
enlightened and advanced political proposals in the 1780s (León del Arroyal,
Manuel de Aguirre, and Valentín de Foronda among them). Still, the limited
diffusion of their work and the notion, present in all of them, that the king had
to be the center and arbiter of political reforms, make it difficult to see a direct
link between the Spanish Enlightenment and the Cádiz Cortes, that w ere so
30
adamant in limiting the king’s power. The links between the Spanish Enlight-
enment, a rationalist movement focused on socioeconomic (i.e., nonpolitical)
reform, and the Cádiz political revolution are not as easy to establish as schol-
ars suggested for a long time, and some historians still do. The Enlightenment
was primarily a protracted intellectual process focused on administrative and
economic reforms that aimed to bolster the monarchy; Cádiz was first and
foremost a political revolution that aimed to limit the monarchy, turn it into a
constitutional regime, expel the French, and hold the empire together.
A lot of ink has been spilled on the purported influence of the French Con-
stitution of 1791 on the Spanish Charter of 1812. Was the Cádiz text an imita-
tion of the 1791 document? The French text had clear influences on the Cádiz
Constitution, but there were also blatant differences regarding certain aspects
of government, political values, and ideological visions. Most notably, a deep
Spanish historical perspective—the historicismo nacionalista discussed in what
follows—justifies the Cádiz text, while a tabula rasa mentality prevails in all
the French constitutions drafted in the shadow of the revolution of 1789. The
Cádiz Charter permits popular participation in elections and devotes a lot of
space to electoral issues, but includes no Declaration of Rights. And as noted,
the Cádiz document remained firmly grounded in Spanish Catholicism, much
in contrast with the areligious character of French revolutionary texts. Influ-
ence, yes; copying, no.
We arrive at arguably the most important doctrinal and ideological source
of the first Spanish liberalism: Spanish nationalist historicism or historicismo
nacionalista. The notion of Spain’s “historic constitution” was one of the most
debated issues in Cádiz. The concept had been discussed in Spanish intellectual
circles since 1780, when Jovellanos presented his discourse of admission to the
Royal Academy of History titled Sobre la necesidad de unir al estudio de nuestra
legislación el de nuestra historia (“On the need to join the study of our legislation
to the study of our history”).31 He argued that the political liberty individuals
enjoyed in Spanish medieval kingdoms was lost under the Habsburg dynasty at
the beginning of the sixteenth century. The liberty assured u ntil that moment
by Cortes that existed in several Spanish kingdoms had kept the power of kings
within certain limits. The situation changed with the Hapsburgs—especially
the first two, Carlos I and Felipe II. For Jovellanos civil liberty was progres-
sively lost (thus the notion of “liberty recovered,” so important for first Spanish
liberalism). Therefore, Jovellanos argued that the primary task was to end three
hundred years of despotism; his practical recommendations, however, were less
critical.32 Without ignoring his historical inaccuracies regarding the real power
of the medieval Cortes, Jovellanos’s idea of a liberty reclaimed or recovered
became, in the hands of the liberales doceañistas, one of the most powerful ideo-
logical devices at work in Cádiz.
The same can be said of the vision of Spain’s history presented by the second
most important author of “historical nationalism”: Francisco Martínez Ma-
rina. He wrote Teoría de las Cortes, the most complete text of this current of
thought; this book was a historical interpretation and an ideological construct
that became a political device.33 Martínez Marina’s life and work reflected the
ambiguities and inconsistencies of the first Spanish liberalism—to such an ex-
tent that it is difficult to locate him in the ideological spectrum of the age. He
first collaborated with the Napoleonic government of José I, but his afrance
sado past did not prevent his ideas from being read and discussed widely, nor
block his election as a deputy in the revived Cortes of 1820.34 Martínez Marina
began to develop Jovellanos’s ideas in his Ensayo histórico-crítico sobre la legis
lación y principales cuerpos legales de los reinos de León y Castilla (1808), but it
was his later Teoría de las Cortes (1813) that gave him notoriety. He extended
Jovellanos’s thesis insisting on the despotism of the Habsburg and Bourbon
dynasties. In the aftermath of the 1808 crisis, Martínez Marina’s argument was
recovered, modified, and developed by Cádiz liberals who found in it Spanish
precedents for popular sovereignty, the rejection of absolutism, and the recov-
ery of individual and municipal liberties.35
The third key text of Spanish historic nationalism, following Jovellanos
and Martínez Marina, is the “Preliminary Discourse” that prefaced the Cádiz
Constitution. Its authorship is traditionally attributed to Argüelles, the dep-
uty considered by friends and foes alike as the leader of the liberal group at
the Cádiz Cortes. Although he was responsible for most of its content, other
members of the constitutional commission contributed to the “Discourse.”
This text became the most important synthesis of the doctrine and program of
early Spanish liberalism. Its opening words have been cited repeatedly. I pres
ent them here again because they show the level of complexity and tension of
the relationship that Spanish liberals established with their past:
The Commission does not propose anything that cannot be found in
authentic and solemn form in the various legislative bodies of Spain, but
rather the novelty lies in the way in which the duties of government have
been distributed. Said duties have been ordered and classified such that
they might form a system of foundational and constitutional law that
was in accordance with the fundamental laws of Aragon, Navarre, and
Castile with regard to national liberty and independence, to the privi-
leges and obligations of citizens, to the dignity and authority of the King
and the judicial system, to the establishment and use of the armed forces,
and to the economic and administrative methods to be employed in the
provinces.36
In these lines, the revival of Spanish monarchical traditions could not be
stated more clearly. Yet as María Luisa Sánchez-Mejía emphasizes, the constitu-
tion also contained articles that were pure “revolutionary liberalism”: sover-
eignty of the nation, a one chamber parliament, individual liberties, clear limits
to the king’s power, division of powers, and the responsibility of ministers to the
Parliament.37 The insistence of key liberals on the traditional character of their
enterprise may thus seem odd. However, with the Spanish people immersed in
a brutal war against Napoleon, this insistence gains intelligibility as another
example of their political ability. Let us read some lines from the end of the
“Discourse”:
The Constitution will never be in greater danger than from the moment
it is announced until, following the proposal that the Constitution will
put into place [that it cannot be modified in eight years, article 375], the
document begins to more firmly establish itself and thereby reduce the
aversion and repugnance that work against it. Feelings of resentment,
revenge, worries, diverse interests, and even habit and tradition, will con-
spire against the Constitution.38
Regarding those authors who still question the liberal character of the Con-
stitution and the Spanish revolution of 1808–1814, it should be mentioned
that there is no one model or archetype of liberalism. Instead, diverse histori-
cal liberalisms have existed in the Western world during the last two hundred
years. It is useful to cite more of the “Discourse” to show to what extent the
Cádiz enterprise belongs among them:
The Government must ensure that our laws are upheld. This must be its
primary concern; but in order to preserve the peace and tranquility of the
people, the government does not need to determine the interests of pri-
vate citizens by means of court rulings and political decisions. The harm
ful insistence on controlling all areas of civilian life by means of the regu
lations and mandates of political authorities have brought about similar
and even greater ills than t hose that were supposed to be prevented by such
control.
A few lines ahead:
True progress means protecting liberty in each individual’s exercise of

his physical and moral authority according to his needs and preferences.
There is nothing more appropriate for the achievement of this objective
than the entities that established u nder the proposed system. This system
rests on two principles: to preserve the role of government so that it
might be able to perform all its obligations and to grant freedom to the
nation’s private citizens so that personal interest might be, in the case of each
and every individual, the agent that drives their efforts t oward well-being
and advancement.39
ese liberal elements in the “Discourse” were partially grounded in some

Th
of the central tenets of historic nationalism: the adherence to the historic
legislation of Spain, the utmost admiration for the Spanish medieval Cortes,
the decadence of Spain attributed to kingly despotism, and the progressive loss
of the limiting power that the Cortes supposedly wielded. The mixture was un-
stable, due to the prescriptive role given to history by nacionalismo histórico.
Still, in the political situation created by the crisis of 1808, this historical,
ideological, and political “cocktail” proved to be very effective. In the final
analysis, historic nationalism was the most original element of the first Spanish
liberalism—a history and a nationalism that could not be imported, yet could
be exported and adapted to Spanish America.
Cádiz Liberalism and Spanish America

In the “Preliminary Discourse” of the Cádiz Constitution there is only one
mention of the wars that by March 1812, when the charter was sanctioned, had
been going on for more than a year and a half in several parts of Spanish Ame
rica. The reference points to the liberal decrees that the Cortes a dopted on the
administration of justice, which the “Discourse” stated “will obviously begin
to heal the wounds that the rejection of the motherland’s revolution, together
with the disorder and arbitrariness of the previous Government, have opened
unfortunately in some of Spain’s overseas provinces.”40 These words evince an
idea cherished by peninsular liberals: that the text, almost by itself, would pac-
ify the American insurrections. Regarding the “disorder and arbitrariness of
the previous Government,” the draft ers of the “Discourse” surely referred to the
Junta Central. The reference reveals a lack of self-criticism. The Junta Central
had disappeared in January 1810, and the Cortes that gathered in Cádiz in Sep-
tember of that year not only failed to offer any proposal to pacify the Americas;
on the contrary, it sent more soldiers to fight American “rebels.”41
If one goal of the Cádiz project was to hold Spain’s Americas in the em-
pire and in the fight against Napoleon, it succeeded despite insurgencies in
New Spain and resistance in Caracas and Buenos Aires during its first years of
implementation. Yet the 1812 Constitution contributed to transatlantic politi
cal debates that led most of the Americas to break away—during the charter’s
second implementation (with a new anticlerical edge), a fter 1820. Cádiz liber-
alism alone could not hold Spain’s domains together, nor did it alone create
Spanish American republics. But it did create liberties that helped keep the
empire together in the face of insurgencies to 1814—and fueled divisions that
contributed to its fall after 1820.
It should not be forgotten that reactions in Spanish America to Napoleon’s
1808 invasion of the Peninsula unanimously supported the motherland (madre
patria), and specifically Fernando VII. During 1809 there w ere confrontations
in Chuquisaca, La Paz, and Quito between Americans and the peninsular au-
thorities regarding the way the king’s sovereignty was to be kept while he was
a prisoner in France. Overt conflict between the metropolis and its colonies
in America began in April 1810, when the Junta of Caracas decided not to rec-
ognize the legitimacy of the Regency that had succeeded the Junta Central in
January of that year as the highest entity representing the deposed king. This
conflict turned into an open war for separation in July 1811, when a Caracas
junta declared Venezuela independent.42 Separation had become an option.
At Cádiz, the empire was reconceived as a constitutional monarchy that
would guide the destiny of a transatlantic Spanish nation united under shared
liberal principles and institutions. While many in the Americas saw gain, they
also saw the limits of Cádiz when dealing with some of their most cherished
goals: commercial freedom and local self-rule. Paradoxically, the Cádiz liberal-
ism designed to forge transatlantic unity increasingly became a language and
a tool that fostered divisiveness between españoles peninsulares and españoles
americanos.
Beginning in the summer of 1808 new political ideas coming from the
Peninsula w ere discussed and debated with growing intensity across Spanish
America. Newspapers, pamphlets, and leaflets published in Madrid, Seville,
and Cádiz arrived in the American ports and reached all the important cities.
Inevitably, there was a lapse of months between events in the Peninsula and
the time they w ere known in America. More important, the news of several
months often arrived at once in American ports (creating uncertainty, limiting
understanding of peninsular events, and inhibiting possibilities of reacting ef-
fectively). Finally, the enormous distances and the time ships took to make the
journey (especially to distant ports in South America) often made measures
taken by the Junta Central, the Regency, or the Cortes obsolete on arrival. Such
delays can be more or less harmless in “normal” times, but more than once they
proved to be crucial as the mundo hispánico lived critical months.
By the time the Cortes gathered on September 24, 1810, Juntas of Caracas,
Buenos Aires, and Bogotá had decided not to recognize the executive power
claimed by the Regency. And although the new Cortes could not know it, a
few days earlier a popular rebellion against Spanish authorities had begun in
New Spain, the richest and most populated territory of the Spanish America.
The rising, headed by the priest Miguel Hidalgo, was crushed after only four
months; still, it shook established powers, devastated the silver economy (so
important to the fight against Napoleon), and set off continuing conflicts—
political and popular—that would change the face of the viceroyalty permanently.
Less violent movements that would nonetheless also end up in independence
several years after, also started in September 1810 in two South American cities,
Santiago and Quito.
Meanwhile, the Spanish American deputies at Cádiz faced possibilities and
limits.43 As noted, the American minority was always defeated when their most
important political and economic demands came to a vote. This was perhaps
inevitable: peninsular liberals never recognized the distinctive nature of the
American territories and the different needs of its inhabitants. This “central-
izing” perspective prevailed in the Cádiz Cortes from the very beginning (the
same can be said of the Madrid Cortes during the Trienio Liberal of 1820–1823).
However, it is important to put this issue in historical perspective. During the
eighteenth century, the Spanish American territories had been treated increas-
ingly as colonies, though Spanish legal tradition considered them kingdoms.
Between 1810 and 1814 the American territories did obtain many things from
the Cortes: among them, the end of tributes paid by indigenous and mixed
peoples, limited representative institutions, freedom of cultivation, some com-
mercial openings, new rights to justice and education, and legislation that
softened social hierarchies. In contrast with the numerous constitutional docu-
ments drafted in Spanish America during these years, the goal of the Cádiz
Constitution was to keep the transatlantic Spanish nation together. Article 18
granted full citizenship to indigenous Americans—a radical inclusionary step
taken by Spanish liberals, far beyond anything contemplated by the men who
turned thirteen colonies into the United States thirty years earlier.44
The 1812 Constitution aimed to keep the transatlantic nation together
through “unitary” rule. It centralized political power in the hands of new jefes
políticos or jefes superiores appointed by the king in each Spanish American
jurisdiction. The political chiefs would rule over two local entities created by
the constitution—the diputaciones provinciales (Provincial Deputations) and
ayuntamientos (city and town councils) that w ere given only administrative
prerogatives. However, once in place the ayuntamientos progressively acquired
capacities that were both administrative and political. In this, some of the most
prescient peninsular liberals were proven right in their fears that due to the
enormous distance from the center of political power, any political autonomy
allowed to Spanish Americans would lead sooner than l ater to federalism and,
in the long run, to the dissolution of the monarchy. In this and other ways,
rights given by a charter seeking to forge unity worked to facilitate autonomy—
and, in time, division.
The Cádiz Constitution did not operate in the w hole of Spanish America
during its first period of application (1812 to 1814); it ruled less widely when it
was reinstalled during the Trienio. During its first phase, it was implemented
in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (except in the Bajío and other regions mired
in insurgency), the Captaincy of Guatemala, the Viceroyalty of Peru, and some
cities in the Captaincy of Venezuela and the Viceroyalty of New Granada, as
well as the city of Montevideo. Provincial deputations appeared in regional
capitals, leading cities elected constitutional councils, old indigenous republics
experimented with liberal municipalities—via parish elections that included all
Hispanic and indigenous men, and excluded those of African ancestry, until se
lections moved up to electors who ensured that only the notables gained office.
The influence of first Spanish liberalism was direct in some cases, important
in many others, but always debated, due to the conflictive circumstances.
Liberalismo hispánico also exerted influence in discussions and debates in
territories where the constitution was not implemented.45 Recent studies show
that the Cádiz Constitution and the first Spanish liberalism had considerable
influence even in the Río de la Plata region. While pursuing local autonomies,
leaders kept informed of constitutional debates and constitutional offerings,
responding in their own way to peninsular liberalism and at the same time
promoting independence from the metropolis.46 A leading Argentine scholar
of the political history of the Río de la Plata in the independence period, Mar-
cela Ternavasio, concluded that the Cádiz experience “had a strong presence in
the rioplatense revolutionary process.”47
The first Spanish liberalism came to an abrupt end in the Peninsula, and
formally in the Americas, with the return of Fernando VII in 1814. Six years
later liberals returned to power in Spain and forced the Cádiz Constitution on
Fernando. In the interim, movements toward independence had advanced in
South America. In Peru loyalty still held, thanks to the political and military
abilities of Viceroy José Fernando de Abascal and a creole elite who feared any
experiment with popular sovereignty as the memories of the devastating risings
of the 1780s held strong. In New Spain, political insurgency had declined since
1815, yet was never vanquished—and the popular insurgency that had devas-
tated the Bajío was just ending in 1820.
Yet, while much had changed in the Americas since 1814, the Trienio Liberal
(1820–1823) did not alter the attitudes and actions of the peninsular deputies
in dealing with America. They remained committed to the limited represen
tation and central control that had prevailed in the Cortes of Cádiz. A new
approach to the problema americano might have been politically wise, as several
territories, notably Buenos Aires and Caracas, were far along the road to inde
pendence, and many elsewhere were actively debating its benefits. Yet Spanish
liberals still refused significant concessions to Americans regarding political
autonomy and commercial openings. When peninsular deputies began to attend
to American requests, it was too late. In September 1821 Mexico declared in
dependence and New Spain’s deputies, the largest American delegation at the
Madrid Cortes, returned to their homeland. Three years later, in December
1824, the b attle of Ayacucho meant that the w hole of continental America was
irretrievably lost to Spanish rule.
The triumph of the Spanish American emancipation movements a fter 1820
should not obscure the importance of the Trienio Liberal for Spanish history
and Spanish American independence. It was the first time that liberalism was
implemented in all of peninsular Spain. More important, this time the liberales
came to power by themselves, not in response to invasion and occupation—but
by a rising of military forces about to be sent to fight for the monarchy in South
America. During the Trienio liberalism was not a cloistered anomaly in a city
under siege. Operating across Spain, in 1820 liberals known as exaltados began
to press radical antiaristocratic and anticlerical measures. Most of the revolu-
tionaries remaining from the 1812 experience, the doceañistas, became liberales
moderados—rivals of the exaltados. The second coming of Spanish liberalism
was laden with contradictions; among them, military leaders forced a constitu-
tion grounded in popular sovereignty on a reluctant monarch in 1820 and new
anticlerical and antiaristocratic energies turned powerful defenders of Spanish
rule in New Spain to lead a monarchical Mexican independence in 1821. In the
metropolis, the rise of radical anticlericalism, divisions and conflicts among lib-
erals, and the hard political and ideological turn toward absolutism across Eu
rope after Napoleon’s defeat contributed to the short life of the second Spanish
liberal experience: in 1823 an army of the Holy Alliance reinstalled Fernando
VII as an absolutist king.
From a chronological perspective, the foundational Spanish liberalism of
1810–1814 and 1820–1823 appears as a brief experiment that failed. However,
its values, visions, and goals would remain part of a polarized Spanish polity
throughout the nineteenth c entury as its radicalism progressively softened.48
The implementation of the constitution on American soil was always selective:
elections and freedom of the press were allowed as those in power thought
warranted. In New Spain, the war and insurgency of 1810 to 1815 limited its
application. In Guatemala, tendencies to localism were strong and economic
conditions too adverse to enable full implementation. In Peru, Abascal modi-
fied or varied the enforcement of the constitution, yet it was applied in several
aspects.49 Still, even with its limits and variations, the implementation of the
Cádiz Constitution meant that for the first time millions of Americans expe-
rienced individual rights, elections, freedom of the press, and the social dyna-
mism they entailed.
The Cádiz Constitution was in force in almost all of the Spanish American
territories considered in this book, among them the core regions of the silver
economies and those with the strongest, most enduring bases in indigenous
republics—which Cádiz would replace with constitutional municipalities. As
Erick Langer’s chapter will show, debates over preferences for indigenous re-
publics and liberal municipalities and the potential gains and losses for native
peoples would mark the nineteenth c entury in Mexico and Guatemala, Peru
and Bolivia, and to a lesser degree elsewhere.
The Viceroyalties of New Granada and Río de la Plata, as well as the Cap-
taincy General of Venezuela and the “Kingdom” of Chile, although much less pop-
ulated than the territories where the constitution was in force, were roughly
equivalent in size to the territories considered in this book. Those four admin-
istrative entities were less central to the silver economies, less grounded in indig-
enous majorities, less organized in indigenous republics. But their commercial
importance had risen in the late eighteenth century; they felt increasingly
constrained by imperial trade restrictions. These long peripheral territories also
received, read, and discussed the hundreds of publications that arrived from
the Peninsula from 1808 onward. While Cádiz liberals, like their monarchical
predecessors, focused on holding the rich silver economies in the empire and fa-
voring Cuban sugar growers with restrictions on Afro-Americans’ citizenship,
they did not open trade possibilities for commodity exporters in Caracas and
Buenos Aires. These territories did not send delegates to Cádiz and rejected the
constitution. They formed their own juntas and pursued autonomous routes.
Cádiz liberalism clearly led to diverse responses: while the capitals of the Cap-
taincy General of Venezuela and the Viceroyalties of New Granada and Río
de la Plata ignored Cádiz, some cities within t hese entities stayed loyal to Fer-
nando VII and accepted the constitution.50
The intellectual, ideological, and political transformations that took place
in the mundo hispánico between 1808 and 1824 were complex and laden with
ambiguities and contradictions. That almost three hundred years of Spanish
rule was often not perceived as domination by many españoles americanos help
explain why so many years, so many qualms, so many hesitations, and so many
battles had to take place before several territories broke from the metropolis. In
general, loyalty did not shift from Spain to the new patria in a direct and unequiv-
ocal manner. On the key viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, Brian Hamnett,
a leading analyst of the period, suggests that the erosion of the “middle posi-
tion” allowing autonomy within the monarchy was “the main characteristic of
the period 1808–1821.”51
Amid the complex imperial and local conflicts that marked Spanish Ame
rica after 1808, the Cádiz revolution was never determining in a simple way. It
was influential in political ideas, political debates, and constitutional proposals,
but it was always limited by peninsular and regional economic interests, and
by international wars, local events, internal insurgencies, and military leaders.
While Cádiz and its constitution s haped liberal political visions in the whole
mundo hispánico, powerful men on horseback at the head of diverse armies
were equally important—and often pivotal in determining political outcomes
between 1810 and 1830. Bolívar, San Martín, and Iturbide may be the first to
come to mind, but many others played pivotal political and/or military roles
in Spanish America at key moments during t hose two decades: among them,
Moreno, Morelos, Rodríguez de Francia, Artigas, Santander, Sucre, Belgrano,
O’Higgins, and Monteagudo; in Spain, Rafael del Riego forced liberalism onto
King Fernando in 1820.
The Cádiz revolution was a hope, a promise, and a possibility for many Span-
iards and Spanish Americans. However, the vast distances and geo-economic
differences between the madre patria and its American territories, the political
divergences that began with the French invasion of the Peninsula, the opposi-
tion of americanos who did not want to continue under Spanish rule, the war
against the Spanish American territories (which the Cortes never r eally dealt
with politically), and the refusal of peninsular deputies in Cádiz and Madrid
to attend to the diverse needs of these territories made that possibility van-
ish.52 Still, in one way or another Cádiz marked everything in the vast Hispanic
world for a pivotal decade and, in certain respects, long after.
Liberalism and the Mundo Hispánico in the Age of Revolution

The ambitious project that peninsular liberals tried to put in place between 1810
and 1814 failed; it did not result in an enduring constitutional regime limiting
monarchical rule; the political and social forces opposed to liberalism proved
to be stronger. The king led the opposition, but support for the monarch in the
top echelons of the army and the Church was decisive. Important opposition
also came from conservative deputies who showed political muscle in the elec-
tions for the ordinary Cortes that opened in October 1813. Less than a month
before the return of the king, these deputies drafted a document, known as
the Manifiesto de los Persas, condemning the preceding extraordinary Cortes
that had written the constitution. If we add a peasantry that saw little change
emerging from liberal proclamations (inevitable, as the constitution could not
be implemented in most of Spain before it was abrogated in 1814) and a society
exhausted by six years of war, the delirious welcome that Spanish towns and
cities gave Fernando VII on his way to Madrid in the spring of 1814 come as
no surprise.53
In the end, a coalition of conservative forces and interests defeated Spain’s
liberals. Many of them suffered the king’s repression; some died b ecause of it, but
some were able to participate in the comeback of liberalism in 1820 and, with
it, the reinstatement of the Cádiz Constitution. This time, however, Spanish
liberals had to share power with a “constitutional” monarch who was not cap-
tive in another country, but very much present and had been working with
international allies to bring down the liberal government and the Cádiz Con-
stitution since the beginning of its reinstallation. Thus the revival of liberalism
in Spain was short-lived.54 Absolutism returned in 1823 without the liberals
being able to put up a real fight. The king would stay in power another decade,
until his death in 1833.
The reactions and responses to peninsular liberalism in Spanish America were
varied, complex, ambiguous, and thus much more difficult to follow, among
other reasons b ecause t here was no “liberal” political group identified as such.
The size and greater social diversity of Spain’s American domains also help
to explain this complexity. In any case, the core principles of liberalism—
national sovereignty, political equality, individual liberties, division of powers,
representative government—were pursued almost everywhere. The challenge
is to distinguish between liberal principles and complex and often-contested
sociopolitical practices.
From 1811 onward a constitutional “explosion” took place in Spanish Ame
rica. Between that year and 1816 more than thirty constitutional documents
were drafted in the region (especially in New Granada). However, given the
state of war that prevailed in many regions, liberalism proved to have limited
social reach during the independence period in Spanish America. Constitu-
tions and formal political structures did not lead societies to adopt liberal val-
ues, attitudes, and behaviors. Very slowly and not without countermarches, this
adoption would take place during the nineteenth century. In that long process,
different segments of Spanish American societies would adapt and use liberal-
ism for differing purposes. Facing that diversity, scholars have used the term
“popular liberalism” to label many of the varied instances when rural commu-
nities mobilized liberal rhetoric to demand rights from the powerful. Whether
those communities had become committed to central tenets of liberalism such
as individual rights and electoral rule, or primarily pursued local political ad-
vantage, is much debated.
The search for popular liberalism in large part emerged as part of the search
for subaltern contributions, participations “from below” in the political devel-
opment of independence movements and also of republicanism in some Spanish
American countries (during the independence period and beyond). In some
cases, these contributions have opened new and more complex understandings
of early national conflicts and political challenges.55 In others, we remain far
from an integrated and convincing understanding of the diverse interactions
among liberalism, republicanism, and popular participation in the complex
processes of nation making in nineteenth-century Spanish America.56
The relationship between liberalism and republicanism during the era of
Spanish American independence also remain subject to debate. The institutional
and constitutional coincidences between the two ideologies far outweigh, in
my view, the contrasts in the political language that some historians have privi-
leged. Some of liberalism’s deepest goals—popular sovereignty, electoral rule,
freedom of the press—remained honored goals in most Spanish American re-
publics throughout the nineteenth century. Though too often abrogated, they
were proclaimed constantly and practiced more often than sometimes recog-
nized. Parliamentary practice and liberal principles, some of them rooted in
Cádiz, played roles that were far more than perfunctory. Political and intel-
lectual history should recognize these facts and pursue studies aiming to un-
derstand the enduring limits to the realization of liberal goals in the history of
Spanish America.
After more than 150 years of ignoring and sometimes denigrating the political
history of the region during the first half of the nineteenth century, Western
historiography recently began to recuperate topics such as elections, citizenship,
sociabilities, the press, and public opinion. The change, provoked a quarter of
a c entury ago by François-Xavier Guerra, is most welcome. Scholars began to
see that not everything was chaos and caudillos in the origin and formation of
Spanish American nations. Too often, however, historiographic reactions be-
come overreactions. Studying aspects of the political and social life of the new
nations that were neglected or ignored is positive; suggesting that life in the
emerging nations was infused with liberalism, republicanism, and citizenship is
another m atter.57 One aim of the chapters that follow is to explore the interplay
of the economic transformations analyzed by Tutino in chapter 1, with the
political and ideological innovations engaged h ere, and with the hard do-
mains where power faced participation of different kinds in diverse American
societies.
In the wake of Guerra’s oeuvre, the Hispanic world of the first quarter of
the nineteenth c entury has become a vibrant field of inquiry for political and
intellectual history.58 New circumstances and new analyses have contributed to
a renewed interest in the “Age of Revolution.”59 I conclude by considering criti-
cally some of the ways Atlantic history has viewed the revoluciones hispánicas
within the Age of Revolution.
The Atlantic approach has become the dominant prism through which the
anglophone academy views and studies the independence movements of Latin
America. Too often, proponents of that approach assume that commonalities
and sequences prevailed over the complex specifics of the several revolutionary
processes that shaped this pivotal age.60 Lurking behind this assumption is an-
other one: that the first Atlantic revolutions (the independence of the thir-
teen colonies and the French Revolution) became “models” followed in Spanish
America from 1808 onward.
The Atlantic perspective on Spanish American independence is an enor-
mous step forward vis-à-vis the nationalistic approaches that prevailed for too
long. Such approaches w ere parochial and limited. Put simply: it is impossible
to understand Spanish American independence from a political and intellec-
tual perspective by studying separate national processes. The Spanish American
nations came out of a single empire. In the last twenty-five years, nationalist
histories of Spanish American independence have given way to broader per-
spectives. They recognize the influence of general political principles and con-
stitutional architectures in part originating in the North American and French
revolutions (with important British antecedents). But studies of Hispanic
American independence have forged a new prism that is mainly Hispanic—or,
better, Hispanic Atlantic. Rather than presume an inevitable sequence of in-
novation that began in the United States and France, the Hispanic-Atlantic
perspective emphasizes that Spain and Spanish America began, negotiated,
and ended their revolutionary processes in deeply Hispanic ways.
Atlantic history has proven its fertility in topics like migration, commercial
exchanges, and slavery—notably when it focuses within the British empire. Too
often, however, the innovations of Atlantic history have not extended to ques-
tioning much older presumptions of Anglo-American primacy in the making
of the modern world. The enduring tendency to expect that Anglo-American
innovations, mediated by French revolutionary aspirations, shaped indepen
dence movement in the mundo hispánico leads, in my view, to fundamental
misunderstandings of the Age of Revolution.61
Global and Atlantic processes, economic, political, and ideological, affected
the independence of Spanish America, no doubt—but local historical cir-
cumstances, an ideological arsenal of great complexity, and a series of regional
conflicts inextricably linked to Hispanic politics led to the new countries that
emerged in Spanish America between 1810 and 1830. There is a clear link
between the French Revolution and the events that shook Saint Domingue be-
tween 1791 and 1804, but it was a link of reverberations that led to oppositions,
as Carolyn Fick shows in chapter 4. Th ere were also conflictive reverberations
of the French Revolution, through Napoleon, on the 1808 invasion of Spain,
on Cádiz liberalism, and on the Spanish American conflicts that led to indepen
dence, but none of them w ere imitations.62 The presumptive assertion of imita-
tive Atlantic revolutions diminishes the complexity of the Age of Revolutions—
and the creativity of Hispanic revolutionaries, intellectuals, and state makers.63
The causal chain often suggested by Atlantic historians mainly refers to ideas
or constitutional principles (in their most general expression). Such links are
often found by intellectual historians who exalt ideas and tend to downplay po
litical and social conflicts and practices.64 The revoluciones hispánicas did not
begin in the light of historical or political “forces” emanating from the United
States or revolutionary France (and the Hispanic American elites who started
these revolutions and declared the independence of new countries saw nothing
positive in Haiti). The revolutionary movements in Spanish America began as a
reaction against Napoleon’s invasion and occupation of the Iberian Peninsula.
French revolutionary ideology was rejected outright for a very simple reason:
the invading army came from the land of Rousseau, Marat, and Robespierre.65
In Spanish America, at the beginning of the crisis hispánica public declara-
tions were not against the king, but for the king—and most Spanish Americans,
including indigenous peoples, remained devoted to the king throughout. The
oft-repeated claim that an accumulation of hatred among Spanish American
criollos against peninsular Spaniards was one of the main causes of the indepen
dence movements is clearly wanting as an explanation of events after 1810. Why
did such “disaffected” elites in New Spain and Peru remain loyal to the Spanish
Crown for more than a decade after 1810?
Spanish America included a diversity of racial and social groups with no
parallel in British North America, making the challenges of independence and
nation making radically diff erent. Careful analysis of Spanish America between
1808 and 1824 cannot suggest, much less conclude, that its independence pro
cesses were last “episodes” of a single Atlantic Revolution—as chapters 7 to 10
of this volume will show.
At the same time, however, no historical process is absolutely original. The
revoluciones hispánicas developed within the broad economic and imperial,
political, and intellectual events that shaped the second half of the eighteenth
century. There is no reason to deny the resonance of important aspects of
North American and French political thought and constitutional thinking.
Still, Cádiz liberalism and the revoluciones hispánicas emerged as independent
creations, that must be taken seriously to understand the Age of Revolution.
Understandings emphasizing transatlantic interactions must remain; presump-
tions of Anglo-American primacy and Hispanic imitation must end.
The Hispanic revolutions must not be presumed isolated or self-generating.
They engaged and revised many of the broad political principles that played
decisive roles in the birth of the United States and in revolutionary France. The
chronological precedence and geographical proximity of these conflicts made
these influences inevitable. The general political principles that were the basis
of the Spanish American revolutions—national sovereignty, political equal-
ity, individual liberties, division of powers, representative systems—were also
paramount in the American and French Revolutions, but with different con
notations and emphases in each case. Since the M iddle Ages, the Spanish world
was part of a European debate on monarchical power and popular participa-
tion. A unique Hispanic emphasis on the rights of the pueblos enabled Spanish
monarchs to allow local republics for indigenous peoples across its American
domains since the sixteenth c entury and helps explain why the Cádiz Consti-
tution recognized these same peoples as part of the citizenry.
When the mundo hispánico was turned upside down by Napoleon’s oc-
cupation of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808, Spanish and Spanish Americans
became active and innovative participants in political, intellectual, social, and
economic debates and conflicts. The revoluciones hispánicas inscribed them-
selves within the Age of Revolution in ways far more creative than too many
histories allow. To fully understand Atlantic processes in the formation of the
modern world, we must recognize the creative complexity and the ambiguous
originality of the Hispanic revolutions—the political and social movements
that culminated the Age of Revolution.66
Notes
I want to thank the anonymous readers for Duke University Press for their critical
comments. Although I did not always agree with their views, this essay benefited
significantly from their attentive reading. I also want to thank John Tutino for the
hours he devoted to my essay and the recommendations he made to improve it.
Needless to say, all of its shortcomings are my responsibility.
1 These are the four “classic” Atlantic Revolutions, therefore in this case we could talk
of certain identification between the Age of Revolution and the Atlantic Revolutions.
2 Some options to study the mundo hispánico with this chronology are Kenneth J.
Andrien and Lyman Johnson, eds., The Political Economy of Spanish America in the
Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994),
and Victor M. Uribe-Uran, ed., State and Society in Spanish America during the Age
of Revolution (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2001). On the whole continent, see
Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
3 Les révolutions de la fin du XVIIIe siècle aux Amériques et en Europe, 1773–1804
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005). Solé’s final chapter on Latin America uses very
limited sources.
4 David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global
Context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
5 Following a classic written more than fifty years ago: Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of
Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 1962).
6 As I will suggest, the reforms of Charles III’s reign (1759–1788) influenced Cádiz’s
liberalism in a limited way.
7 The promulgation of the 1812 Constitution is why the Spanish liberals of this pe-
riod are also known as doceañistas, and doceañismo is sometimes used to label their
ideological, political, and social project—a project that, it may be added, resonated
not only in Spanish America, but also in Portugal, Italy, Norway, and even Russia.
On the three first cases, see Ignacio Fernández Sarasola, “La proyección europea e
iberoamericana de la Constitución de 1812,” in La Constitución de Cádiz (Origen,
contenido y proyección internacional) (Madrid: cepc, 2011), 292–308. On the
Russian case, see Richard Stites, “Decembrists with a Spanish Accent,” Kritika 12:1
(winter 2011).
8 Some ideas in the first section of this essay appeared in my book El primer liberal
ismo español y los procesos de emancipación de América (Una revisión historiográfica
del liberalismo hispánico) (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2006). Some arguments
presented in the second and third sections appeared in El imperio de las circun
stancias (Las independencias hispanoamericanas y la revolución liberal española)
(Madrid: Marcial Pons/El Colegio de México, 2012).
9 See Emilio La Parra, ed., La guerra de Napoleón en España (Alicante: Universidad
de Alicante/Casa de Velázquez, 2010). The contributions by Fraser, Hocquellet,
and Álvarez Junco in this volume show the decisive role played by the diffusion of
the Bayonne abdications and not the uprisings in Madrid in igniting the general in-
surrection of 1808. In strict legal terms, the only “abdication” was the one in which
Carlos IV ceded the crown to his son Fernando in March 1808. Two months later,
Fernando VII returned the crown back to his father, who gave it to Napoleon the
day after. A month later, he awarded the crown to his brother Joseph, who became
José I “rey de España e Indias.”
10 I use the term “first Spanish liberalism” to refer to the political revolution in the
Peninsula between 1808 and 1814. However, the expression can also include the
Trienio Liberal (1820–1823), and some authors extend it to the end of the 1830s.
11 It is impossible to deal here with Godoy and his power from 1792 to 1808. See
Emilio La Parra, Manuel Godoy (La aventura del poder) (Barcelona: Tusquets,
2002).
12 See Guerra’s article “Dos años cruciales (1808–1809),” in Modernidad e independen
cias (Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas) (Madrid: Mapfre, 1992), 115–148. The
use of the word hispánicas in the subtitle reflects that for Guerra the first quarter of
the nineteenth century had to be understood from a Hispanic perspective (includ-
ing Spain and Spanish America). For him, the two years were “crucial” mainly

b ecause peninsular newspapers and other publications spread the ideas, principles,
and values of the political revolution taking place in the Peninsula to Spanish America.
13 It was also in this city that in June 1808 Napoleon gathered a series of Spanish and
Spanish American notables to discuss and approve a constitutional document that his
advisors had drafted. This Constitution or Statute of Bayonne was never applied in
Spanish America (in the Peninsula its application was minimal). Its influence on the
Cádiz Constitution is hard to determine, but it is clear that the concessions offered
by the Statute to the Spanish Americans in political and commercial terms could
not be ignored by the deputies who gathered in Cádiz more than two years l ater.
14 The role of the guerrillas has been exaggerated in Spanish historiography; a ten-
dency that diminishes the importance of the British army and the Duke of Welling-
ton, the commander of allied British, Spanish, and Portuguese troops. A balanced
view suggests that guerrillas were very important in harassing the French army day in
and day out throughout the war, but did not determine the military outcome.
15 Almost thirty of them were substitute deputies chosen in Cádiz among the
American residents. This limited the legitimacy of the Spanish American delegates;
more so in the regions that never sent proprietary deputies. This was the case across
South America, except for the Viceroyalty of Peru and the cities of Maracaibo and
Montevideo.
16 Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notices of His Life (London:
John Murray, 1830), 195.
17 This is exactly what the king established in the decree that he issued on his return
to Spain. The document is dated May 4, but became known only days l ater to
avoid reactions against it: http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/real-decreto
-de-fernando-vii-derogando-la-constitucion-valencia-4-mayo-1814/, Biblioteca
Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (www.cervantes virtual.com), accessed 13 April 2015.
18 Up to that time, most output of Spanish presses had been religious. On freedom
of the press, see Elisabel Larriba and Fernando Durán, eds., El nacimiento de la
libertad de imprenta (Madrid: Sílex Ediciones, 2012). The Cortes first sanctioned
this freedom in December 1810, then confirmed it in article 371 of the constitution.
19 Of course, the word existed for centuries in Spanish, English, French, and Italian,
meaning “generous”; I refer here to its use as an adjective labeling a political group
with a shared ideology.
20 Marx expressed these ideas in a series of articles in the New York Daily Tribune in
1854. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Escritos sobre España, ed. Pedro Ribas (Val-
ladolid: Editorial Trotta, 1998), 131, 139; my translation.
21 The intensity of the opposition to the liberales and the measures they proposed can
be surmised by some paragraphs of the “Preliminary Discourse” of the constitu-
tion, discussed at the end of this section.
22 The articles on education in the Cádiz Constitution have not received the atten-
tion they deserve, even by historians inclined to underline the liberal character of
the document.
23 With a couple of minor changes, this is the classification given by Joaquín Varela
Suanzes, in his article “La Constitución de Cádiz y el liberalismo español del siglo
XIX,” in Política y Constitución en España (1808–1978) (1987; reprint, Madrid:
cepc, 2007).
24 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2: The Age
of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 159, 163. On
page 174, Skinner underlines the influence of the Spanish neo-Thomists on John
Locke and his Two Treatises on Government.
25 For Mariana political power rested essentially and permanently with the com-
munity, making the right of resistance a permanent option (a position Vitoria and
Suárez rejected).
26 See Skinner, The Foundations, 148, and Howard P. Kainz, Natural Law (An Intro
duction and Re-examination) (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 31.
27 “The idea that natural law might be valid and binding even if God did not exist was
suggested before Grotius by Robert Bellarmine and other scholastics. But Grotius
made this point more explicitly and forcibly, and is credited with the groundbreak-
ing attempt to disengage natural law from the existence of a Divine Legislator.”
Kainz, Natural Law, 33.
28 La teoría del Estado en las Cortes de Cádiz (Madrid: cepc, 2011), 42.
29 See La Parra, Manuel Godoy, chaps. 4 and 5.
30 Antonio de Maravall, “Las tendencias de reforma política en el siglo XVIII espa-
ñol,” in Estudios de historia del pensamiento español s. XVIII (1967; reprint, Madrid:
Mondadori, 1991); Antonio Elorza, La ideología liberal en la ilustración española
(Madrid: Tecnos, 1970).
31 The discourse can be found in Jovellanos, Obras en prosa, ed. José Miguel Caso
González (Madrid: Castalia, 1988), 71–102. On the political thought of Jovellanos,
the most important thinker of the Spanish Enlightenment, see Obras completes,
vol. 9: Escritos políticos, ed. Ignacio Fernández Sarasola (Oviedo: Ayuntamiento de
Gijón/Instituto Feijoo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII, 2006).
32 Some Spanish American intellectuals and politicians favoring indepen
dence adopted the notion, making despots of all the Spanish authorities in
America.
33 Teoría de las Cortes (Bilbao: Gestingraf, n.d.); this book, in three volumes, is
number 9 of the collection “Clásicos Asturianos del Pensamiento Político,” edited
by the Junta General del Principado de Asturias. On Martínez Marina’s political
thought, see Joaquín Varela Suanzes, Tradición y liberalismo en Martínez Marina
(Oviedo: Caja Rural Provincial de Asturias, 1983).
34 I have not paid any attention to the Spaniards that supported José I: the afrancesa
dos. Long condemned as traitors, their historiographical rehabilitation started with
Los afrancesados by Miguel Artola, published in 1953. By now it is clear that the
motives of those who supported José were complex and that many of them were
ideologically very close to the liberales, their sworn enemies.
35 Martínez Marina’s main political and historical ideas can be found in a brief dis-
course on the Cortes he first published by itself, but then used to introduce Teoría
de las Cortes in 1813. It has been read through this lens since then (see Teoría de las
Cortes, 5–49).

36 There are many printed versions of the “Discourse”; an option is the one that
accompanies La Constitución de Cádiz (1812) by Antonio Fernández García (Madrid:
Editorial Castalia, 2002), 195–270. The English translation I use here is by Liberty
Fund. Conference “Liberals and Liberty in 1812; Spain and Beyond,” Eduardo Nolla,
organizer, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, January–February 2013, 2.
37 “Tradición histórica e innovación política en el primer liberalismo español,” Revista
de Estudios Políticos, no. 97 ( July–September 1997), 281.
38 Liberty Fund translation, 44.
39 Liberty Fund translation, 37, 38 (my emphasis in both cases).
40 Liberty Fund translation, 29.
41 Due to the war with Napoleon, its number was limited, but that is secondary to the
point I make here.
42 The Spanish American wars of independence were civil wars, rarely setting peninsula
res against americanos. The royalist armies were filled by Americans who for diverse
motives did not seek separation from Spain—as the histories in this book show.
43 Marie Laure Rieu-Millan, Los diputados americanos en las Cortes de Cádiz: Igual
dad o independencia (Madrid: csic, 1990).
44 On slavery, only two of the new countries on Spanish America abolished it quickly
(Chile and Mexico); most maintained it until the middle of the nineteenth
century.
45 On the two “variants” of the liberalismo hispánico (peninsular liberalism and Span-
ish American liberalism), they were so intermingled in the first quarter of the nine-
teenth century that one must be careful with the division. Once Spanish American
countries achieved independence (often long a fter they declared it), we cannot refer
any longer to liberalismo hispánico but to Spanish, Mexican, Chilean, Argentine,
(etc.) liberalisms.
46 Venezuela declared independence in 1811, Paraguay in 1813, the Provincias Unidas
del Río de la Plata (Argentina) in 1816, Chile in 1818, Peru in 1821 (and again in
1824), New Spain (Mexico), and the Capitanía General de Guatemala in 1821.
47 Marcela Ternavasio, Gobernar la revolución (Poderes en disputa en el Río de la Plata,
1810–1816) (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2007), 261. Ternavasio refers to Spanish
American territories that for geographic al and military reasons were never threat-
ened by the Spanish Crown during the whole independence period.
48 See Varela Suanzes, “La Constitución de Cádiz y el liberalismo español del
siglo XIX.”
49 On New Spain, see Roberto Breña, “The Emancipation Process in New Spain and
the Cádiz Constitution (New Historiographical Paths regarding the Revolucio-
nes Hispánicas),” in The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic
World (The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812), ed. Scott Eastman and Natalia
Sobrevilla Perea (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015). For Guatemala,
Mario Rodríguez, The Cadiz Experiment in Central America, 1808–1826 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978), and Jordana Dym, “Central America and Cadiz:
A Complex Relationship,” in The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian
Atlantic World. On the Peruvian case, see Víctor Peralta, En defensa de la autoridad:
Política y cultura bajo el gobierno del virrey Abascal, 1806–1816 (Madrid: csic/
Instituto de Historia, 2002), and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, “Loyalism and Liberalism
in Peru,” in The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World.
50 At different times and facing different war situations, this was the case in cities like
Coro, Maracaibo, and Valencia in Venezuela; Popayán, Santa Marta, and Carta-
gena in New Granada; and Montevideo in Río de la Plata.
51 Brian Hamnett, Revolución y contrarrevolución en México y el Perú (Liberalismo,
realeza y separatismo, 1800–1824) (Mexico: fce, 1978), 17. Th ere is a new and
updated version: Liberales, realistas y separatistas, 1800–1824 (Mexico: fce, 2011).
52 The return of Fernando VII in 1814 and of absolutism in 1823 sealed the fate of the
first Spanish liberalism and the destiny of what he considered to be his possessions in
America. He died in 1833, without ever recognizing them as independent countries.
53 To get an idea of this reception, see last pages of what still is the most complete and
best-written history of this period of Spanish history: the count of Toreno’s Histo
ria del levantamiento, guerra y revolución de España (Pamplona: Urgoiti Editores,
2008), specifically, 1179 and 1182. This edition has an excellent introduction by the
late French historian Richard Hocquellet. I survey the book and make a critique of
Toreno’s ideas on Spanish America in a long review I wrote for Historia Constitu
cional, no. 13 (2012): “La Historia de Toreno y la historia para Toreno: el pueblo,
España y el sueño de un liberal”: http://www.historiaconstitucional.com/index
.php/historiaconstitucional/article/view/350.
54 On the end of the Trienio, see Emilio La Parra, Los cien mil hijos de San Luis: El
ocaso del primer impulso liberal en España (Madrid: Editorial Síntesis, 2007), and
Emmanuel Larroche, L’expédition d’Espagne, 1823: De la guerre selon la Charte
(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013).
55 See Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of
Revolution, Colombia, 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007),
and Véronique Hébrard and Geneviève Verdo, eds., Las independencias hispano
americanas: Un objeto de historia (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2013).
56 See, for example, James Sanders, “Revolution and the Creation of an Atlantic
Counter-Modernity: Popular and Elite Contestations of Republicanism and Pro
gress in Mid–Nineteenth Century Latin America,” in L’Atlantique révolutionnaire:
Une perspective ibéro-américaine, ed. Clément Thibaud, Gabriel Entin, Alejandro
Gómez, and Federica Morelli (Bécherel: Éditions Les Perséides, 2013), 233–257.
57 I do not see Mexico City and Lima as rich in civic culture and democratic practices
as Carlos Forment does in his book Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900, vol. 1:
Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003).
58 Besides Guerra, Jaime Rodríguez, Antonio Annino, and Brian Hamnett have
played very important roles in these fields. To engage the politics and intellectual
life of the mundo hispánico in the first quarter of the nineteenth century requires
reading in Spanish, in order to keep up with some of the best historians working
nowadays on the period, among them José María Portillo, Elías Palti, Javier Fernán-
dez Sebastián, Marta Lorente, José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, Marcela Ternavasio,

Ignacio Fernández Sarasola, Víctor Peralta Ruiz, Carlos Garriga, Rafael Rojas, and
Noemí Goldman.
59 For contemporary political reasons that Cádiz has received so much attention in
recent years, see Gabriel Paquette, “Cádiz y las fábulas de la historiografía occiden-
tal,” in Cádiz a debate (Actualidad, contexto y legado), ed. Roberto Breña (Mexico:
El Colegio de México, 2014), 49–61.
60 However, as I will suggest and as the present book gives ample proof, in several
aspects the Atlantic approach enriches our understanding of the Spanish American
independence movements. Two very good examples are Jeremy Adelman’s Sover
eignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006) and J. H. Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World (Britain and Spain
in America, 1492–1830) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). I dealt
briefly with the Atlantic approach in “Liberalism in the Spanish American World,
1808–1825,” in State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain, ed. Miguel A.
Centeno and Agustín Ferraro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),
271–281.
61 In the words of Atlantic historian Wim Klooster: “Seismic waves travelled through
the Atlantic world in the half century after 1775, linking uprisings on either side of
the Atlantic.” Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative Perspective (New
York: New York University Press, 2009), 158.
62 In “Was There an Age of Revolution in Spanish America?” Eric Van Young shows
why Latin American historians should be cautious with the assumptions that lie
behind the expression “Age of Revolution.” This essay is the conclusion of the book
State and Society in Spanish America during the Age of Revolution, 219–246.
63 There is a recent trend to establish close connections between the Haitian Revolu-
tion and Spanish American independence movements. If among the Atlantic revo-
lutions only Haiti achieved a radical social transformation, this in fact limited its
influence on the revoluciones hispánicas, which were eminently political processes.
In Myths of Harmony, 33, Marixa Lasso states that while Haiti entered the local
popular imaginary, it is difficult to assess the influence of the Haitian Revolution in
Cartagena, a Caribbean city with a large slave population.
64 I dealt with this topic in “Las conmemoraciones de los bicentenarios y el liberal-
ismo hispánico: ¿Historia intelectual o historia intelectualizada?” Revista Ayer, no.
69 (2008), 189–219.
65 Napoleon in many ways inherited the spirit of 1789, while at the same time, in
several ways he was the denial of that same spirit. In any case, from 1789 to 1814
revolutionary France was a political countermodel in the mundo hispánico.
66 The regionally focused chapters that follow seek an understanding not only of the
Spanish American independence movements, but of how diverse regions of the
Americas negotiate their way through the Age of Revolution in very different ways.
part ii
at l an t ic
t r ansfor m at ions
3
U nion, Capitalism, and Slavery in the

“ Rising Empire ” of the United States
Adam Rothman
Writing as Publius in October 1787, Alexander Hamilton jumped headfirst

into New York’s raging debate over whether to ratify the newly proposed con-
stitution for the United States. “The subject speaks its own importance,” wrote
Hamilton at the very beginning of the very first Federalist, “comprehending in
its consequences nothing less than the existence of the u nion, the safety and
welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many re
spects the most interesting in the world.” And just what was interesting about
this new American empire? “It has been frequently remarked,” Hamilton contin-
ued, “that it seems to have been reserved to the p eople of this country, by
their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies
of men are r eally capable or not of establishing good government from reflection
and choice, or w hether they are forever destined to depend for their political
constitutions on accident and force.”1
Hamilton’s “important question” was really two questions: could men r eally
choose their own form of government, and if so, would they choose wisely? In
1787, the answer to the first question seemed to be an emphatic yes. The citizens
of the United States believed they w ere—perhaps for the first time in history—
freely deliberating on the basic structure of their polity, rather than inheriting
it or having it forced upon them. The motto of the new country, Novus ordo
seclorum, indicated the collective sense of a fresh start to h
uman affairs, even as
it paradoxically hearkened back to ancient lore. Despite this sense of novelty,
the slate of society was not wiped clean by the revolution; the heritage of the
colonial era could not be erased. Nor were Hamilton and his countrymen de-
liberating in blissful isolation from the rest of the world. Despite a successful
war for independence, the new United States faced a treacherous international
landscape, and to Hamilton and other Federalists, a stronger national govern-
ment was required to meet the challenge of national survival.2
The answer to the second question remained in doubt. Hamilton was not
at all sure that his fellow citizens would accept the proposed constitution,
which he preferred to the existing Articles of Confederation. It “affects too
many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions” not to
arouse opposition. Reason would inevitably be clouded on all sides by “ambi-
tion, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives
not more laudable than these.” Actual politics barely resembled the republican
ideal of a rational quest for the common good. Some influential people might
even prefer a “subdivision of the empire,” Hamilton feared, to “union under
one government.” The fear of disunion was central to the constitutional politics
of the early United States. Supporters of both a stronger and a weaker national
government argued that their vision would be more likely to preserve the unity
of a large and diverse country in a dangerous world.
Hamilton erred in posing a sharp dichotomy between reflection and choice
on one hand, and accident and force on the other. These were two sides of the
same historical coin, as inseparable as heads and tails. Choice was structured
by force, and often, force was masked as choice. This essay argues that the ori-
gins and development of the United States from the British imperial crisis of
the 1760s to the end of the U.S. Civil War combined “reflection and choice”
with “accident and force”—indeed, with a great deal more “accident and force”
than many people in the United States care to remember today. As Marx wrote
about another people, U.S. Americans made their own history, but they did not
make it just as they pleased. How then did they make it?3
This essay focuses on three major aspects of the early history of the United
States: the character of the polity forged out of the American Revolution; the
108 — Adam Rothman
growth and expansion of the country across the continent; and the contest over
slavery that tore it apart. Hamilton signaled the first two aspects in his uses of
the words “union” and “empire” in Federalist 1. By u nion, he meant the complex
political arrangement by which several disparate states (“the parts”) collected
themselves under one overarching government without each losing its corpo-
rate integrity; by empire, he acknowledged the vast size and big expectations of
this new republic. He did not mention slavery in that paper, but it cropped up
in others and lurked perilously in the ratification debates. Although contained
for sixty years by a long series of political compromises that w ere largely con-
cessions to slave o wners, arguments over slavery rooted in real socioeconomic
changes would emerge in time as the chief cause of the “subdivision of the em-
pire” that Hamilton and other founders feared above all other evils.
Divergence, a keyword of this volume, offers a handy frame for conceiving the
history of the new United States in an international context and a comparative
way. John Tutino’s introduction suggests multiple meanings of divergence. Colo-
nists throughout the Americ as seceded from transatlantic empires in revolution-
ary processes of national state formation, diverging from those who remained
within imperial polities. The new countries they founded then diverged from
each other, taking different paths across the nineteenth century and sometimes
colliding into each other, as the United States and Mexico did in 1846. Many
new countries experienced internal fissures and fragmentation as well; divergence
between North and South nearly wrecked the United States over the question
of slavery. That internal divergence was intricately connected to the “great diver-
gence” described by Kenneth Pomeranz.4 The powerfully disruptive forces of the
rise of industrial capitalism fundamentally reconfigured the Americas’ economic
prospects. Some prospered. Others suffered. The northern United States emerged
as Britain’s most successful imitator across the Atlantic, while the southern United
States grew into the most formidable slave society in the world on the basis of white
southerners’ ability to harness slave labor to supply short-staple cotton to British
textile manufacturers. Over time, the country became “half slave and half free,” as
Lincoln put it in 1858.5 Considering the United States within this set of divergences
provides an antidote to the dogma of exceptionalism without losing sight of the
peculiar aspects of the United States’ historical trajectory.
The Federal Union

“A more perfect Union”—that was the first aim of the constitution. But a
union of what or whom, and on what terms? Answering that question requires
a panorama of the British mainland North American colonies at the end of
Union, Capitalism, and Slavery in the
“Rising Empire — 109
the Seven Years’ War in 1763, and a tracing of the revolutionary dynamic from
the origins of the imperial crisis to the ratification of the constitution and be-
yond. How thirteen diverse colonies managed to secede from the British
empire, forge a durable framework of government, and survive the pressures of
a war-torn Atlantic world is a story of successful divergence in the short term,
even if Hamilton, who was killed by his political nemesis in a duel, did not live
to taste the fruits of peace.
Relative latecomers to the early modern Atlantic world, the British main-
land North American colonies were settler societies populated largely by free
and quasi-free people of mostly British descent but harboring a substantial
proportion of enslaved Africans and people of African descent as well, particu-
larly in Virginia and South Carolina. The late colonial population numbered
roughly 2 million on the mainland, of whom 15 percent were enslaved (com-
pared to roughly 400,000 in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, of whom 85 percent
were enslaved). The zone of Euro-American settlement was fairly narrow, hug-
ging the eastern seaboard and rivers that flowed into the Atlantic. Within the
constricted zones of colonial settlement, indigenous p eople had mostly been
annihilated or driven out, but the vast continental interior west of the Appala-
chian mountains remained populated almost entirely by indigenous and métis
people, except for the lower Mississippi Valley, which had been penetrated by
French settlements that from 1765 lived under Spanish rule. Unvanquished
indigenous power in the continental interior was confirmed by the uprising
known as Pontiac’s War, which stretched across the southern Great Lakes re-
gion in 1763–1766.6
The seaboard colonies were fundamentally agricultural but economically
diverse, ranging from the mixed farming societies of New E ngland to the
more plantation-oriented southern colonies, where slaves labored to grow to-
bacco and rice for export. Coastal towns—Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
and Charleston—were nodes of artisanal production and Atlantic commerce,
with ties to both Europe and the Caribbean. Hence, maritime trades were also
important. The mainland colonies were closely tied to the lucrative Caribbean
sugar islands, which they supplied with fish, grain, lumber, and other supplies.
The mainland fueled the islands. To put the mainland colonies in a broader
British colonial perspective, almost three-quarters of the value of exports to
Great Britain from British America came from the West Indies; on the other
hand, the value of British exports to the mainland colonies was more than dou-
ble the value of exports to the West Indies.7 The mainland American colonies
provided ready markets for British goods and nurtured a thriving consumer
culture, particularly in urban settings. Nothing represents the cosmopolitanism
of British Americans’ consumer habits as much as their taste for tea, which
became famously politicized in the imperial crisis that led to revolution.8
The mainland colonies enjoyed considerable local political autonomy.
Royal officials had to contend with strong colonial assemblies representing
propertied men who insisted on their rights and privileges within the British
empire. The colonies’ strength derived from the fact that the empowered class
of propertied men was relatively large, literate, and prosperous, and the met-
ropolitan authorities w ere basically willing to leave them alone. They lacked
the coercive power to do otherwise. Even in the commercial regulation of “ex-
ternal” trade, which had been the focus of metropolitan oversight, extensive
smuggling made a mockery of restrictive policies.9 Despite class stratification
and cultural markers of status, most of the mainland colonies had a popular
politics that embraced a wide swath of f ree men from the middling and lower
ranks, while generally limiting free women to more circumscribed modes of
participation, like petitioning, and excluding slaves from formal participation
altogether. The presence of chattel slavery, however, made free people in the
colonies hypersensitive about their own freedom, as Samuel Johnson observed
in his famous quip “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the
drivers of negroes?” When the imperial crisis came, rebellious colonists loudly
protested that the British wanted to “enslave” them.10
The religious diversity of the British North American colonial world was
crucial to the formation of an independent and flourishing civil society. The
colonies were deeply Protestant, but they also exhibited “a strange religious
medley,” in Crevecoeur’s words. Widespread Protestant dissent challenged the
established Anglican and Congregational churches. Non-Protestants, like Cath-
olics in Maryland and Jews in Charleston, also carved out a sacred space for
themselves. Not coffee h ouses but churches w ere the most important arena of
colonial civil society, and religious associations provided the spark and the model
for more secular voluntary organizations. Although Protestantism had begun to
make inroads into the increasingly creole, or native-born, slave population, most
African and African-descended slaves were probably Catholic, Muslim, or ani-
mist in their beliefs and practices.11
Historians have chipped away at the idea that a growing sense of a distinctively
American national identity inexorably led to the revolution. Rather, colonists’
concept of themselves as equal British subjects was at the core of the imperial
crisis that spiraled into a colonial revolt. To make a long story short, metropoli-
tan efforts to tighten Britain’s grip over the colonies and shift some of the fiscal
burden for security onto them in the wake of the costly Seven Years’ War led
many British American colonists to protest the violation of their rights, their
lack of representation in Parliament, and ultimately, the collapse of the king’s
protection. South Carolinian Henry Laurens, who served as president of the
Continental Congress in 1777–1778, put the case succinctly. Stung by a jibe
from a British admiral, Laurens retorted, “I had once been a good British sub-
ject, but after Great Britain had refused to hear our petitions, and had thrown
us out of her protection, I had endeavored to do my duty.”12
The revolutionary dynamic from 1763 to 1783 precipitated an American
nationalism, and not the other way around. Popular mobilization by local
organizations like the Sons of Liberty, intercolonial communication and co-
ordination through the Committees of Correspondence and Continental
Congress, widely circulated propaganda like Paine’s pungent Common Sense
(which is as much an artifact of English radicalism as American nationalism),
the shared hardship and blood sacrifice of soldiers in the Continental army
and battered communities, the remembrance of the wartime struggle in culture
and politics—all t hese created a new national or “patriot” sensibility among
mainland British North Americans. Whether that new national sensibility
was actually widely shared, deeply felt, and politically effective is a matter of
lively debate. And we might wonder what would have happened to American
nationalism if G reat Britain had successfully quashed the rebellion. The long
shadow of Confederate nationalism over the post–Civil War South might pro-
vide some clues.13
When the Declaration of Independence spoke for “one people” in 1776,
its authors expressed a hope more than a reality. The colonists were internally
divided; significant numbers of loyalists maintained their allegiance to the
king. The revolution was simultaneously a civil war, especially in the southern
colonies, where partisan and guerrilla warfare broke out as the war dragged on.
Loyalists were harassed, punished, and dispossessed. Roughly sixty thousand
loyalists fled to safer havens elsewhere in the British empire, reshaping Canada,
Florida, and the Caribbean. Several hundred black loyalists founded the ex-
perimental antislavery colony of Sierra Leone, while a few others ended up in
Australia. Often forgotten in recent histories celebrating the prospect of free-
dom for black loyalist refugees are the roughly fifteen thousand slaves whom
loyalist owners carried with them into exile.14
The loyalist flight to Canada and the Caribbean illustrates the geographic
limits to U.S. nationalism during the revolution. Just as not all colonists w ere
patriots, not all the British colonies joined the revolution. Why not? Demo-
graphic differences, political concessions, and a stronger British military pres-
ence were crucial. The British won over Canada’s large French population with
the 1774 Quebec Act (which outraged patriots in the lower colonies), while
RUPERT'S LAND
LOWER
BLACKFOOT CANADA MAINE
NEW HAMPSHIRE
UPPER NEW MASSACHUSETTS
SIOUX CANADA YORK
L RHODE ISLAND
CROW O CONNECTICUT
PENNSYLVANIA
U PAWNEE NEW JERSEY
NORTHWEST TERRITORY DELAWARE
SHOSHONE UTE
I
SHAWNEE MARYLAND
CHEYENNE
S
VIRGINIA
I
NORTH CAROLINA
A
OSAGE CHEROKEE
SOUTH CAROLINA
N
AT L A N T I C
A PA C H E GEORGIA OCEAN
A
N E W
EAST
S P A I N WEST FLORIDA
PA C I F I C FLORIDA
OCEAN GULF OF MEXICO
0 500 mi
0 800 km
Map 3.1. The United States in North America, ca. 1790
British West Indian planters’ dependence on Britain and fear of slave rebel-
lion made them cling to British power. The imperial crisis and revolution di-
vided Britain’s American empire but did not destroy it, and the new United
States had to contend with an enduring British imperial presence in its vicinity
even as the locus of Britain’s empire shifted eastward. The British presence in
Canada, as well as Spanish persistence beyond the new country’s southern and
western borders in Florida and Louisiana, gave rise to what might be called a
paracolonial situation. However postcolonial the United States may have been, it
was still ringed by other powers’ colonies. Many in the new country optimistically
expected that these neighboring territories would eventually turn republican
and join the United States, but nobody knew exactly how and when that would
happen. In the meantime, the postcolonial republic coexisted with a persistent
colonial order.15
The patriots did not win the Revolutionary War by themselves. European
imperial competition and American environmental conditions played into
their hands. At the conclusive b attle at Yorktown, they got timely help from the
French navy and the malaria-bearing Anopheles quadrimaculatus mosquito.
The French w ere no less self-interested than the mosquitoes, as the colonial
revolt gave them a chance to exact some revenge upon the British for the Seven
Years’ War. French and also Spanish involvement turned an intraimperial war
into an interimperial one that rippled beyond mainland North America and
touched every inhabited continent. If the Minutemen at Lexington fired the
“shot heard round the world,” then the sound reverberated through the echo
chamber of European imperial power.16
In the breakaway colonies, secession inevitably led to the central questions
of who should rule at home and how. Nearly all agreed that the states should
be part of a single Union, and the new government should be “republican,” that
is, ruled by the citizenry through their representatives and not by a monarch.
In today’s debates over the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution,
the radical quality of the principle of republican self-government at the time
should not be underestimated, despite the all-too-obvious limits on the defini-
tion of “we, the people” in actual practice. At the same time, consensus on the
principle of republican self-government left plenty of room for diverse visions
of who should be included and how they should govern themselves, and what
to do about those who were left out.17
Much as in the newly independent countries of Latin America in the early
nineteenth century, a fault line running through the postrevolutionary United
States divided state-oriented elites who envisioned strong local autonomy within
a loose federal system and nationally oriented elites who preferred a strong
central government with plenary powers over the states. The former held sway
under the Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781, which a frustrated George
Washington lampooned a few years later as a “half-starved, limping Govern-
ment, that appears to be always moving upon crutches, and tottering at e very
step.” Despite some important successes, including the Northwest and Land
Ordinances that established a template for western expansion, the u nion under
the Articles turned out to be a diplomatic and fiscal failure. It was unable to
raise taxes, enforce treaties, maintain an army, or secure its commercial interests
abroad. Some historians have emphasized the centralists’ anxiety over populist
politics in the states, but an equally powerful impetus for the overthrow of the
Articles was the intensifying sense that the federal structure was inadequate to
deal with a hostile and meddling outside world. Notable challenges included
Britain’s persistent military presence in the northwestern borderlands, and the
failure of commercial diplomacy to crack open Caribbean markets to mainland
merchants.18
Three famous sets of compromises secured the constitution. The first com-
promise balanced the interests of large and small states through the mechanism
of a bicameral legislature. One chamber, the Senate, gave each state two rep-
resentatives, while the other, the House, apportioned representation accord-
ing to population (with the slave population counted in a three-fifths ratio).
The second involved slavery. The three-fifths clause decided how much added
representation slaveholders would enjoy in the House by virtue of owning
slaves; the Fugitive Slave Clause prevented slaves from gaining their freedom
by escaping to another state; the Slave Trade Clause barred Congress from
prohibiting slave imports before 1808, a twenty-year window of opportunity
for slavers. The third compromise, completed a fter ratification, led to a Bill of
Rights, which gave suspicious anti-Federalists additional guarantees that the
new national government would not overstep its bounds and infringe on indi-
vidual liberty or state prerogatives. One recent historian argues that the consti-
tution should be seen as a “peace pact” among the states, which kept the Union
from fragmenting into regional confederacies or succumbing to anarchy (until
it failed to do so).19
One mark of the new constitution’s initial success was that the new Union
successfully navigated the dangerous currents of international politics in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The country held together, even
thrived, in an era of almost unremitting European and Caribbean war from
1789 to 1815. Its population and territory doubled, and it began to pursue what
might be called “self-strengthening” policies that placed the national state on a
stronger footing. The first party system, a rivalry between Hamiltonian Feder-
alists and Jeffersonian Republicans, was powerfully shaped by the French Revo-
lution and its ripple effects. And as France warred with its enemies, the United
States’ active neutral carrying trade invited attacks from belligerent powers at
sea. Although Washington’s successors heeded his advice to avoid “entangling
alliances” with foreign powers, they could not escape the global vortex.20
Hamiltonian Federalists admired Britain and hoped to emulate it. They de-
ployed the national government to court European investment in domestic
enterprise and accelerate capitalist development. Particularly important was
Hamilton’s fiscal program designed to shore up public credit. By contrast,
the Jeffersonian opposition regarded Britain as an antimodel of concentrated
power and inequality, and they were more sympathetic to the French Revolu-
tion until it careened toward terror. Most notably in the debate over the char-
tering of a national bank, Jeffersonian Republicans sought to keep the powers
of the national government strictly limited by a narrow construction of the
language of the constitution. During the Adams administration in the late
1790s, the Federalists overplayed their hand, and the Jeffersonian Republicans
swept them aside in the election of 1800, which reasserted antifederalist princi
ples of state sovereignty within the structure of the constitution. In power,
Jeffersonians sought to pry open European markets and secure the virtuous
commercial-agrarian republic. They deployed the young navy against the Bar-
bary pirates, and took advantage of Napoleon’s plight in the Caribbean and
Europe to purchase Louisiana—recently regained from Spain. The Republicans’
trade policies of discrimination and embargo failed, but unintentionally stim-
ulated “domestic manufactures” and industrial enterprise.21
The War of 1812 showed both the strains and the strength of the republican
nation-state. James Madison’s administration managed the war poorly. The
United States failed to wrest Canada out of British hands, mocking Jeffer-
son’s rash prediction that the conquest of Canada would be “a mere matter of
marching.” The war antagonized New E ngland’s anglophilic, arch-Federalist
merchant elite. At the Hartford Convention in 1814, New Englanders threat-
ened to secede from the Union. Most embarrassing of all was the burning of
public buildings in the nation’s capital. Not all was disaster for the United
States. Tecumseh’s pan-Indian alliance collapsed in the Ohio Valley. Planter-
general Andrew Jackson crushed the Red Stick Rebellion among the southern
Indians and beat back a British invasion of New Orleans. The war spelled the
doom of indigenous power east of the Mississippi River. Victories for the
United States on the western and southern frontier stoked a heady nationalism
and new imperial ambitions. An era of national consolidation, territorial
expansion, and capitalist development would follow the War of 1812 in republi-
can North America as much of Spanish America plunged into uncivil wars for
independence.22
A Rising Empire
Hamilton was not alone when he referred to the United States as an “empire,”
but what he and others meant by that word is elusive. Its most regular usage
simply denoted an extensive territory u nder a sovereign power. A 1789 dic-
tionary published in Philadelphia defined empire as “imperial power; the re-
gion over which dominion is extended; command over anything.” It was often
used metaphorically, as Hamilton did in Federalist 6 to refer facetiously to the
“happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue.” However, there are sev-
eral references in the Early American Imprints database to the United States as
a “rising empire,” one as early as 1776, suggesting that the concept of American
empire was, from the very start, linked to the emergence of the United States as
a power in the hemisphere if not the world.23
Recent scholars have effectively historicized the founders’ idea of a “repub-
lican empire,” their solution to the problem of preserving liberty and pursuing
expansion at the same time. The political key was the principle of the equal-
ity of the states composing the Union. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 en-
shrined the expectation that new territory would eventually be absorbed into
the Union as states on an equal basis with the original states. Promising west-
erners equal political rights to local self-government was intended to prevent
separatist and secessionist movements on the frontier, particularly t hose incited
by meddling Spanish officials in the lower Mississippi Valley. And by endowing
westerners with substantial responsibility for their own self-government and
defense—in a word, citizenship—republicans attempted to limit a potential
source of the growth and concentration of power in the national government:
colonial administrative patronage and a standing army. Federalism thus blazed
the way for a continental, if not infinitely expansible, “empire of liberty,” to use
Jefferson’s famous phrase.24
Turning western “wilderness” into republican “civilization” offered a social
basis for the empire of liberty. This transformation was accomplished through
myriad policies on the federal and state levels that promoted migration, com-
mercial development, and national integration, including the creation of a
regulated land market, a postal network, and other infrastructural projects
that eased the transportation of people, goods, and information back and forth
between interior communities and the Atlantic world. The infiltration of civil
society also assisted greatly in this transformation. Religious missions and
churches, schools, debating societies, newspapers, and the national political
parties formed a diffuse and highly effective lattice of infrastructural power that
spread the nation across an “improved” western landscape. Federalist fears of
frontier settlers’ reversion to barbarism faded pretty quickly, or morphed into
a new concern about the spread of slavery.25
In retrospect, the westward march of the United States across North Ame
rica appears inexorable if not inevitable, but it was actually a sporadic process
that depended heavily on “accident and force” and sparked enormous inter-
national and domestic conflict. Consider the windfall known as the Louisiana
Purchase. Jefferson’s main goal was to protect western farmers’ access to foreign
markets by keeping New Orleans out of the hands of the French after the secret
Treaty of San Ildefonso, but St. Domingue’s rebels and mosquitoes defeated
Napoleon’s ambitions to revive French empire in North America and the Ca
ribbean, so Napoleon threw in the whole vast Louisiana territory as lagniappe.
(That’s what they call it in New Orleans.) In acquiring Louisiana, the United
States not only played the Old World’s game of imperial diplomacy but also
benefited from the explosion of the ultimate contradiction between metropol-
itan liberty and colonial slavery in transatlantic imperialism. The shocks from
that explosion would continue to reverberate in Louisiana and elsewhere for
sixty years. The New Orleans Daily Picayune was still reeling in May 1861, when
it charged that the “abolition party” in the North “would gloat to see the South
made the scene of another massacre like that of St. Domingo.” The fates of the
United States and Haiti diverged in innumerable ways across the nineteenth
century, but they were also deeply entwined.26
In acquiring Louisiana’s roughly eight hundred thousand square miles, the
United States gained more than enough land to perpetuate the agrarian repub-
lic for generations. It also acquired nominal dominion over at least fifty thou-
sand people of European and African descent living in colonial settlements
mostly on the lower Mississippi, and at least another hundred thousand Indi-
ans spread across the vast territory. Nobody knew exactly how many there w ere
at the time, b ecause of the autonomy of indigenous communities from impe-
rial control—and census-takers—in the late eighteenth century. One hundred
years later, the U.S. government officially counted 144,000 Indians living in
the region of the Louisiana Purchase; w hether relocation and reproduction
made up for displacement and death is difficult to say.27 Whether and how to
integrate all these people into the United States posed a considerable array of
challenges for the proponents of republican empire. It also posed a consider-
able array of challenges for those American Jonahs swallowed by the U.S.
whale. Perhaps the most innovative new scholarship on America’s continental
empire focuses on the view from inside the belly of the beast.
Louisiana’s white, largely francophone population descended from early
French settlers in the Mississippi Valley, as well as later migrants such as the
Acadian and Caribbean refugees. Many eastern Federalists expressed suspicion
of their republican credentials and would have liked to place them under an
indefinite political apprenticeship u ntil they could learn the proper habits of
citizenship, but after some debate and negotiation, they were admitted to the
United States under similar rules as governed the Northwest and Southwest
Territories. So their political equality with the rest of the country was ensured—
at least in time. Thirteen states were eventually carved out of the Louisiana
Purchase, ending with Oklahoma in 1907, which means that the process of
folding Louisiana into the republican empire took more than a c entury. The
political status of citizens living in so-called unorganized areas of the Purchase,
or areas stuck in the territorial stage of government, was a subordinate one,
reminiscent of those of us who live in Washington, D.C., t oday, who lack voting
representation in Congress.28
Up and down the Mississippi Valley, Greater Louisiana’s “creole” population
soon found itself outnumbered by newcomers from the eastern United States
and foreigners from abroad. According to the 1850 census, only 40 percent of
the 1.2 million white people living in the four states then formed out of the
Louisiana Purchase (Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa) w ere native to
the state they lived in, and 10 percent of the whole population of these states
had been born abroad. New Orleans was second only to New York as a port of
disembarkation for immigrants before the Civil War, most of whom headed up
the Mississippi River into the continental heartland, where the U.S. government
was selling federal lands for a minimum of $1.25 an acre. Immigrants populated
the towns and cities of the Upper Mississippi to a remarkable extent; more than
half the residents of St. Louis in 1860, for instance, were foreign-born.29
While the creoles w ere overrun, the Indians w ere pushed aside. Not only
did the Louisiana Purchase bring many new Indian peoples under nominal U.S.
sovereignty, but it occurred to a few U.S. policy makers (included Jefferson)
that “uninhabited” Louisiana could serve as a potential receptacle for displaced
eastern Indians. Mounting demographic and political pressure against the east-
ern Indians reached a critical juncture in the late 1820s with the election of
Andrew Jackson as president. Jackson and his followers regarded the enduring
Indian presence as an obstacle to democratic republicanism. They saw asser-
tions of Indian sovereignty, most notably the Cherokee Constitution of 1827,
as illegitimate assaults on the constitutional prerogatives of the states and unjust
monopolies on valuable land. Indian removal truncated federal and evangelical
efforts to “civilize” the eastern Indians through the provision of farm imple-
ments and the establishment of Christian schools and missions. Consequently,
removal met with strong but ultimately unsuccessful opposition from the
Indians’ largely northeastern evangelical and anti-Jackson allies inside the
United States, as well as fierce opposition from the Indians themselves.30
Jackson defended Indian removal as a benevolent alternative to physical an-
nihilation or unwanted cultural and political assimilation, but it was in fact a
vicious, deadly sham conducted with fealty to the outward forms of diplomacy
and justice—force dressed up as choice. “To destroy human beings with greater
respect for the laws of humanity would be impossible,” observed Alexis de Toc-
queville, who witnessed a miserable group of emigrant Choctaws crossing the
Mississippi at Memphis. By 1845, roughly seventy-five thousand Sac, Fox, Kicka-
poo, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Miami, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw,
and Seminole Indians had been compelled by fraud and violence to migrate
to the so-called Indian Country, a reserve carved out of the Louisiana cession
west of Missouri and Arkansas in what today is Oklahoma. Several thousand
died along the way from starvation and disease (including newly arrived chol-
era); hundreds of o thers were killed in the wars of removal, including the Black
Hawk War in Illinois and Wisconsin and the protracted Seminole War (1835–
1842) in Florida.31
Emigrant and relocated Indians tried to compose themselves in the Indian
Country west of the Mississippi River, but their displacement created a whole
new set of challenges. The new Indian settlements butted against the powerful
Osage, Sioux, and Comanche Indian nations of the Plains, who w ere often hos-
tile to them. Feckless U.S. Indian agents and army garrisons did not help. In the
1850s, another wave of Euro-Americans broke over them as the bloody saga of
Indian annihilation, displacement, and confinement repeated itself on differ
ent terrain and with more lethal technology. “Bleeding Kansas,” the infamous
battleground between proslavery and antislavery settlers in the 1850s, was also
the first theater of the thirty-year war between the Lakota Sioux and the U.S.
Army. The heart of North America became a crossroads of conflict.32
A long chain of causation led from the Louisiana Purchase to war between
the United States and Mexico, which resulted in the United States’ next g reat
territorial extension. As Ávila and Tutino’s essay on Mexico in this volume
makes clear, the origins of that pivotal war (perhaps it should be called “The
War of Northern Aggression”) must be viewed as much in the context of
contests over state formation and market development on Mexico’s northern
margin as in the context of U.S. western expansion and rhetoric of Manifest
Destiny. Texan secession and independence from Mexico was not only fueled
by Anglo migrants from the United States, but also had deep roots in the clash
between Mexican centralists and localists (into which Anglo migrants inserted
themselves on the localist side), the expansion of plantation slavery and trade
with New Orleans and St. Louis, Mexican abolition of slavery in 1829, and the
failure of the Mexican government to protect northern Mexican communities
against Indian raids.33
By itself, the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny explains little about the internal
pressures behind U.S. expansion, which were shaped in crucial ways by partisan
political competition between Democrats and Whigs, who had contrasting
cross-sectional coalitions that led to different outlooks on war and territorial
expansion. Polk and the southern-dominated Democrats coveted not just
slave-based Texas, but also control of West Coast harbors that would fulfill a long-
standing desire to push into Pacific and Asian markets. The more northern-
dominated Whig Party had greater fears about the divisive sectional effects of
expansion. That conflict over slavery s haped these divisions became apparent
when South Carolina’s John Calhoun, in his capacity as secretary of state, ar-
gued for the annexation of Texas as a bulwark against British abolitionism in
North America, clinching northern antislavery opinion that Texas annexation,
and the war that followed, was a proslavery plot. Whig and abolitionist oppo-
nents registered anguished objections to the war.34
The U.S. victory was not the cakewalk it has often seemed to be in the
historiography. While its battlefield victories w ere often overwhelming and
decisive—due in great measure to the professionalism of the United States’
West Point– trained officer corps— occupying extensive Mexican terri-
tory proved far more challenging. (Sound familiar?) Local uprisings against
the U.S. presence made Mexican territory hot to the touch. In the end, the
United States grabbed as much Mexican territory with as few inhabitants as
possible via the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Even so, the acquisition of ter-
ritory posed similar problems for the republican empire as had the Louisiana
Purchase: how to incorporate Mexicans; what to do about Indians; w hether
the territory should be slave or free. But too much had changed for these prob
lems to be solved in the same way as before.35
The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 put the U.S.-Mexican War
in a whole new light. A massive influx of migrants from around the world
quickened California, as well as the ports and passageways leading to it. Al-
most 40 percent of California’s population in 1860 was foreign-born, includ-
ing 35,000 Chinese, 33,000 Irish, and 22,000 Germans, as well as argonauts
from Sonora, Peru, and Chile. The California gold rush inspired the equally
great discovery of gold in Australia, and the infusion of massive quantities of
gold from the Pacific World powerfully stimulated the American and global
economies. Friedrich Engels ruefully admitted that the Communist Manifesto
had not foreseen the “creation of large new markets out of nothing.” The rapid
development of California stirred schemes to tie the West Coast closer to the
eastern United States through a transcontinental railroad, which in turn ig-
nited the b itter sectional strife over slavery that led to the Civil War. But that
next war remained hidden beyond the horizon when the nineteenth century
reached its midpoint, and few p eople in the United States would have pre-
dicted it, despite their divisions. In the wake of the so-called Compromise of
1850, which appeared to soothe the tensions over slavery’s expansion resulting
from the war with Mexico, more would have been more apt to celebrate a new
era of peace, prosperity, and power than to fear an impending crisis.36
An Irrepressible Conflict
All changed quickly. Just a decade a fter the conclusion of the Mexican-American
War, William Seward—a leader of the new Republican Party that caught fire in
the North—proclaimed the existence of an “irrepressible conflict” between two
political systems in the United States, one based on “servile, or slave labor” and
the other on “voluntary l abor of freemen.”37 Seward’s irrepressible conflict soon
became a vicious civil war that revolutionized the foundations of the Union by
breaking up the “slave power.” Why did the United States split apart? How
was it remade? Answering these questions remains a challenge for historians,
but the global turn in U.S. history has infused the study of the Civil War era
with a new dimension. The nation’s history must now be embedded in more
global dynamics of capitalism, national state formation, imperial expansion,
international diplomacy, and the clash of ideas about slavery and freedom.38
The North American slave regime changed in important ways between
independence and Civil War. It became more sectional, more completely
domesticated, and enmeshed in the transatlantic cotton economy. First more
sectional: slavery disappeared from the northeastern states through a state-
by-state process of gradual emancipation, and it was barred from the “old
Northwest” by legal enactments (the Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri
Compromise). A mix of revolutionary antislavery ideals, evangelical perfec-
tionism, and emerging bourgeois norms of freedom motivated northern aboli-
tion, which was made feasible by the relative insignificance of slave labor in
the northern economy. Free p eople of color in the North generally occupied
the lowest rungs on the economic ladder, and they faced newly institutional-
ized forms of racism, but they also organized vigilance committees, mutual aid
societies, schools, and (most importantly) churches that provided the bedrock
of an African American civil society.39
As slavery disappeared in the northern states, the northern economy expe-
rienced a transformation that some historians have called a “transition to
capitalism” and others a “market revolution.” In crude summary, demographic
growth and improvements in transportation led to an intensifying social divi-
sion of labor and economic specialization, the commercialization of agriculture,
the emergence of proto-industrial production, and the proliferation of towns
and cities. Placing the so-called market revolution in a transatlantic context, it’s
clear that t hese developments mirrored similar developments in Britain and
borrowed liberally from the British model. New England entrepreneurs smug-
gled industrial knowledge out of Britain, while skilled and semiskilled immi-
grants added their own technical know-how and ingenuity. A common lan-
guage facilitated this transfer of human capital. British lenders helped to finance
state-sponsored internal improvement projects in the 1830s and private railroad
construction in the 1840s and 1850s. Throughout the era, British goods flooded
American markets, providing standards of industry and fashion that domestic
manufacturers struggled to imitate and improve upon behind a protective wall
of tariffs.40
By midcentury, a broad array of northerners celebrated “free labor” as the
just, progressive basis of their social order, while regarding southern slavery as
cruel and backward. Free labor ideology did not necessarily lead to abolition-
ism, however, since distance, racism, property rights, and federalism all stood
in the way. It took something more for the transformation of northern society
to precipitate into a politically effective antislavery movement. Yet free labor
ideology harbored a crucial tension. The concept encompassed both the inde
pendent farmer and artisan who worked for himself and commanded his own
household, and the wage laborer, increasingly common in the North, who “vol-
untarily” worked for someone else under the compulsion of the labor market
rather than the lash. Spokesmen for the northern white working class invoked
the slogan of “wage slavery” to indict the swindle of free labor, and at times,
they transmuted “wage slavery” into its doppleganger, “white slavery.”41
In the southern states, by contrast, the “market revolution” traced a differ
ent, slavery-based path toward modernity. The well-known rise of the short-
staple cotton production invigorated and extended North American slavery
from the Carolina upcountry to Texas. A local crop used for home textile pro-
duction in the eighteenth century, short-staple cotton became the favorite fiber
of cotton textile manufacturers, the vanguard of the industrial revolution in
the nineteenth c entury. Annual North American short-staple cotton exports
increased from almost none in 1790 to 4 million bales by 1860. The United
States produced two-thirds of the world’s short-staple cotton on the eve of the
Civil War, and three-quarters of the U.S. crop was exported, mostly to G reat
Britain. Cotton alone accounted for more than half the value of all U.S. exports
throughout the pre–Civil War era. All this did not magically occur b ecause of
the cotton gin. That s imple invention was less a cause than an effect of the new
structure of opportunity in the transatlantic economy.42
Neither capitalism nor the market revolution (whichever one wants to call
it) bypassed the southern states. Rather, the cotton plantation system at the
core of the nineteenth-century South latched onto transatlantic industrial
revolution and went along for the ride—an unnatural symbiosis in which the
parasite feeds its host. Outside the cotton core w ere other slave-grown crops
(tobacco and hemp in the Upper South, rice in the Carolina-Georgia low
country, and sugar in lower Louisiana), upcountry enclaves where non–slave
owners predominated, and an outer ring of towns and smaller cities from Bal-
timore to New Orleans where slavery took on a distinctive urban form. North

American masters weathered the revolutionary challenge and adapted slave
labor to a wide range of environments and economies, much like their counter
parts in Cuba and Brazil.43
Unlike Cuba and Brazil, the United States “domesticated” its slave population
by (mostly) withdrawing from the Atlantic slave trade before 1820. Instead of
imported Africans, biological reproduction and a massive internal slave trade
sustained the expansion of cotton and sugar production in the Deep South
in the decades before the Civil War. The routine buying and selling of p eople
gave the nineteenth-century South its most brutally commercial aspect, not-
withstanding slave o wners’ many strategies of denial and concealment. Th ose
strategies w ere in fact crucial elements of proslavery ideology—a conceptual
domestication. Proslavery was the antithesis of northern free labor ideology.
Southern slave owners came to insist that slavery was natural, just, and even
progressive in the classic sense. Most of all, they endorsed it as a sacred Christian
arrangement and a bulwark against the dangerous isms of the modern world.44
The clash between northern antislavery and southern proslavery viewpoints
crystallized within broader transatlantic debates over slavery and freedom, and
it was paracolonial in that both sides drew lessons from the models of eman-
cipation pioneered elsewhere in the Atlantic world. Both sides reacted to the
British campaign against the slave trade, the Haitian Revolution and other foreign
slave revolts, the various West Indian emancipations, and antislavery coloniza-
tion projects in West Africa. Intellectuals on both sides of the slavery debate
drew from European political economy, anthropology, and sociology to bol-
ster their positions. U.S. abolitionists beginning in the 1830s allied with their
British counterparts through personal correspondence, the travel and lecture
circuit, and antislavery publishing and marketing. The transatlantic icon of
abolitionism, a kneeling slave emblazoned with the slogan “Am I not a man
and a b rother?,” illustrates this collaboration. The abolitionists’ foreign con-
nections could backfire, however, since it opened them to the potent charge of
anglophilia.45
Southern slave owners looked on with increasing alarm at a spreading anti-
slavery epidemic in the North. From the 1820s to the 1840s, they more or less suc-
cessfully quarantined the national state from infection through their influence
in the political parties, the suppression of debate via the “gag rule” in Congress,
and an insistence on a narrow reading of the national government’s constitu-
tional powers with respect to slavery. But they had no such power over northern
civil society, where antislavery flourished in churches and middle-class parlors.
While the immediatist, antiracist stance of William Lloyd Garrison attracted
many black northerners, his brand of radical abolitionism remained marginal
among white northerners. A more diffuse and sentimental antislavery atti-
tude made greater headway. Many subscribed to African colonization in the
delusional hope that removing black people would pave the way for a gradual
emancipation. That many white Americans thought an overseas colony could
solve the problem of domestic slavery is, among other things, a good indication
of just how much slavery—and the racism it spawned—unhinged republican
principles.46
What translated northern antislavery opinion into an antislavery politics
beginning in the 1840s? The trigger was the Mexican war and the emergence of
free-soilism. Free soil fused an indictment of slavery with a defense of the rights
of white northerners against infringement by the “slave power.” Although the
question of the status of slavery in the Mexican cession was resolved by the
so-called Compromise of 1850 (which admitted California as a free state and
shifted the burden of decision onto local communities in the rest of the ces-
sion through the mechanism of “popular sovereignty”), the debates over once-
Mexican lands Mexico let the slavery genie out of its bottle. When Stephen
Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska bill applied the principle of popular sovereignty
to the newly org anized Louisiana Purchase territories of Kansas and Nebraska
in 1854, the bottle shattered. The operation of the new Fugitive Slave Law, fili-
busterism in Cuba and Nicaragua, and loud southern agitation to resume Af-
rican slave importation all strengthened northern fears that southern slavery
had aggressive national, and even international, ambitions—what Abraham Lin-
coln called “the high-road to a slave empire.” By 1860, Whigs had virtually dis
appeared, Democrats had divided along sectional lines, and a new antislavery
party calling itself Republican had reassembled the shards of northern politics
into a winning electoral coalition.47
Lincoln, a western railroad lawyer mythologized as a rail splitter, won the
presidency in 1860 without a single southern electoral vote. Even though Lin-
coln and the Republican platform disavowed abolitionism and pledged not
to touch slavery in the states where it already existed, southern secessionists
viewed the outcome as immensely dangerous to slavery. It placed the national
government in the hands of a northern antislavery party. Once in control of
the legislative and executive branches of the national government, they foresaw,
Republicans would do more than simply contain slavery. They could legislate
slavery out of existence by degrees. They could use patronage to build up a south-
ern antislavery party starting in the northern tier of slave states and working
its way down. Or worst of all, the Republican victory could breed more John
Browns, the militant abolitionist who tried to spark a slave revolt at Harpers
Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.48
Free states
Slave states CANADA
New Hampshire
Maine
N Washington Territory Vermont
SIOUX Minnesota Massachusetts

Oregon Territory Nebraska Territory Wisconsin New York
SIOUX Michigan Rhode Island
SIOUX
Connecticut
Pennsylvania New Jersey
Iowa
Ohio Delaware
Indiana
Illinois Maryland
Utah Territory Virginia
Kansas Washington, DC
California Territory Missouri Kentucky
North
Carolina
Tennessee
New Mexico Territory South
Indian Carolina
Arkansas
AP
Territory
HE
AC
Georgia
COMANCHE
Alabama AT L A N T I C
Mississippi
OCEAN
Texas
Louisiana
Florida
PA C I F I C
OCEAN GULF OF MEXICO
MEXICO 0 500 mi
CUBA
0 800 km
Map 3.2. The United States in North America, ca. 1860
At the same time, secessionists did more than react defensively against an
existential antislavery threat. They also attempted to forge a popular national-
ism based materially and ideologically on slavery. The secessionist campaign
following Lincoln’s election, the establishment of a new Confederate govern-
ment, and the initial mobilization for war w ere politically effective, though not
uncontested, articulations of proslavery nationalism in the South. (Four border
slave states remained in the Union, and opposition to secession was quite strong
in non-slave-owning pockets of the South.) Over time, however, the long slog
of war exposed Confederate weaknesses relative to the Union: a smaller citizenry,
an inferior industrial base, difficulties of communication and coordination, a
deep-seated localism, and, as it turned out, slavery itself. Confederate national-
ist hopes that dependence on southern cotton would compel European diplo-
matic recognition and support went unfulfilled. Unlike the breakaway colonies
during the American Revolution, the Confederacy had to fend for itself in a
new era of industrial warfare.49
By contrast, only a few northern voices defended the right of secession. Lin-
coln could neither concede to slave o wners’ demands for constitutional pro-
tections for slavery nor let the South go. Most northerners regarded secession
as “the essence of anarchy,” as Lincoln put it in his first inaugural address. It
flaunted basic democratic principle. Time and again, Lincoln emphasized the
world-historical significance of American democracy. In 1862 he called it “the
last best hope of Earth.” In the Gettysburg Address he implored his country-
men to resolve that “government of the p eople, by the p eople, for the p eople
shall not perish from the earth.” Union soldiers agreed. They fought for the
Union and the abstract principle of democratic self-government that it sym-
bolized. Over time, however, northern war aims shifted away from merely
preserving the Union to overthrowing slavery. This momentous shift resulted
from the tenacity of Confederate resistance. If they had given up sooner, they
might have held on to slavery longer.50
From southern slave owners’ perspective, the Civil War turned into the very
catastrophe they had hoped to prevent through secession. It was Haiti all over
again, the military road to emancipation. Masters’ authority eroded. Thou-
sands of slaves fled to the Union lines. Almost two hundred thousand black
men joined the Union army and navy in the last two years of the war once
Lincoln authorized black enlistment. But the military road to emancipation
was not straight and narrow. Different rules applied in different places and to
different people; freedom came sooner to some than others. Among the last
to be freed w ere slaves in the Union slave states of Kentucky and Delaware,
where emancipation did not generally apply u ntil ratification of the Thirteenth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in December 1865. The physical and en-
vironmental devastation of the war made life difficult for freed p eople strug-
gling to eke out a living from a ruined landscape. The trauma of war scarred
southern society. Many former Confederates refused to accept the legitimacy
of emancipation, and their rage at defeat took the ritual form of lynching and
murdering freedpeople. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the
United States but did not define what freedom meant for newly emancipated
people. As in other postemancipation societies in the Americas, the meaning of
their freedom was hammered out over subsequent decades of intense and often
violent struggle, and fell so far short of full citizenship and economic indepen
dence that “freedom” is a misnomer.51
The United States came through its “fiery trial” at a steep price in blood
and treasure. At least 750,000 p eople died, and the war cost an estimated
$10 billion (approximately $32 trillion today). The protagonists struggled to
make sense of the death and carnage. Some found meaning in emancipation,
others in martial virtues like courage. Most ultimately attributed the war to
God’s inscrutable w ill. In hindsight, historians have endowed the Civil War
with more secular significance, such as “the last capitalist revolution” or “the
figure 3.1. Defending the Union and freedom: A soldier
guards cannon in Virginia, 1865
first modern war.” Less reductively, this essay has argued that the Civil War
and emancipation resulted from the intricate dynamics of republican state-
formation, transatlantic capitalist development, and imperial expansion across
North America. Ultimately, the crisis of the 1860s answered Hamilton’s impor
tant question—choice or force?—in terms revealed by a photograph taken in
City Point, Virginia, in 1865, showing a black soldier guarding a line of cannon.
As Lincoln had reminded the U.S. Congress earlier in the war, “We cannot
escape history.”52
The Civil War ended one era of U.S. history and launched another, yet
there is never a clean break with the past. The war did more than restore the
Union; it strengthened the hand of the national government in its unending
contest with the states. Still, there were significant reassertions of state-level
power through the late nineteenth c entury, including the return to home rule
in the South and the formation of new states in the West. Industrial capitalist
development was spurred by the war and accelerated afterward. With railroads
as a leading sector, the U.S. economy steamed t oward new accumulations and
concentrations of wealth, sharper inequality, and fierce class conflict often ar-
ticulated in the seemingly outdated language of Jeffersonian republicanism.
Unprecedented numbers of immigrants flooded into the country, diversifying
and populating swelling cities and manning its workshops, slaughterhouses,
and factories. The United States overtook Great Britain as the world’s largest
manufacturer by the 1890s.
Untangled from slavery and infused with industrial might, the American
empire grew into a more global force. Seasoned Union veterans of the Civil
War, armed with powerful weaponry, stampeded the Plains Indians into mea-
ger reservations and intensified the crusade of civilization against them. It did
not take long for the United States to flex its muscle abroad. In 1867, the United
States annexed tiny Middlebrooks (Midway) atoll in the Pacific, and just over
three decades later, it would claim far bigger prizes from Spain—Cuba and the
Philippines. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the rising empire of Hamil-
ton’s ambitious generation had transformed into a great power and a linchpin
of the modern world.53
Notes
1 Publius [Alexander Hamilton], Federalist 1, http://thomas.loc.gov/home/fedpapers
/fed_01.html, accessed April 14, 2016.
2 Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitu
tion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 131–132. On the continuity between the
colonial and early national eras, see Jack Greene, “Colonial History and National
History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d ser.,
64:2 (April 2007), 235–250. On the importance of placing the history of the United
States in transnational, international, and global contexts, see the essays in Thomas
Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), and Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s
Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006). This historiography is
rapidly growing. On the new nation’s international obligations, see Eliga H. Gould,
Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New
World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
3 Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), translated and online at the
Marx & Engels Internet Archive, online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx
/works/1852/18th-brumaire/, accessed April 14, 2016. I learned much about the false

dichotomy between force and choice from Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of
Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 1:100 (November–December 1976), 5–78.
Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). For
an argument linking the expansion of slavery in the southern United States to the
Great Divergence, see Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery
and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 78–83.
5 For a succinct analysis of Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech in Springfield,
Illinois, in 1858, see Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American
Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010), 99–102.
6 The best delineation of the geography of colonial settlement in mainland British
North America is D. W. Meinig, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1986). The most influential interpretation of the enduring
Indian presence in eastern North America is Richard White, The Middle Ground:
Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1991).
7 Nuala Zahedieh, “Economy,” in British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Ar-
mitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 58, 62.
8 For an argument linking colonial Americans’ consumerism and the revolution,
see T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped
American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
9 That the American colonies w ere governed by negotiated consent is a hallmark of
the work of Jack Greene. For a succinct statement, see his “The American Revolu-
tion,” American Historical Review 105:1 (February 2000), 93–102.
10 My favorite example is from George Washington’s General O rders, February 27,
1776: “It is a noble Cause we are engaged in, it is the Cause of virtue, and mankind,
every temporal advantage and comfort to us, and our posterity, depends upon the
Vigour of our exertions; in short, Freedom, or Slavery must be the result of our
conduct, there can therefore be no greater Inducement to men to behave well:—
But it may not be amiss for the Troops to know, that if any Man in action s hall
presume to skulk, hide himself, or retreat from the enemy, without the orders of his
commanding Officer; he will be instantly shot down, as an example of cowardice;—
Cowards having too frequently disconcerted the best form’d Troops, by their
dastardly behaviour.” Washington apparently thought the fear of enslavement
needed reinforcements. This document can be found online through the George
Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741–1799, https://memory.loc.gov
/ammem/g whtml/g whome.html, accessed April 14, 2016.
11 Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Letter 3,
online at http://xroads.v irginia.edu/~hyper/crev/letter03.html, accessed April 14,
2016; for an overview of colonial American religious history, see Jon Butler, Awash
in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
12 “A Narrative of the Capture of Henry Laurens, of His Confinement in the Tower
of London, &c. 1780, 1781, 1782,” Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society
(1857), 21–22; Greene, “American Revolution.” Among the countless books on
the revolution, see Richard Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts
13 John Murrin, “A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Iden-
tity,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National
Identity, ed. Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). For the war as a touchstone of
nationalism, see Sarah Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in
Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002),
and David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American
Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
14 An outpouring of scholarship on the loyalists has been recently capped by Maya
Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New
York: Random House, 2011). These numbers are Jasanoff ’s.
15 For the Caribbean, see Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided:
The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2000). For Canada, see Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: In
dians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderlands of the American Revolution (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). For the early United States as paracolonial, see Sean X.
Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture
in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), and on
paracolonial states in this era, see C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Em
pire and the World, 1780–1830 (New York: Longman, 1989), 228–235, which argues
that several independent states thrived outside Europe, particularly in the Ottoman
world. For the early United States as postcolonial, see Greene, “Colonial History
and National History,” and the essays in the same volume responding to Greene;
Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became
a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sam W. Haynes,
Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlot-
tesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).
16 John McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean,
1620–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Bender, A Nation among
Nations, chap. 2, places the American Revolution in the context of the long-term
Anglo-French rivalry. Ungrateful Americans still find mosquitoes and the French
irritating.
17 The strongest recent statement of the American Revolution as a revolution, see
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1991). Wood’s critics emphasize the class, racial, and gender limits of
republicanism, and they generally view the constitution as a backlash against the
revolution’s more democratic tendencies.
18 Important recent works rethinking the origins of the constitution in the context
of international relations are David Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World
of the American Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), and Max
Edling, A Revolution in F avor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and

the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Quotation from George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, January 18, 1784,
George Washington Papers, https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/g whtml/g whome
.html, accessed April 14, 2016. To the extent that any social basis undergirded the
political division between the localists and nationalists, it was the gap between
backcountry provincials and more urbane cosmopolitans, but like most broad
analytical dichotomies, this one is subject to caveats, exceptions, and outright
contradictions. A more complete analysis of the mosaic of interests on each side
of the debate over the constitution is beyond the scope of this essay. Sean Wilentz,
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005),
chapter 1. Proving the class basis of the constitution is the progressive Holy Grail
of U.S. historiography.
19 Henrickson, Peace Pact. On the constitution, see Rakove, Original Meanings;
David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New
York: Hill & Wang 2009); Gordon Wood, Creation of the American Republic,
1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).
20 On the French Revolution and the first party system, see Stanley Elkins and Erik
McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
21 Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America
22 J. C. A. Stagg, The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), emphasizes the weaknesses of the U.S. effort in the War
of 1812.
23 S.v. “empire,” A complete dictionary of the English language, both with regard to sound
and meaning: one main object of which is, to establish a plain and permanent
standard of pronunciation. To which is prefixed a rhetorical grammar. By Thomas
Sheridan, A.M. (Philadelphia: Printed by William Young, bookseller, the corner of
Second and Chesnut-Street, 1789), n.p.; for “rising empire,” see Large additions to
Common sense; addressed to the inhabitants of America, on several important subjects.
Being divided into eleven parts . . . (Salem, MA, 1776), title page.
24 Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottes-
ville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), chap. 2; In his Second Inaugural Address,
Jefferson asked rhetorically, “But who can limit the extent to which the federative
principle may operate effectively?”
25 Richard John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to
Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); John Lauritz Larson, In
ternal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government
in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001);
Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2015). On infrastructural power, see Michael Mann, Sources of
Social Power, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
26 New Orleans Daily Picayune, May 7, 1861. On the United States and Haiti, see
Tim Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during
the Early Republic (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Matthew Clavin, Toussaint
Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian
Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
27 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington, 1902), 52. U.S.
policy makers’ nearly total ignorance of the Indian people in the Louisiana territory
is evident from the “Description of Louisiana” Jefferson transmitted to Congress in
1803. One goal of the Lewis & Clark Expedition was to determine who was actu-
ally living there.
28 Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman, The Constitution of Empire: Territorial Expansion
and American Legal History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), argues
that the promise of statehood is what makes territorial acquisition constitutionally
permissible.
29 Census data from Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington: Robert
Armstrong, 1853).
30 The vast literature on Indian removal mostly focuses on the southern Indians
(Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole). For an introduction, see
Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1993). For the northern Indians, see John P. Bowes,
Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2007).
31 D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1992); William Unrah, The Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 1825–1855
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers. Quota-
tion from Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(New York: Library of America, 2004), 391.
32 Some of the most exciting new work in North American history illuminates the
complex world of these western Indian nations and empires before the U.S. on-
slaught, including their often hostile relations with the emigrant Indians. See Ned
Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American
West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Kathleen DuVal, The
Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). On slavery and Indians in Kansas,
see Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–
Civil War Kansas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009).
33 Recent U.S. scholarship on the struggles on Mexico’s northern frontier include
Brian Delay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the US-Mexican War
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Andrés Reséndez, Changing
National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005). Albert Hurtado, John Sutter: A Life on the
North American Frontier (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2006), puts Sutter
and California in a transnational context.
34 The political struggles b ehind the Mexican War on the U.S. side are laid out in
detail in Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, and Daniel Walker Howe, What
Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2007). Amy Greenberg emphasizes domestic opposition to the
Mexican war in A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of
Mexico (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). See also Thomas Hietala, Manifest
Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2003).
35 Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War
and Peace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), chap. 3;
John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The US War with Mexico, 1846–1848
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). On local unrest and resistance in
the Mexican war, see Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History
of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2011), chap. 6.
36 On the California and Australian gold rushes, see H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold:
The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (New York: Doubleday
2002); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of
the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 9.
For California and sectional crisis, see Leonard Richards, The California Gold Rush
and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). Quotation
from Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, August 24, 1852, Marx and Engels Internet
Archive, online at http://marx.libcom.o rg/works/1852/letters/52_08_24.htm,
accessed on April 14, 2016. “Impending crisis” is the title of a classic history of the
road to the Civil War, David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1976), which in turn plays on Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impend
ing Crisis of the South (New York, 1857).
37 For William Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” speech in Rochester in 1858, see
George E. Baker, ed., The Works of William H. Seward (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin
and Company, 1884), 4:289–302.
38 See for instance Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in
World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), chap. 3.
39 For an overview of gradual abolition and the emergence of f ree black society in the
North, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery
in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 9.
We might compare gradual emancipation in the northern states to the demise of
slavery in the newly independent Spanish American republics.
40 Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), argues that these transformations w ere wrenching
and catastrophic; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, takes a more benign view. On
the transatlantic transfer of technology and knowledge, see Doron S. Ben-Atar,
Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
41 For a summary of the rise of free labor ideology, see the new introduction to
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party
Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), ix–xlii. On “wage
slavery” and “white slavery,” see the controversial David Roediger, The Wages of
Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso,
1991).
42 Statistics from Douglas A. Irwin, “Exports of Selected Commodities: 1790–1989,”
table Ee569–589 in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the
Present: Millennial Edition, ed. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Mi-
chael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006). Three important recent books contend that
the brutal expansion of the South’s cotton kingdom was an integral part of a global
capitalist endeavor: Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; Sven Beckert, Empire
of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Walter Johnson,
River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
43 Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century
South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75:3 (August 2009),
627–650. A cogent comparison is Laird Bergad, The Comparative Histories of
Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
44 David Eltis summarizes recent findings on the dimensions of the slave trade to the
United States in “The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644–1867: An Assessment,”
Civil War History 54:4 (December 2008), 347–378. There are several fine books
on the internal slave trade within the United States, including Michael Tadman,
Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the
Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Steve
Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005). On proslavery ideology, see most recently Eugene
Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race
in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), and Michael O’Brien, Conjunctures of Order: Intellectual Life and
the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004).
45 Recent work that places the U.S. slavery debates in a transatlantic context in-
clude Edward Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of
the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008),
and W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Gar
risonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2013). Two panoptic works on emancipation are Robin Black-
burn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (New York: Verso, 1988), and more
recently, Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
46 At the end of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, George Harris and his
family emigrate to Liberia. Southern slave owners’ grip on national politics is
documented in Leonard Richard, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern
Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000),

and Don Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United
States Government’s Relation to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001).
47 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy.
Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and
the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), emphasizes
the complexity of state politics and the salience of issues other than slavery. On
filibustering, see Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in
Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
Lincoln quotation from Foner, The Fiery Trial, 154.
48 William Freehling offers a detailed and provocative narrative of t hese events in The
Road to Disunion, vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007). For a fine-grained state study, I like Michael Johnson,
Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1977).
49 The most recent synthesis along traditional lines is Russell Frank Weigley, A Great
Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861–1865 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2000). On the strength and limits of Confederate nationalism,
see Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and
Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1988); Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997); Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the
Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
50 Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil
War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). For emancipation as war policy, see Mark
Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians,
1861–1864 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
51 For the process of wartime emancipation in the United States, see Ira Berlin,
Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, Slaves
No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), and the documentary volumes of the Freedmen and South-
ern Society Project, Freedom, a Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985–). Michael Vorenberg traces the
origins of the Thirteenth Amendment in Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Aboli
tion of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001). The best account of the politics of emancipation is now James Oakes,
Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New
York: Norton, 2012). Steven Hahn presses a provocative comparison between the
Civil War and Haitian Revolution in his Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For the postwar struggle, see
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1988); Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political
Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the G
reat Migration (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003).
52 The Lincoln quotations at both ends of the paragraph come from the conclusion
to his Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862. For the full text
see The American Presidency Project, online at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu
/ws/index.php?pid=2 9503, accessed on April 14, 2016. A new estimate revises
the number of Civil War dead upward from the traditional 620,000 to 752,000;
see J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War
History 75:4 (December 2011). The estimate of the war’s cost is from Roger
Ransom, “Economics of the Civil War,” EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples,
August 24, 2001, online at http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-t he
-civil-w
ar/, accessed April 14, 2016. For the reckoning with death, see Drew Gilpin
Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). “Last capit alist revolution” is from Barrington Moore
Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making
of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1966), chap. 3; “first modern war” is from
Bruce Catton, The Civil War and Its Meaning in American Culture (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1958). These are older works, but still classic, and
their interpretive tendencies remain vital today. The photograph also echoes John
Quincy Adams’s prediction in 1831 that the controversy over the doctrine of nullifi-
cation “can be settled only at the cannon’s mouth.” Calvin Colton, ed., The Private
Correspondence of Henry Clay (Boston, 1856), 313. See Lacy Ford, “Reconfiguring
the Old South: ‘Solving’ the Problem of Slavery, 1787–1838,” Journal of American
History 95:1 (2008), 122.
53 This paragraph condenses a vast scholarship. On the key themes of this essay, I w ill
single out for special mention Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of
Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1991); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great
West (New York: Norton, 1991); and D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A
Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 3: Transcontinental America,
1850–1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

4
From Slave Colony to Black Nation

Haiti’s Revolutionary Inversion
Carolyn Fick
By the late eighteenth century, the French slave colony of Saint Domingue was
by far the most lucrative colony of the French empire and the entire Atlantic
seaboard. Its trajectory from a slave colony to an independent nation led by
former slaves and their descendants in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic
defies idealization. Yet its existence as an independent black state, the challenges
it posed to Eurocentric notions of liberty, and the fact that the emancipatory
revolution was launched and sustained by the slaves themselves w ere extraordi-
nary and unprecedented accomplishments. To most contemporaries (and until
the last few decades for most historians), the capacity of enslaved Africans to
envision freedom, develop strategies to achieve it, and establish an indepen
dent nation-state to defend it, was inconceivable. Simply put, a slave revolution,
understood on its own terms, lay outside the conceptual framework of Western
thought.1
Yet Haiti did exist in 1804—and has endured despite a history of difficulties
and denigrations. Its existence as an independent country, founded on anti-
slavery, anticolonialism, and racial equality, rather than conventional forms of
political philosophy and constitutional theory, came riddled with complexi-
ties and posed almost insurmountable barriers to leaders committed to state
formation—and to Haitian masses seeking a nation grounded in peasant land-
holding, household production, and local markets.
Saint Domingue: The Quintessential Slave Colony

On the eve of France’s 1789 revolution, Saint Domingue was at its peak. It
had 7,000 plantations: nearly 800 in sugar, more than 3,000 in indigo, some
2,500 in coffee, another 800 in cotton, and some 50 cocoa growers—worked
by over half a million slaves, two-thirds of them born in Africa.2 Yet t here was
very little in its early stages of settlement in the late seventeenth century, with
the spurious activities of freebooters, buccaneers, and pirates, and only a small
number of tobacco and cotton farms, to indicate that a century later the colony
would become the jewel of the French colonial empire and the engine that fu-
eled her international commerce, supplied her domestic industries, employed
millions of French workers, and guaranteed enviable trade surpluses through
reexportation of finished colonial imports to European markets.
Only at the turn of the seventeenth century, after France acquired the west-
ern portion of Hispaniola from Spain in the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), did
Saint Domingue enter its sugar boom, with 120 sugar plantations by 1704, 100
built from 1700 to 1704.3 Over the next eighty years Saint Domingue’s econ-
omy soared to new heights not only in sugar, but, during the decades following
the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, in an emerging coffee sector as well.
By 1789, the total property values in the colony w ere estimated to be over 1.6
4
billion livres.
Such prosperity was not possible without slavery and the slave trade. The
slave trade was a key component of economic expansion in both the metro-
politan and the colonial economies, with over a million slaves imported into
the French West Indies during the eighteenth century, approximately 800,000
going directly to Saint Domingue. By the eve of the revolution, the colony was
importing between 37,000 and 40,000 slaves annually.5
Part of the reason for the insatiable demand for slaves lay in the labor-intensive
nature of sugar production and the profit-driven motives of Saint Domingue’s
planters. Sugar, unlike most other colonial exports, required extensive cultiva-
tion and semi-industrial manufacturing. The planting and harvesting of cane;
From Slave Colony to Black Nation — 139
AT L A N T I C O C E A N
l’Île de la Tortue
CAP FRANÇAIS
N Port-de-Paix Baie de
(LE CAP) Quartier
Morin
l’Acul Petite-
Cap St. Nicolas Port Margot Montechrist
Anse
Môle St Nicolas Jean-Rabel NORTH PROVINCE
Limbé Acul
Bombarde Fort-Dauphin
Plaisance NORTH PLAIN Terrier Rouge
Limonade Le Trou
Grande Rivière
Les Goanïves Dondon Vallière Ouanaminthe
Marmelade
Saint-Raphaël
ARTIBONITE
PLAIN Petite-Rivière
Hinche
St. Marc Verrettes SANTO
l’Île de la Gonave WEST D O MINGO
PROVINCE
Cap Dame- Arcahaye

Marie Mirebalais
Jérémie CUL-DE-SAC PLAIN
Croix-des-Bouquets
Dame-Marie
Anse-à-Veau PORT-AU-PRINCE
GRAND’ANSE
Léogane
Miragoâne Grande Goâve
Tiburon LES PLATONS SOUTH PROVINCE Petit Goâve
Fond-des-Nègres
LES CAYES Cavaillon Aquin Jacmel
PLAIN
LES CAYES
Torbeck St. Louis
Baynet
Port-Salut l’Île à Vache
Sugar plantation zones CARIBBEAN SEA

Coffee cultivation zones
Indigo cultivation zones 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 mi
Cotton cultivation zones 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 km
Map 4.1. Saint Domingue, ca. 1790
the twenty-four-hour multistage process of hauling, milling, boiling the cane

juice, crystallization, purging, and finally drying and packing the sugar, all re-
quired an inexhaustible, highly diversified, enslaved l abor force. With mortality
rates on the sugar plantations among newly arrived Africans reaching upward
of 50 percent in their first five to eight years in the colony, planters continually
purchased more slaves, not just to replenish their diminished stock of h uman
labor, but to expand operations, increase profits, offset debts, and build personal
wealth. The slave population never reproduced, and by 1789 well over two-thirds
of Saint Domingue’s slaves had been born in Africa.
140 — Carolyn Fick
figure 4.1. Slaves milling cane in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue
As slave imports to Saint Domingue reached nearly forty thousand per year
by 1791, most of the African-born, predominantly from the lower West African
coast of Angola and the kingdom of Kongo, had arrived in the colony in the
decade or two before the outbreak of the revolution.6 On average, they were
between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five on arrival. They had spent their for-
mative youth and early adulthood acquiring knowledge and a worldview that
embraced the politics, the languages, religious practices and cultural forms,
kinship ties and obligations, as well as the landholding and agricultural prac-
tices of the African societies from which they came. Most had acquired a long
experience in household production of food crops and local marketing, prac-
tices fundamentally at odds with the system of large-scale plantation produc-
tion and commodity exports they were now forced to endure and sustain.
Slaves born in Saint Domingue, plus a few of the African-born who became
acclimated to colonial slave society, generally occupied elite or supervisory
positions in the slave hierarchy as domestics, coachmen, valets, skilled labor-
ers, and artisans practicing trades in the towns or on plantations. O thers held
important roles as slave drivers, or commandeurs. Holding positions of respon-
sibility and, as commandeurs, authority over other slaves, and with access to the
outside world, some gained a knowledge of French and became aware of politi
cal and other events in the colony, as well as of the politics behind the events—
which often originated in France. The core of the slave leadership that orga
nized the massive slave insurrection of August 22, 1791, came from the ranks
of the commandeurs, along with coachmen, domestics, and other elite slaves,
who played key roles in its inception.7 Toussaint Louverture, who would rise to
the summit of power as a revolutionary black leader and statesman, had been
born a slave, but was already free at the time of the revolution. The revolution,
however, did not begin with slave revolt.
The Background to Slave Emancipation

To understand events in Saint Domingue, we must look to France on the eve of
its revolution. An unprecedented financial crisis faced the Bourbon regime due
in large part to debts incurred to fund the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and
military support of the British American war of independence. The resistance
of the nobility and upper clergy to government tax reforms compounded the
crisis—leaving the monarchy no alternative but to convoke the Estates General. In
doing so, however, Louis XVI opened the floodgates to a revolutionary process
beyond his capacity to control. In addition to dealing with taxation, represen-
tatives from each of France’s three estates—clergy, nobles, and commoners—
were to submit lists of grievances, or cahiers de doléances, to be considered by a
deliberative assembly that had not met since 1614, yet with each estate meeting
and voting separately. Finding themselves at a permanent two-to-one disadvan-
tage with respect to the two privileged estates, the delegates of the Third Estate,
which comprised close to 98 percent of the French population and included all
classes of people—wealthy port merchants, slave traders, commercial agents,
provincial lawyers, notaries, urban and rural artisans, and shopkeepers, as well
as the peasantry—on June 17, 1789, boldly declared themselves a National As-
sembly, deliberating and speaking for the nation as a whole. Three days later,
they swore not to adjourn u ntil a written constitution was a dopted for France.
On August 26, they laid out foundational principles in the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen: universal equality and the preservation of the natu
ral rights to liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
In the context of unfolding revolutionary events in France, sparked by the
opening of the Estates General in 1789 and the egalitarian ideology put for-
ward by the Third Estate, the colony’s white planters and free coloreds (affranchis)
mobilized—and fought against each other—to press their own grievances and
obtain rights they believed to be theirs. The white planters wanted freedom
from restrictive mercantilist policies, political autonomy within the colonial
administration, and the maintenance of racial supremacy.
For the island’s free coloreds, whose elite members were planters, and slave
owners, coffee merchants, and militia officers, many educated in France, some
having fought for British North American independence as volunteers in
the French army, the goal was to gain access to the unfolding political process
in France. They hoped to claim the rights of universal citizenship proclaimed
in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in France and thereby re-
gain legal equality with their white counterparts, denied them b ecause of their
African heritage.8
They aimed to “regain l egal equality” because initially, by Louis XIV’s Code
Noir of 1685, the affranchis were to enjoy “the same rights, privileges and liber-
ties enjoyed by persons born free,” which is to say, by all French subjects. This
remained more or less the case u ntil the Seven Years’ War, a fter which Saint
Domingue witnessed an influx of new French immigrants seeking fortune in
the colony’s expanding plantation economy. Facing competition from a rising
class of f ree colored property o wners for land, slaves, and employment, racial
tensions became increasingly acute. From the late 1760s u ntil the eve of the
revolution, planters pressed racial exclusions. Colonial authorities passed leg-
islation imposing racial segregation in public places, barring free coloreds from
most “white” professions, restricting their ability to travel to France, and, to
suppress feelings of social equality, imposed sumptuary regulations in the pub-
lic sphere. By the early 1770s, f ree coloreds were required to renounce French
surnames and adopt o thers suggesting African origins.9 And they w ere prohib-
ited from holding political office.
The revolutionary context of 1788–1791 suddenly opened the questions of
political equality for free coloreds—of access to office and to the legislative
and judicial processes of making, changing, and interpreting laws. The right to

participate in the public domain took on special urgency. It became the battle-
field on which not only the future of free coloreds, but the future of slavery
itself would be fought and determined.
Free colored leaders like Vincent Ogé, a rich coffee merchant from the col-
ony’s North province, who was in Paris at the outset of the French Revolution,
argued that only if they gained political equality by peaceful and constitutional
means could a generalized slave revolt be averted. If free coloreds had to take
to arms in defense of their rights, they could not be responsible for any actions
the slaves might take. The white planters, for their part, argued that extend-
ing political rights to even one free colored in Saint Domingue would open
the floodgate to demands for universal equality, including the colony’s free
blacks and ultimately their kin still in slavery. For the powerful white colo-
nists, political and civil equality for free coloreds would inevitably lead to the
end of slavery—and of their personal fortunes. In the end, both parties were
proven right—for opposite reasons. A massive slave insurrection did break out
in the colony’s North province on August 22, 1791, a day after f ree coloreds in
the West province announced taking recourse to arms to defend their cause
and their lives from violent aggressions aimed against them across the colony,
mostly by property-less “small white” and other déclassé elements. It would take
another eight months of violent conflict among factions of white colonists—
some wanting to secede from revolutionary France to defend racial supremacy;
others embracing a counterrevolutionary royalist position; and still o thers who
supported French revolutionary officials—and between these factions and the
free coloreds, before the latter w ere granted universal rights of French citizen-
ship by the Legislative Assembly in France on April 4, 1792.
With the new law, f ree coloreds were expected to aid French authorities in
putting down the slave insurrections that had erupted throughout the colony,
and in returning rebel slaves to their plantations. The task proved impossible.
Those in the North, u nder the command of Jean-François and Biassou (with a
small contingent of several hundred well-trained and hardened rebel slaves led
by Toussaint Louverture), were fighting under the banner of Spain, defending
monarchy, and occupying numerous parishes in the eastern part of the prov-
ince. Slave insurgents in the West were close to forming alliances with the Brit-
ish, whose agents had begun to negotiate with secessionist planters to bring
the colony under British domain. In the South, a massive slave rebellion was
unfolding by the end of summer 1792 in the mountainous region around the
capital of les Cayes; rebels formed a massive maroon community of ten to twelve
thousand men, women, and c hildren, with armed contingents and military
outposts. By March 1793, France was at war with both G reat Britain and Spain,
10
and the threat of British invasion loomed.
By late spring 1793, the two French civil commissioners, Léger Félicité Son-
thonax and Étienne Polverel, having arrived in the colony in September 1792
with a mandate from the revolutionary government to restore order, enforce
the April 4 decree, and suppress the slave insurrections, faced a near-hopeless
situation. Amid threats of foreign occupation and agitations by secessionist and
royalist factions, new conflicts broke out on June 22–23 in the northern capi-
tal of le Cap. The newly arrived governor-general, Thomas Galbaud, refused
to recognize the superior authority of the civil commissioners, who dismissed
him and issued deportation o rders. Events escalated to rioting in the streets
and the emptying of the prisons. Hundreds of disgruntled sailors aboard the
governor’s fleet in the harbor joined the fray, as did some ten thousand of
the city’s black slaves. By June 23, fires destroyed over two-thirds of the city. In
the face of t hese events, and no longer able to rely upon the full support of f ree
coloreds to save the colony from the revolution’s domestic and foreign enemies,
the commissioners turned to the rebel slave insurgents and their leaders, who
had taken arms, torched plantations, and for two years maintained organized
armies to defend their freedom: “It is with the natives of the country, that is,
the Africans,” the commissioners wrote to the French National Convention,
“that we will save Saint-Domingue for France.”11 In desperation, and in the
name of the French Republic, they offered legal manumission to any rebel slave
who enrolled in the French army, with liberty soon extended to their wives
and children. Yet not one of the major slave leaders, Toussaint included, rallied
to the call, maintaining their professed allegiance to Spain in the struggle for
freedom.
Nearly half of the slaves in the North province had deserted the planta-
tions to join the rebel movements; those who remained, along with le Cap’s
white and f ree colored citizens fearing the power of slave insurgency, pressured
Sonthonax to proclaim general emancipation. On August 29, 1793, the com-
missioner decreed slavery abolished in the North province, an act that was
followed by Polverel in September and October for the West and South prov-
inces, respectively. On February 4, 1794, the French National Convention rati-
fied the abolition of slavery in all French territory and ostensibly extended the
Rights of Man and Citizen to all colonial inhabitants, without regard to color
or previous status. Unprecedented as this was in the history of slavery, the de-
cree did not end colonial rule or the plantation regime of enforced labor and
export commodity production.

From Slavery to Freedom—and Plantation Labor
From the moment the revolutionary commissioners abolished slavery, the
problem of reconciling freedom, universal citizenship, and individual rights
with coerced plantation labor and the large-scale production of exports that
alone could generate commercial prosperity and strong government revenues,
shaped defining debates and conflicts—and ultimately proved impossible to
resolve. In the end, Haiti became a nation of peasant producers, as did the Bajío
in Mexico after the popular insurgencies launched in 1810 brought the collapse
of the silver economy there. For Haiti, the outcome appears inevitable, given
the permanent rejection of plantation labor by the overwhelming majority of
former slaves.
It was not the chosen path of t hose in power. In the transition from slavery to
a postemancipation, and then to a postcolonial state and society based on uni-
versal freedom and legal equality, colonial administrators and independence
rulers alike tried to maintain large-scale plantation production and commodity
exports—and repeatedly faced the problem of replacing the social relations of
slavery with the labor of free individuals. Every attempt failed. Barring coer-
cion, military supervision or, at the very least, the suppression of individual
rights, freed slaves refused to reconcile themselves to the plantation regime.
The labor regime first put in place in 1793–1794 by the civil commissioners
after general emancipation served as a prototype for each successive regime of
the revolutionary period and after, from Toussaint Louverture to Dessalines
and Christophe long into the national period. The emancipation proclama-
tions of Sonthonax and Polverel acknowledged that the plantation workers
were f ree and that the rights of French citizenship extended to them. Freedom
from chattel slavery, of course, was one t hing; personal liberty and the right to
land, quite another. Under the first emancipation regime, plantations would
remain intact as productive units, as would the collective l abor force. To assure
a stable transition from slavery to “free labor,” workers were ordered to remain
on the plantations of their former owners, where they would labor at the same
tasks as u nder slavery.12 They would, however, gain a small wage for their l abor,
but only on fulfilling a six-day work week, as under slavery. Under this arrange-
ment (le système portionnaire) one-third of the plantation revenues (or one-quarter
after deduction of government taxes) w ere reserved for workers, to be divided
among them in unequal portions according to rank, occupation, sex, and age;
the other two-thirds belonged to the owner as profit and investment capital.
Theoretically, the more the ex-slaves worked and the greater the output, the
greater their collective portion of the crop revenues. Their only rights w
ere those
derived from their labor and confined to the plantation regimen. The August 29
emancipation proclamation issued by Sonthonax in the North province, fol-
lowed by more a detailed document promulgated by Polverel in February 1794
for the West and South provinces, were the first of their kind in the history of
slavery and abolition. While proclaiming universal emancipation, the decrees
were regimented work codes that set norms for plantation labor. In essence,
they granted a “plantation citizenship.”13
The reason to maintain plantation agriculture was clear: France was at war
in Europe and facing Spanish and British occupation forces in the colony.
Without the labor of plantation workers to produce revenue-generating ex-
ports, France could not sustain the war effort in Europe or in the colony, let
alone pay the salaries of their black compatriots who, as free French citizens,
had joined the ranks of the French army to defend the Republic and general
emancipation. Plantation workers were to consider themselves “soldiers-in-the-
field”; their efforts, like t hose of their counterparts in the army, w
ere necessary
to the defense of revolutionary France who had sanctioned their freedom. The
exigencies of the war economy dictated the social relations of production, land,
and labor. Ironically, the war economy set the terms and conditions of freedom.
At this point, Toussaint Louverture was still allied with Spain and rebel
leaders Jean-François and Biassou, while fighting for general emancipation in
his own name. He remained cautious about Sonthonax’s emancipation proc-
lamation; normally only kings or other sovereigns had the power to abolish
slavery. Decreed by a commissioner, emancipation might be revoked in the
ever-changing course of events in France. Only a fter news arrived in early May
1794 of the National Convention’s law of February 4 abolishing slavery did
Toussaint break with his Spanish allies and join the French republican army.
From then until the final evacuation of the British troops in 1798, on terms
he personally negotiated as commander-in-chief of the French army in Saint-
Domingue and lieutenant-governor of the colony, Toussaint r ose to become
the foremost figure—militarily and politically—in determining the direction
and destiny of the colony. He worked to create a prosperous, self-governing ter-
ritory of France, under sovereign black rule.
Over time, he lost confidence in the conservative post-Jacobin government
of the French Directory, responsible for reorganizing the colonies into over-
seas departments of the Republic, “one and indivisible,” and for implementing
universal citizenship and equality among former slaves. The year 1797 brought
a resurgence of royalist and other proslavery factions, inside and outside the
government; they took control of the legislature in spring elections and w ere
pushing t oward a restoration of the slave trade and the pre-1789 colonial regime.14
Although these elements w ere purged in the republican coup d’état later that
year, the Directory came close to suspending application of the French con-
stitution of 1795, which guaranteed the abolition of slavery. Finally, in early
1798, the Directory sent a military, rather than a civil agent, General Marie-
Théodore-Joseph Hédouville, to represent French republican authority in
Saint Domingue. For his part, Toussaint began to build the foundations for
Saint-Domingue’s political autonomy and, ideally, economic conditions to take
an emancipated black state into the Atlantic world of the still-slaveholding
great powers. But how? With what powers and with what consequences? What
kind of a society would it be? In the absence of metropolitan guarantees, how
could such an entity—on its own amid revolution and international warfare—
defend emancipation? Fundamental contradictions underlay any exercise of
colonial sovereignty in a plantation society without slavery.
The Road to Independence

Toussaint’s state-in-the-making revolved around a number of overriding and
interlocking objectives.15 The first and most crucial was to defend general eman-
cipation, and to do so u nder black rule. In the uncertain world of colonial slav-
ery and Atlantic imperialism—not to mention the uncertainties of the French
Revolution—Toussaint needed a strong army; and for this he needed the re-
vival of exports and accumulation of foreign reserves to sustain his emerging
state and the military. The path he chose toward economic recovery was built
on the ruins of the pre-1789 plantation export regime, and on the post-1793
emancipationist labor regimes founded by the French civil commissioners.
To restore the colony’s war-torn economy, which by 1795 left Saint Domingue’s
exports virtually nonexistent,16 Toussaint reinforced, rather than reformed,
the existing agrarian structure. To deter individual initiatives toward a model
of production based on independent smallholding and local markets, which
might undermine his regime, he placed plantation laborers u nder military
rather than civil administration. Commercial prosperity, under slavery or free-
dom, came only from agricultural exports. Large-scale agriculture and plantation
labor were tied to international commerce, and without commerce Toussaint
could never hope to achieve his ultimate objective—a solid and sovereign black
state. For Saint Domingue to reenter the commercial Atlantic as an interna-
tional player, Toussaint needed free markets and open trade relations, notably
with neutral countries like the United States. Inevitably this would bring him
into the tangled world of international diplomacy and the vortex of Atlantic
colonialism. To consolidate his own government and preserve the freedom of
his people, he would need to deal directly with two major powers, G reat Britain
and France, and an emerging nation, the United States—each motivated by
self-interest.
At the time of the British evacuation in August 1798, Toussaint sought to
maximize his options and turn to advantage the terms of Britain’s military
troop withdrawal. He entered direct negotiations with General Maitland and,
overriding France’s legally constituted agent, General Hédouville, signed a mu-
tually expedient convention by which G reat Britain was guaranteed protected
and exclusive trading relations with Saint Domingue.17 In exchange, Great
Britain would guarantee the colony’s security by promising not to attack Saint
Domingue for the remainder of the war with France in Europe, or to intervene
in its internal affairs. For his part, Toussaint promised the same with regard to
Jamaica, which meant that he would not try to export emancipation beyond
Saint Domingue. The convention was a hermetic trade agreement with an e nemy
of France. By acting in his own name, without consulting—and without the
consent of—any higher French authority, Toussaint assumed powers of head of
state. He exercised a function normally reserved to sovereign states, negotiating
international treaties.
Later that year, Toussaint took another step to expand Saint Domingue’s
commerce, this time with the United States. On November 6, 1798, he dis-
patched a letter to President John Adams proposing to reopen trade between
the two states. Toussaint aimed to circumvent the interruption of commerce
with U.S. merchants that had resulted from the diplomatic hostilities between
the United States and France in their Quasi-War against each other’s shipping.18
He would legalize and expand trade that, at the time, was conducted clandes-
tinely. For the young North American nation, the West Indies trade was crucial
to commercial development; by now U.S. trade with Saint Domingue ranked
second in importance only to that with G reat Britain.19 The foreign policy of
the Adams administration reflected these commercial goals, even as the cau-
tious opening to diplomatic relations with a nominally sovereign black state
exposed the contradictions embedded in early U.S. attitudes toward slavery,
emancipation, and race.
Renewed commerce, of course, depended on Saint Domingue’s capacity
to produce and export plantation crops to pay for foodstuffs, arms, and other
basic goods with which to equip the army. In the first of a series of proclama-
tions relating to land and labor resources, issued on November 15, 1798, Tous-
saint began to reorganize and reinforce the plantation structure by placing it
under the supervision of the military. In the process, he began transforming the
civil basis of the society into a military one. Toussaint specifically charged his
lieutenants, the military police, and local army commanders with enforcing
work discipline and the overall submission of the plantation laborers, and with
forcing t hose who had abandoned their estates for opportunities on other plan-
tations or in the towns, to return to those to which they belonged.20 He also
began leasing out plantations that had been sequestered by the state to leading
generals and other high officers of his army. As leaseholders, they became new
proprietors; for plantation laborers, they became new masters.21
On November 17, 1798, Toussaint issued another ordinance seeking to re-
dress the colony’s balance of trade, offset the drainage of colonial currency, and
increase government revenues. He lamented: “The small volume of trade [at
present] with the Americans and the Danish tends only to drain the colony of
its specie. These foreign traders bring mostly luxury goods and very few staples,
of which the colony is constantly deprived to meet its basic needs.”22
The “mercantilist maneuver,” as Toussaint called it, had three detrimental
effects: maintaining the high cost of basic staples by reducing supplies, creating
scarcity and increasing unmet demand; draining the colony of specie to pay for
costly luxury goods; and, in prevailing wartime conditions, driving down prices
of exports by limiting outlets for plantation production. In response, Toussaint
restricted the landing of luxury goods to one-third of a ship’s cargo, prohibited
the export of colonial specie in any form and, to counter fraud and corrup-
tion, tightened administrative controls over customs and treasury officials.23
As important as t hese measures were to improving government finances, and
strengthening his government and army, without a normalization and expan-
sion of trade with neutral powers like the United States, the reforms remained
insufficient.
On February 9, 1799, Congress passed and President Adams signed into
law “Toussaint’s Clause,” exempting Saint Domingue from the U.S. embargo
on trade with France in the Quasi-War between the two countries, reopening
trade with the colony. Adams appointed Edward Stevens as consul-general to
Saint Domingue, a title implying official recognition of an independent Saint
Domingue. For Stevens, the reopening of trade with Toussaint was good policy
and an absolute necessity for the U.S. merchant h ouses doing business clandes-
tinely since the initial American embargo on French ports. He urged a parallel
agreement with Great Britain “in the interests of America.” For Maitland on
the British side, trade with Saint Domingue, if well-regulated and kept within
a U.S.–Great Britain–Saint Domingue triangle, would economically benefit
Britain, strike a blow at French commerce, and also isolate Saint Domingue,
preventing the spread of emancipation in the Caribbean or the southern United
States. A three-way alliance, known as “Heads of Regulation,” was signed on
June 13, 1799. It expanded the earlier Louverture-Maitland agreement to open
direct trade in Saint Domingue to both British and American shipping.24
Yet the arrangement had significant drawbacks for Toussaint. It prohib-
ited Saint Domingue from building a merchant marine or navy by restricting
the size of her ships to fifty tons and their navigation to five leagues from the
northern coastline. While Toussaint had broadened his trading partners and
widened his markets, Anglo-American commerce with Saint Domingue, in-
cluding the carrying of the plantation exports Toussaint promoted, would be-
long exclusively to British and U.S. ships. However, the agreement did permit
Toussaint to pursue another objective: eliminating his political rival, André
Rigaud, military commander of the South and leader of the colony’s former
free-colored elite. Anticipating the impending civil war between them, Tous-
saint insisted that the ports of the South be excluded from the new trade agree-
ment to prevent Rigaud from supplying his army and ensure his defeat.
The United States wanted to ensure Toussaint’s victory over his rival; they
saw him as the stronger of the two protagonists and one who, “were his power
uncontrolled, would exercise it in protecting commerce, encouraging agricul-
ture and establishing useful regulations for the internal government of the col-
ony.” Should he be unsuccessful, Stevens wrote, “all the arrangements we have
made respecting commerce must fall to the ground. The most solemn treaty
would have l ittle weight with a man of Rigaud’s capricious and tyrannical tem-
perament.”25 Furthermore, in the view of the United States and the British,
Toussaint was seeking to separate himself from French authority. As soon as
Rigaud was defeated and the last French civil commissioner sent off, Stevens
anticipated that Toussaint would declare the colony independent.26 From
the U.S. point of view, if Toussaint declared independence, the United States
would bear no responsibility and could carry on trade with Saint Domingue
without having to extend official diplomatic recognition, and thus contravene
French sovereignty. Free trade with Toussaint was commercially beneficial,
having Toussaint declare independence would be diplomatically pragmatic,
and, so far as any potential threat to slavery, a safe bet. Secretary of State
Timothy Pickering added that, for the time being, “and perhaps for a much
longer period,” Saint Domingue’s foremost needs w ere military.27 The popula-
tion of Saint Domingue would be tied to agriculture; the Heads of Regulation
ensured that Saint Domingue would never have a navy or merchant marine
posing a threat to U.S. commerce.
With his final victory over Rigaud in August 1800, Toussaint could have
declared independence. We may never know w hether he was on the verge of

d oing so, but Toussaint knew he was dealing with France’s enemies. He had
defied French authority in the colony, while maintaining deferential relations
with the metropolis; he kept British and U.S diplomats guessing about the con-
sequences and ramifications of Saint Domingue independence. Toussaint had
entered the world of nation-states and plunged into the vortex of imperialist
politics; he was no dupe to the ultimate aims of British American commercial
interests, and less so to those of British imperialism. Had he broken ties de-
finitively with France in 1799 or 1800, Saint Domingue would have been l ittle
more than a protectorate of the United States and G reat Britain, a pawn serv-
ing Anglo-American commerce and British imperialism. Neither the United
States nor Britain encouraged Saint Domingue independence on abolitionist
principles or to further black self-determination. Their only goal was to take
the colony from France and further their own commerce. They accepted slave
emancipation on the island of Saint Domingue alone, b ecause there was noth-
ing they could do about it. They hoped to contain in Saint Domingue the
dangers of a black state born of slave revolt. To preserve his own and Saint
Domingue’s de facto independence, Toussaint remained deferential to France.
As long as it maintained the abolition of slavery, he stopped just short of break-
ing formal ties with the metropolis.
Within the colony he reigned supreme. A fter defeating Rigaud in the civil
war, Toussaint had arranged for his exile to France, eliminating any further
challenge to his authority in Saint Domingue. To consolidate t hese gains, he
turned to incorporating the adjacent Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (ceded
to France in 1795 by the Treaty of Basel, but never formally occupied). In early
January 1801, defying metropolitan prohibitions, he sent an expedition to place
the Spanish territory under military occupation in the name of France. He thus
extended his military and political authority over the entire island. At the same
time, he placed the remaining French commissioner, Philippe Roume, u nder
house arrest for refusing to authorize the expedition. Finally, Toussaint created
a commission to draft a constitution, promulgated on July 8, 1801, conferring
political sovereignty (although not formal independence) over all of Hispan-
iola and absolute power on himself as governor-for-life.
The constitution was not a declaration of independence. Toussaint was
careful to recognize that Saint Domingue was still French and to reiterate the
permanent abolition of slavery: “There cannot be any slaves on this territory;
servitude here is forever abolished. All men are born, live and die h
ere, free and
French.” Hence all individuals were equal before the law, which would be ap-
plied without distinction of color. Toussaint’s constitution established the legal
foundations for a multiracial egalitarian society. He, not France, set the terms
by which Saint Domingue would be governed.
Napoleon Bonaparte had already ended the status of the colonies as over-
seas departments of France, previously conferred u nder the Directory’s Con-
stitution of 1795. Now, according to Article 91 of his new constitution of 1799,
the colonies would be subject to “special laws” that addressed the specific needs
of each colony. In his proclamation of December 25, 1799, to the “citizens of
Saint Domingue,” but directed primarily at Toussaint Louverture, at the time
still engaged in the civil war against Rigaud, Bonaparte announced that the Di-
rectory’s Constitution of 1795 had been replaced by a new constitutional pact
“aimed at strengthening liberty,” Article 91 of which concerned the colonies.
Given differences in climate, customs, soil, agriculture, and types of production
from those in France, the inhabitants of the colonies could not be governed
by the same laws as those in the metropole. Still, it proclaimed the principles
of liberty and equality for blacks to be inviolable: “Remember, brave Negroes,
that only the French people recognize your freedom and the equality of your
rights.”28
Lurking in all the deflecting rhetoric, the law of February 4, 1794, which
abolished slavery and extended universal citizenship to all inhabitants of the
French Republic, no longer had constitutional validity. For Toussaint, the po-
tential for a restoration of slavery became manifest. There was little doubt in
his mind that Bonaparte’s “special laws” would strike a terrible blow to the l egal
foundation of freedom and lead to a very uncertain future.
In the absence of French constitutional law, Toussaint aimed to provide
clear, decisive, and sovereign black leadership for Saint Domingue, on his own
terms and with his own constitution. Yet beyond the constitutional guarantees
of personal security, the inviolability of domicile, the sanctity of private prop-
erty, the right to be lawfully charged with an offense before arrest, the right
to a trial in court, and the right of petition—“especially to the governor”—
the structures Toussaint set to govern the colony and direct the economy w ere
29
military.
All previous laws and ordinances on agriculture and the policing of the
plantation workforces were constitutionalized, as was the leasing of sequestered
or abandoned estates to army generals and other high-ranking officers. Former
white colonists wishing to return and take possession of their properties w ere
encouraged. To reinforce the plantation complex and preclude the rise of a class
of smallholding peasants, Toussaint passed legislation prohibiting the purchase
of land u nder 50 carreaux (approximately 165 acres). Any worker or association

of workers hoping to buy a few carreaux were barred. To ensure the growth of
the plantation workforce and the increase of agricultural output, Toussaint’s
constitution gave him power to import additional laborers (presumably by
purchasing them through the slave trade and then freeing them), a measure
that, ironically, gave rise to rumors in the North that Toussaint intended to
restore slavery. Such rumors, along with the harsh restrictions and ubiquitous
presence of the military, prompted widespread popular revolt against his re-
gime in October, only three months after the promulgation of his constitution.
It was inspired by Toussaint’s nephew, General Moïse; as agricultural inspector
for the North he opposed the repressive measures that deprived workers of per-
sonal freedom. Following the revolt, which cost the lives of hundreds of white
colonists, Toussaint ordered Moïse arrested and quickly had him tried and ex-
ecuted. He then enacted new measures of control requiring district military
commanders to submit censuses of all farmworkers on the plantations under
their jurisdiction. Anyone not a farmworker had to carry a passport proving his
vocation or trade, or be arrested and sent to the fields. Any residential, occupa-
tional, or social mobility to which a farmworker might aspire was precluded;
they were tied to the plantations.
Toussaint made a clear distinction between freedom as the abolition of
chattel slavery (insisting that no person could be property of another), and
freedom as the right of former slaves to exercise individual liberties. The latter,
if allowed to plantation laborers, would, he believed, inevitably lead to wide-
spread vagrancy and idleness, a lack of moral and civic virtues, and of parental
responsibility in educating youth. Above all, it would result in the refusal to
work on plantations for the profit of others, undermining the island’s economic
prosperity. He formalized the distinction in his constitution: there could be no
slaves in Saint Domingue—all men are born, live and die free and French; but,
“the colony being essentially agricultural, [it] can suffer no loss or interruption
of production,”30 lest it lead to economic ruin and leave the colony prey to
slaveholding colonialist powers. Each plantation should therefore be run as a
factory, with a permanent concentration of workers assembled as one family
under the paternalistic authority of an owner or manager, and the absolute
authority of the military. To defend slave emancipation, Toussaint effectively
replaced civil society with a militarized state, making any distinction between
state and society, or “the state and the nation,” all but invisible, leaving the mass
of the agrarian citizenry constitutionally and politically alienated.
Toussaint did achieve a limited economic recovery. Export figures for 1801–
1802, at the height of his governance, are revealing. Compared with figures for
1795, when the colony exported almost nothing, those for 1801–1802 show a
significant increase in coffee and cotton exports, and a lesser rise in sugar. In
1795, sugar exports, the economic lifeblood of the plantation system, were but
1.2 percent of the levels of 1789; by 1801 they had risen to 13 percent of the earlier
peak, a limited growth that documented encouraging results from the opening
of Anglo-American trade and the efficacy of Toussaint’s labor regime, despite
freed slaves resistance to the most difficult of labors. In 1795, coffee, a crop re-
quiring far less capital investment than sugar, had dropped to 2.8 percent of the
prerevolutionary peak—then rose to 57 percent by 1801. Evidently, freed slaves
profited from coffee, but only when they received their entitled wages from
coffee sales and only through coerced labor conditions. Cotton exports experi-
enced a fall to only 0.7 percent of preconflict levels in 1795—by 1801 they r ose
to 35 percent of their 1789 levels. Certainly this was a crop the British would
buy if production could increase. Only indigo, concentrated in the South, ex-
perienced a slight decline between 1795 and 1801, when British occupation and
civil war disrupted production. In 1802, Saint Domingue’s exports w ere even
more favorable, with sugar reaching 38 percent, cotton 58 percent, coffee hold-
ing near 45 percent, and indigo up to 4 percent of 1789 levels.31 The recovery
enabled Toussaint to build reserve funds to strengthen the army that accounted
for 60 percent of government expenditures in 1801.32
Toussaint had achieved a tenuous sovereignty in a world of imperial ri-
valry and wars, and in which t here was no guarantee that slave emancipation
would survive. Many events threatened to undermine the project of black
self-determination. On September 30, 1800, barely two months a fter his vic-
tory over Rigaud, the Treaty of Mortefontaine was signed in Paris ending the
Quasi-War between the United States and France, and terminating Toussaint’s
trade alliance with the United States. The next day, on October 1, the Treaty
of San Ildelfonso confirmed the transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France;
then the presidential victory of Thomas Jefferson over John Adams in early
1801 again brought into question the island’s favored trade relations with the
United States. The final thunderbolt came with the signing of the Amiens
peace preliminaries between France and Great Britain in October 1801, allowing
Bonaparte to reorganize and redeploy French troops for a military expedition to
Saint Domingue, led by his brother-in-law, General Charles Victor-Emmanuel
Leclerc.
With Napoleon in power and Louisiana in French hands, Saint Domingue
was destined to become the cornerstone of a revived French empire extend-
ing up the Mississippi Valley. The plan, however, required a French victory
over the emancipated blacks of Saint Domingue and a restoration of slavery
there. For this, Bonaparte needed the support of the United States, now u nder
Thomas Jefferson, who had let it be known to Bonaparte that he would support
a French expedition against Saint Domingue to remove Toussaint and restore
the colonial regime.
However, when he realized that a French victory in Saint Domingue would
lead to an expedition to occupy Louisiana, threatening the security and poten-
tial of the young republic, he withdrew support. Jefferson needed a victory by
emancipated Haitians over Bonaparte’s army to render Louisiana worthless to
France and valuable to the United States. In a perverse irony, the Haitian vic-
tory over Bonaparte contributed to the maintenance and expansion of slavery
in the United States, its total embargo of Haiti in 1806, and nonrecognition of
Haiti’s independence by the United States for another fifty-six years.
When Bonaparte’s army landed on February 2, 1802, Toussaint’s constitu-
tion became irrelevant. The terms of Haitian independence were set not by
Toussaint Louverture, but by Napoleon’s attempt to restore slavery. After three
months of sustained resistance to Leclerc’s army u nder the command of Tous-
saint’s closest and most loyal generals, notably Christophe and Maurepas
in the North and Dessalines in the West, and with heavy losses on both sides,
Leclerc offered Toussaint a deal in early May—amnesty for the emancipator
and his generals, personal asylum at a place of his choosing within the colony,
and the maintenance of general emancipation.33 At the same time, Christophe
asked permission from Toussaint for a conference with Leclerc, after which he
defected with over fifteen hundred colonial troops and nearly five thousand
armed workers. Two days later, Toussaint accepted Leclerc’s offer of asylum,
leaving Dessalines militarily isolated and with little recourse but to submit in
turn. In June, Leclerc summoned Toussaint to a meeting. Having laid a trap, he
had him arrested, bound as a criminal, and deported to France, where he died in
isolation on April 7, 1803, at Fort de Joux prison.
When news arrived that summer that slavery had been restored in Guade-
loupe, the Haitian masses understood that their fate and their freedom no
longer lay in the hands of the leaders now fighting in Leclerc’s army. Only their
own capacity to mobilize in mass insurgency, maintain individual and collec-
tive networks of resistance, to fight to the end—in short, to live f ree or die—
could keep them free. By October, the forces of popular insurgency had reached
a peak throughout the colony in a total war against slavery—despite the brutal
campaigns by Dessalines and the other generals under Leclerc’s orders to harass
and suppress them and their chosen leaders, now mostly of African origin.
Facing an unsustainable impasse and with the mass of the population in
rebellion, Dessalines and the southern mulatto general, Alexandre Pétion, de-
serted Leclerc to join forces and take over the direction of the independence
struggle, in the process liquidating the popular revolutionary leaders who re-
fused to submit to their authority—once again pitting the military (and ulti-
mately the national) leadership against the masses. Yet it was the instinctive
self-mobilization of the masses that rendered the defection of the generals
militarily and politically feasible. As Toussaint’s intrepid second in command,
it was Jean-Jacques Dessalines, now commander-in-chief, who would lead the
indigenous army to independence.34
With independence, slavery was forever abolished. The plantation economy
that had made Saint Domingue the most valuable colony on the Atlantic—that
drove the slave trade to new heights and flooded European markets with slave-
made sugar and coffee, guaranteeing French domination of both markets—
also collapsed. In less than a decade, the parallel but interlinked Spanish North
American silver economy of Bajío would also collapse under pressures of popu
lar insurgency in parallel movement toward peasant holdings and household
crop production. For Haitians, however, individual acquisition of land was not
the immediate outcome of independence; it took over two decades before the
transition to an economy of h ousehold production, local markets, and, at best,
of coffee cultivation for limited exports, was completed.
What Haiti’s independence in 1804 did provide was the opening for other
slaveholding regions, notably Cuba and Brazil, to take her place sending slave-
made sugar and coffee into changing world of early nineteenth-century in-
dustrial capitalism. Confronting that world, Haiti needed to constitute and
defend itself as a state, creating the institutions, revenues, and military power
to sustain itself in a hostile world that would not acknowledge its legitimacy.
A Nation Divided
On January 1, 1804, Haiti defiantly proclaimed its existence to the world as a
nation whose people, in conquering their liberty, had avenged the oppressed
of the New World. In a more than symbolic gesture, Hayti, the original Taino
name for the island, replaced the French colonial name, Saint Domingue.
Haiti’s struggle to justify, define, and defend its existence, and to create a
unique national identity, can be understood by examining key principles of its
foundational national constitution, written and promulgated in 1805 u nder the
regime of Dessalines. In its preamble, as Sybille Fischer demonstrates, the uni-
versalism of Haiti’s existence as a free black nation is established by appealing
to the Supreme Being, “before whom all mortals are equal” but whose power is
revealed only through human diversity and difference among the peoples of the
earth;35 and to nature—in a disavowal of the centuries-long exclusion of Africans
and those of African descent as “unworthy c hildren.” Equality, to be universal,
would have to encompass racial equality, something Haiti could only achieve
through the violent negation of slavery and of its perpetrators, and through a
war for independence that conferred upon the new nation a historically self-
determined existence. Haiti might stand as a pariah in “Western history,” but it
also broke the Enlightenment out of its racist Eurocentric constraints.
A close examination of some of the seminal articles of Haiti’s first constitu-
tion reveals far more than lofty statements of intent. As Fischer suggests, they
constitutionally historicize Haiti’s identity as a black nation—the first of its
kind—having overthrown a colonial past grounded in racial slavery. This ex-
plains why the 1805 Constitution stipulates that “no white man, regardless of his
nationality, may set foot in this territory as a master or a landowner, nor will he
ever be able to acquire any property”;36 but that white women and their children
who are “naturalized as Haitian citizens,” as well as the Germans and Poles (who
had deserted Napoleon’s army to fight alongside the blacks for Haiti’s indepen
dence), would be exempt; and that “because all distinctions of color among
children of the same family must necessarily cease, all Haitians will henceforth
be known generically as black [noir].”37 Although this stipulation may at first
glance appear to be racial, it must be understood in light of Haiti’s rejection
of the colonial taxonomies that created artificial categories of color and corre-
sponding categories of legal and social status. “Black” in the new context of
Haitian independence became a political category of citizenship and national
identity.38
Given the socioeconomic and ethnic diversity of Haiti’s population, and
the political, social, and cultural aspirations of each group, one may question
the extent that such principles w ere put into practice. As with the 1812 (lib-
eral) Constitution in Spain and in the Spanish American independence move-
ments, as Roberto Breña points out in his essay, it is important to distinguish
between lofty constitutional principles and sociopolitical practice. Contingen-
cies of revolution and insurgency, the lack of experience of early independence
leaders, the militarization of politics and selective or manipulative application
of citizenship rights by those in power, or, as Jordana Dym demonstrates in
her essay on Guatemala, cultural forces of regional identity that compete with
national identity, all tended to short-circuit the universal application of consti-
tutional aspirations. And Spanish liberalism had centuries of intellectual and
institutional tradition to draw on in elaborating the 1812 Constitution. For
Haiti, the realities of citizenship were defined on the ground by the legacies
of its colonial past, particularly with respect to the peasantry. Constitutional
aspirations matter; in young nations, power struggles may matter more.
In defining and defending the nation under Haiti’s first postindependence
regimes of Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1804–1806) and Henri Christophe
(1807–1820) in the North, the universalism of the revolution’s liberating aspi-
rations and the popular nationalism of the war of independence gave way to
the militarism and social inequalities that characterized the last colonial re-
gime under Toussaint, and to power strugg les among and between the new
country’s elites. What emerged from independence was a military state that
dominated rather than governed its citizenry, the vast majority of whom were
permanently excluded from participation in nation building. With indepen
dence, all lands of the former French colonists w ere taken into the national do-
main (as biens nationaux), making the state—a military state—the primary
property owner in the country (and the biggest landowner of the entire Carib
bean). The new militarized state effectively replaced the colonial master class to
rule the agrarian masses and “recolonized” the labor force.39 To restore exports
and reinforce military capacities in the fledgling nation, both Dessalines and
Christophe, who themselves had leased numerous plantations u nder Tous-
saint’s regime, unquestioningly maintained the plantation system of land and
labor. The agrarian structure of their regimes was, in many ways, a reinforced
extension of that codified and constitutionalized by Toussaint, relying on the
suppression of popular sovereignty, the denial of individual liberties, and the
prohibition of independent peasant smallholding—the only way Haiti’s agrar-
ian laborers could org anize their lives freely. In constructing an indigenous
black state to defend antislavery, civil society was truncated. What emerged was
not a coherent nation, but a state with a political and military elite that domi-
nated society.
Plantation workers w ere not the only alienated element of the new Haitian
state u nder Dessalines, who exacerbated the recurrent “color question” that
had so often plagued Haiti’s colonial past and led to civil war between Tous-
saint Louverture and André Rigaud in the revolutionary period. Since all prop-
erties formerly belonging to the French had been confiscated e ither during the
revolution, by decree after 1803, or by the 1805 constitutional prohibition of
white property ownership, the only potential private landowners w ere the for-
mer free coloreds, living primarily in the South and West. Fearing that white
planters might try to entrust properties to their mulatto offspring as they fled
the colony in 1803–1804, hoping to reclaim them later, Dessalines demanded
verification of all transfers of land title a fter 1803; any land claimed by mulat-
toes but previously held by whites was confiscated by the state and their claims
rendered null and void. Only mulattoes who could prove ownership in their
own name and prior to 1803 were allowed to retain their holdings.40
Dessalines’s land policy, as much antimulatto as antiwhite or anti-French,
combined with his autocratic rule and imperial pretensions (crowning himself
emperor in 1805), led to his assassination on October 17, 1806. His short-lived
regime, however, was symptomatic of a deeper crisis that would exacerbate ten-
sions and open power struggles between the country’s two emergent elites over
control of constitutional processes and the political and economic direction
of the country. The constitutional crisis that followed the death of Dessalines
led the new nation into a second civil war and a split into two political entities,
the Kingdom of Haiti u nder Henri Christophe in the North (1807–1820) and
the Republic of Haiti under Alexandre Pétion (1807–1818) in the South. As
in every new American country that faced economic collapse, each Haitian
leader had to confront fundamental questions of state formation: what kind of
government, what kind of economy—and in the case of Haiti, what kind of so-
cial and l abor relations should replace t hose that prevailed u nder slavery, while
maintaining plantation production and commodity exports. Military defense,
international relations, as well as the role of the state vis-à-vis the citizenry w
ere all
ridden with new and irreconcilable contradictions.
For the former slave majority living on the land under Christophe, there
were no f ree choices. The land was property of the state; plantations w ere given
in five-year leases to high-ranking army officers or members of a new “nobil-
ity”; they were worked by former slaves who preferred to be independent peas-
ant farmers. Workers w ere thus tied to estates in a condition of regimented
plantation labor, in perpetuity, even though they received a quarter of the prof-
its, exempt from taxes paid by the estate holder on the crops produced. Other
rights and obligations of farmworkers and estate holders w ere codified in
Christophe’s Code Henry, issued in 1811.41 Christophe tried to convince work-
ers cultivating cash crops for export that the harder they worked and more they
produced, the greater the value of their share of the profits, and thus the
greater their own well-being. Such incentives proved of little avail, as workers
increasingly left plantations, either taking to the hills as “maroon” peasants or
squatters, or, in the final years of his regime, migrating to live under the more
tolerant regime of Pétion in the South, where government policies eventually
placed land within reach of even the poorest. In the northwestern parishes of
Gros Morne and Port-de-Paix, disaffected farmworkers turned to armed upris-
ings against Christophe’s coercive plantation regime.42
Beside their entrenched opposition to plantation labor—painfully remi-
niscent of slavery—other factors also contributed to workers’ rejection of the
plantation model. Sugar never regained its place in Haiti’s export economy, and
what little sugar was produced for export could not compete with the exports
of Cuba, well on its way to dominating Atlantic sugar markets by opening new
lands worked by newly imported slaves. For Haiti, only coffee held its own as a
major export, and it was vulnerable to price fluctuations and stiff competition
from Brazil, also opening new lands with new slaves. For the Haitian workers
under Christophe’s regime, vulnerability to unpredictable market conditions
left their quarter shares uncertain and subject to sudden decline. Such hardship
reinforced the desire for a piece of land to cultivate food crops for their families
and to fashion their own lives. It was a situation Christophe only addressed
belatedly, in 1819, the final year of his reign; and even then his decision to par-
cel out portions of government estates served only the military, with soldiers
and officers receiving grants according to rank: 20 carreaux (approximately 66
acres) for a colonel and 1 carreau (or 3.3 acres) for a soldier.43
Yet Christophe found fair success in organizing his kingdom and creating a
functioning state. The economy performed fairly well despite the adverse cir-
cumstances under which he tried to reintegrate the country into Atlantic com-
merce. By placing the country on the gold and silver standard for trade with
foreign merchants, notably those of Great Britain and neutral countries such as
the United States, he ensured that exports held at sustainable levels. He raised
annual averages of $3 to $3.5 million in government revenue, and on his death
in 1820 left a surplus of $6 million.44 Overall, the treasury was fiscally sound, al-
lowing Christophe to begin financing a national education project. Most con
temporary observers of Haiti confirmed the importance Christophe placed on
education; as head of state (and illiterate) he understood its importance to any
emerging nation. Although the primary beneficiaries were children and young
adults of the upper classes and the military, Christophe’s efforts remain note-
worthy in a country then (and still) overwhelmingly illiterate. He understood
the need for educated individuals to run the public administration and state
bureaucracy, especially for the northern kingdom of Haiti with a population
composed almost exclusively of ex-slaves and former free blacks, and where
educated mulattoes w ere few. His antipathy t oward the latter was notorious.
Instead, he looked to G reat Britain, where abolitionists supported his educa-
tional projects, and to Prussia, whose educational system was among the most
progressive in Western Europe at the time.45
Christophe’s kingdom was, to borrow an apt expression, “oddly modern”46—a
self-proclaimed monarchy with an invented nobility. That Christophe opted to
rule as a king, rather than a republican president, is understandable. In 1811,
when he proclaimed his regime a monarchy, nearly all of the European powers
were monarchical; as no country had recognized Haiti’s independence, a monar-
chy might provide Christophe’s government with some legitimacy and a regal
aura for himself as head of state. Royal absolutism and a hereditary monarchy,
as opposed to constitutional republicanism, where rights and invested powers
could be contested, also short-circuited political opposition, whether from the
masses below or the ranks of educated elite. It is also possible that Christophe
presumed an affinity among his African-born subjects for kingship.47 Chris-
tophe’s monarchy was by no means anachronistic for the time; at least two
other new Latin American countries, Mexico briefly in 1821–1822, and Brazil
from 1822 to 1889, began as monarchies. For Brazil, monarchy provided con-
ditions for long-term political consolidation and the maintenance of slavery
to 1888. In Haiti, the death of Christophe in 1820 brought an end to the mo-
narchical regime in which the state dominated the lives of plantation laborers
struggling to acquire land of their own, hoping to reshape them and forge their
own identity. Its end did not resolve the fundamental problems of citizenship
and nationhood—which would plague so much of the Americas long into the
nineteenth century.
Alternative Landholding Policies and the Peasant Economy

While Christophe’s monarchy struggled to rule and maintain the plantation
system in the North, in the South, the republican regime of mulatto president,
Alexandre Pétion, opened the way for alternatives to large-scale plantations
and coerced labor. After early and largely futile attempts to restore the planta-
tions by adjusting tariff and tax policies on sugar and coffee, and by subsidizing
them in times of declining market prices during his first two years in power,
Pétion began a policy of land distribution that, by 1817, had led to the breakup
and transfer of some four hundred thousand acres of land from the national
domain to roughly ten thousand peasant recipients.48 His turn to distribution
reflected both an understanding of the need to address the goals of the majority
and the needs of the state. First, Pétion recognized that those who had fought
in the war of independence deserved to be rewarded with land in recognition of
their military service to the nation (and in lieu of back wages): noncommissioned
soldiers and officers received 5 carreaux (16.5 acres) each; former commissioned
officers received larger grants according to rank. By 1814 he was distributing
land taken from large coffee estates to active members of the military, to civil
servants, hospital employees, petty administrative officials, and influential politi-
cians.49 By 1817 properties from the national domain w ere for sale at affordable
prices, enabling thousands of others to become property owners.50 Pétion
believed that if peasant families owned their land they would be motivated to
cultivate it and produce crops not only for their families and local markets, but
also for export. That was possible in the South, where coffee easily meshed with
subsistence production, facilitating a family-based mix of production for con-
sumption and trade. And with a stake in landholding, Pétion believed that
ex-slaves become peasants would gain a stake in society: civic virtue, f amily values,
and personal and civic responsibility would all be promoted—while govern-
ment would be left to predominantly light-skinned, educated elites.
Pétion’s recognition of the needs and potential of his citizens merged with
other, often more pressing concerns. His government faced a serious fiscal cri-
sis when he took office in 1807 and his early attempts at restoring the planta-
tion economy during his first two years were dismal failures. By parceling out
portions of the national domain beginning in 1810, Pétion aimed to create a
mixed economy in which state revenues derived from taxes on the production
of a wider and more numerous base of independent peasant landowners culti-
vating coffee for exports, in addition to food crops for domestic or f amily
consumption—while remaining large estates might continue to produce for
export, yet with diminishing returns.
At the southwestern extremity of the island in the region of G rand Anse,
a large independent maroon community of armed peasants lived on the pe-
riphery of Pétion’s emerging republic. Their leader, Jean-Baptiste Goman, had
been a popular insurrectionary slave leader from the early days of the revolu-
tion and an important figure in sustaining the popular resistance forces against
the French army during the war of independence. Refusing to submit to Des-
salines when the indigenous army entered the South, Goman retreated into
the mountains of Grand Anse, where by 1807 he led an armed peasant state
numbering close to three thousand men, w omen, and c hildren. Their fierce re
sistance to Pétion’s government and crushing defeat of his troops in 1813 likely
influenced the latter’s agrarian policies. To undermine the attraction that the
existence of Goman’s armed landed community provided, and to consolidate
national unity, in 1814–1815 Pétion began to implement measures to ameliorate
the socioeconomic conditions of workers and accelerate the pace of land dis-
tribution.51 Over time, Pétion’s land distribution policies created a diversified
peasantry, with a few rich large holders, others m iddle-sized, and many very
small landowning peasants producing alongside tenants and sharecroppers (de
moitié workers) on the larger estates. Th ere remained countless landless peas-
ants, many squatting in outlying regions, occupying land in their family name
and cultivating it illegally, others working for wages as day laborers.52
Under Pétion and his successor Jean-Pierre Boyer (1818–1843) popular peas-
ant demands for land w ere ultimately satisfied. W
ere the same peasants simul
taneously disempowered politically at the hands of a ruling mulatto oligarchy
figure 4.2. Market women in nineteenth-century Haiti.
Courtesy Archives c
idihca (Centre International de Documentation et
d’Information Hatienne, Caraibeenne, y Afro—Canadienne)
that progressively abandoned landholding to take control of the more lucrative

sectors of politics, commerce, and the state? Did they ensure that the peasants,
in the majority black, African-born and illiterate, would become politically ap-
athetic, inactive, and self-isolated? Scholars long maintained that the parceling
of land resulted in an “egalitarian poverty”—the root cause of Haiti’s economic
stagnation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.53
Recent studies of the early nineteenth-century Haitian peasant economy
and society now challenge the prevalence of peasant apathy and political with-
drawal.54 Postindependence peasant struggles for democratization (essentially
political in nature) did exist; universal citizenship and universal male suffrage,
effective at local levels, persisted under Pétion. Peasant proprietorship and
demands for political citizenship merged; landholding peasants and citizens
pressed to negotiate individual citizenship rights, including t hose of education,
in the spaces open to them. Most politics were local, sometimes pressing de-
mands in armed rebellions. As citizens of the republic they exercised the right
to petition for, and receive, land grants under the reform program instituted
by Pétion. They were left to their own initiatives to make the land productive,
improve their lives, and seek inclusion as citizens of the nation.
Boyer made a final attempt to restore plantation production and exports in
the Rural Code of 1826—adopted in an attempt to raise revenue to pay the in-
demnity debt promised to France in 1825 in exchange for recognition for Hai-
tian independence. Popular pressure demanding land and resisting plantation
labor proved too strong, and by midcentury the landholding structure had been
permanently transformed. The plantation system was gone and a diversified
landholding peasantry dominated production. Coffee—easily grown on peas-
ant holding of diverse size—irreversibly replaced sugar—which demanded large
plantations and forced labor—as Haiti’s primary export. At the same time, the
state and the military institutions that sustained it operated in an enclave, disen-
gaged from Haiti’s agrarian citizenry. Left to produce and pay taxes, the landed
majority was left without channels of effective political participation or protest.
The structural ties between the state and civil society that might have permitted
ordinary individuals to make their voices heard in meaningful ways at the state or
national level did not exist. And the role of the military in the day-to-day lives
of the peasantry and in relations between the peasantry and the state reinforced
the cleavage between the two. Haitian peasants w ere neither “traditionally con-
servative” nor “self-isolated” politically. They w
ere blocked by the powers con-
centrated in the state from exercising greater agency and active political roles.55
Peasant empowerment was also constrained by the rise of merchants, often
former planters who had turned from landholding to seek new wealth by ruling the
links between peasant producers, international markets, and a state in search
of revenues. They gained virtual monopolies over peasant marketing, setting
prices for household surpluses. Property holding peasants found themselves
vulnerable to the price-fixing practices of speculators and merchants (them-
selves indebted to foreign capital) and to direct and indirect taxation by the
government, whose sole source of revenue came from taxation of peasant pro-
duction, especially coffee.56 The only other source of state revenue came from
customs duties and export taxes, normally paid by wholesale merchants and
middlemen, but inevitably passed on to coffee peasants by uniformly lowering
the price paid them for their coffee.57 Increasingly, the independent peasantry
saw small gain in producing for export markets. They carried on out of dire
needs to supplement their meager incomes from h ousehold crop cultivation
while they bore the burden of state financing. The same state deprived peasants
of any direct means to negotiate or ameliorate the terms of their inclusion in
l’Île de la Tortue
AT L A N T I C O C E A N
N Port-de-Paix
NORTH DEPARTMENT Port Margot

Môle St Nicolas
Gros Morne Cap Haïtien
Plaisance Fort Liberté
Marmelade Dondon Ouanaminthe

Goanïves
St. Michel (de l’Attalaye)
CENTRAL
ARTIBONITE PLATEAU Hinche
PLAIN
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Petite-Rivière (Haiti from 1822–1844)
St. Marc
l’Île de la Gonave
WEST
DEPARTMENT
Arcahaye Mirebalais
Abricots CUL-DE-SAC PLAIN
Jérémie CORAIL
Croix-des-Bouquets
Dame-Marie
Anse-à-Veau PORT-AU-PRINCE
GRAND’ANSE Léogane
Anse d’Hainault Petit Goâve
Miragoâne Grande Goâve
Tiburon SOUTH DEPARTMENT
Fond-des-Nègres
LES CAYES Aquin
PLAIN
LES CAYES Jacmel
St. Louis
Baynet
l’Île à Vache
CARIBBEAN SEA
Zones of cultivation for primary exports

1840s-1870s (approximately) Major Ports of export 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 mi
Coffee Coffee
Mahogany and Dyewood Mahogany and Dyewood 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 km
Cocoa Cocoa
Map 4.2. Haiti, ca. 1840–1870
a market economy. Their inclusion in civil society was similarly constrained.

Meanwhile, former plantation owners shifted their pursuit of wealth from
landholding (irrevocably in decline) to commerce, forging a working alliance
for profit and power with the state.58
The one opportunity for a rapprochement of “state” and “nation” came in
the context of the Liberal revolt of 1843 to overthrow the aging Boyer. A new
generation of young Haitian elites, educated in France and eager to break the
control of politics and the state held by Boyer in his twenty-five-year autocratic
regime, aimed to implement basic principles of nineteenth-century liberal de-
mocracy, enabling them to play a defining role in the politics of the nation. In
the face of Boyer’s intransigence, the movement became a revolt that violently
toppled Boyer’s government. But in the elections held after they took power,
and in implementing their constitutional reforms, the young liberals’ professed
principles of racial equality broke down. Insurrectionary peasants saw an open-
ing to demand citizenship that would give tangible social, cultural, and eco-
nomic, as well as political meaning to the rights of citizenship. They pressed
a counterdiscourse of popular sovereignty and peasant democracy as experi-
enced in their communities and peasant organizations, and practiced in daily
lives. Their deception with the politics of the liberal elite was well founded; the
traditional wisdom of the Kreyòl proverb “Constitusyon sé papié, bayonet sé
fer” (constitutions are paper; bayonets are iron), well placed.
Jean-Jacques Accau, a former member of the rural police, led the “Army of
Sufferers” in the Piquet peasant rebellion of 1844–1847. The focus was not the
pursuit of individual peasant property, by then widely dispersed, but to claim
the constitutional rights of social democracy. As primary spokesman, Accau ar-
gued for these with less emphasis on the distinctions of color that separated the
educated light-skinned elites from the politically disempowered black peasantry
and more along lines of class—of rich versus the poor. The Piquet insurrections
forced open new public spaces in which rights were forcefully contested, in
which political citizenship, the state, and the nation could have been redefined,
and from which a new social contract might have emerged to encompass the le-
gitimate claims of the peuple souffrant to integrated rights of citizenship including
education, political empowerment, and social and economic justice.
By 1847, the insurrections were suppressed. An opportunity for fundamental
change and national consolidation was lost as the liberal mulatto elites turned
to a politique de doublure; a succession of black “front” presidents would be ma-
nipulated to serve the financial and commercial interests of the powerful few,
maintaining the latter’s indirect domination of the state. Haiti’s peasantry, as
Mimi Sheller plainly put it, was “ready for democracy from before the first day
of emancipation, but democracy was not ready for them.”59 National consoli-
dation never occurred as the state continued to function, when it functioned
at all, as a self-contained entity which parasitically exploited the peasantry to
sustain itself.
paradoxically, haiti ’ s first regimes (except Dessalines’s) proved

relatively durable, perhaps b ecause the Haitian majority of ex-slaves did gain
two key goals of their revolution: first and most immediately emancipation,
more slowly but in time solidly access to land to consolidate lives focused
on family sustenance. Simultaneously, the nation was politically isolated, and
while gaining some trade and revenues from coffee, never joined the Latin
American countries that in the later nineteenth century stabilized by produc-
ing commodities to sustain the industrializing countries of Europe.
Throughout, Haiti stood as a beacon of freedom to the oppressed, offering
asylum and, a fter one year of residence, naturalization as a Haitian citizen to
any person of African or Indian descent who entered Haiti, regardless of their
place of birth.60 In 1815, at a critical moment in the Spanish American wars
of independence, Haitian president Alexandre Pétion provided asylum, mon-
etary and military aid, and Haitian troops to a defeated Simón Bolívar, allow-
ing him to continue to fight and eventually succeed in his struggle for South
American liberation. He asked only that Bolívar pledge to abolish slavery in
the territories he liberated.61 A decade later, in preparatory talks for the hemi-
spheric Panama Congress, to be held in 1826, the Federation of Gran Colombia
raised the issue of Haitian independence and argued for Haiti’s participation
in the conference. U.S. delegates refused to recognize Haitian independence on
blatantly racist grounds, guaranteeing that Haiti was excluded from the Con-
gress and would remain on the periphery of inter-American relations long a fter
the United States, in Civil War over slavery, recognized Haiti in 1862.
Only France recognized Haiti’s full independence in 1825—at a catastrophic
price. After seven years of fruitless talks with Haitian leaders, including Chris-
tophe and Pétion, about restoring French rule over the country and its people,
and u nder the threat of French gunboats stationed on Haiti’s shores, President
Boyer agreed in 1825 to France’s demand for an indemnity of 150 million francs
(equivalent to anywhere from $12 billion to $21 billion U.S. in t oday’s value),
plus a 50 percent reduction in customs duties on all French imports. Such
recognition left the Haitian government fiscally bankrupt, crippling Haiti’s lim-
ited commercial economy and prejudicing political consolidation for decades
to come.62 An independence that consolidated the end of slavery and enabled
the rise of a landed peasantry gained recognition from its former “mother
country” only under pressure and by a deal that left the new country permeable
to the power of international finance capital and economic imperialism of
the great powers. In the later decades of the nineteenth century Haiti would
face the economic uncertainty and political instability that earlier characterized
many new Latin American republics.
the haitian revolution permanently destroyed the plantation econ-

omy of the world’s foremost sugar colony, a French dependency that had fueled
the international slave trade, profited home industries large and small, employ-
ing uncounted workers in a “free” France, and sending produce across Europe.
The revolution was shaped by contradictions embedded in the country’s colonial
origins: the vast majority of the African-born had to struggle perennially to forge
spaces of freedom based on independent peasant holdings—their definition of
independence and the means by which to defend their freedom against slavery
(and the coercions that followed), plantation production, and the state.
The leaders who rose during and after the revolution were, by the nature of the
war against slavery, military men who took control of government, shaped the
state in their own interests, and tried to maintain exports and revenues by per-
petuating the plantation economy—which they knew required coerced labor,
as former slaves who fought for independence would never willingly return to
cane fields. That contradiction set off a long struggle—until by the late 1820s
peasant proprietorship and household production prevailed. Former slaves liv-
ing as peasants were by then better off than before—certainly more autono-
mous and likely better fed.
The gains—and they were real—did not bring an end to exploitation. In
consolidating freedom and gaining the land, Haitian peasants faced the rise
and persistence of a predatory state backed by a class of merchants traffick-
ing the country’s only v iable export, coffee, in the emerging world of indus-
trial capitalism, and sustaining themselves—state politicians and merchant
predators—through a perfidious system of peasant taxation. The state became
simultaneously authoritarian and weak and fractured within. Through the
nineteenth c entury nationhood remained, as it remains t oday, a dream deferred
in a new country—arguably the newest in the Americas based on its revolution-
ary transformation—shaped by the unresolved contradictions of revolutionary
emancipation, a population adamantly grounded in autonomies on the land,
and the challenges of making and sustaining a sovereign state.
Notes
1 On the “unthinkability,” and recurrent denial and banalization of the Haitian Revo-
lution, if not erasure, among contemporaries and in Western historiography gener-
ally, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s influential essay “An Unthinkable History: The
Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event,” in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production
of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995).
2 C. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knox-
ville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 22–26. One of the best works on colonial
Saint Domingue and the Haitian Revolution is still C. L. R. James’s The Black
Jacobins (1938), 2nd ed., rev. (New York: Vintage, 1963; reprint, London: Allison &
Busby, 1980). All further references to James’s work are from the 1963 edition.

3 Fick, Making of Haiti, 22.
4 Henri Castonnet des Fosses, La perte d’une colonie: La révolution de Saint-
Domingue (Paris: A. Faivre, 1893), 8.
5 John Garrigus, “French Slavery,” in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Ameri
cas, ed. Robert Paquette and Mark Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
173; also see Fick, Making of Haiti, 22, 280, nn42–44.
6 John Thornton, “ ‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political
Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4:2 (Fall 1993):
185 and nn14–15. See also David Geggus, “Sugar and Coffee Cultivation in Saint
Domingue and the Shaping of a Slave Labor Force,” in Cultivation and Culture:
Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americ as, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip Mor-
gan (Charlottesville: University Press of V irginia, 1993), 73–98.
7 On the composition of the slave leadership and organization of the August 22,
1791, insurrection, see Fick, Making of Haiti, 91–96.
8 For a larger discussion of these issues, see John Garrigus, “Colour, Class and Iden-
tity on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution: Saint Domingue’s F ree Coloured Elite as
Colons Américains,” Slavery and Abolition 17:1 (1996), 20–43.
9 See J. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint Domingue
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 329, n 47.
10 Before long, the British would be in control of the western extremities of the
northern and southern provinces, as well as significant coastal port cities of the West
province.
11 Cited in Robert Stein, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic
(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1985), 76.
12 After one year, they could, with special dispensation from a justice of the peace,
contract themselves to another plantation, but whether or not this was a wide-
spread practice under the prevailing wartime conditions in 1793–1794 is unclear. In
any case, the structural features of the plantation economy and of plantation l abor
remained unaffected.
13 For further discussion of the duties and obligations of the workers, wage allocations,
and police regulations, as well as workers’ reactions and resistance to these, see
C. Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti: From Plantation Labor to Peasant Proprietor-
ship,” Slavery and Abolition 21:2 (August 2000), 9–22. The term “plantation citi-
zenship” is that of Vertus Saint-Louis, “Les termes de citoyen et Africain pendant
la révolution de Saint-Domingue,” in L’insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue
(22–23 août 1791), ed. Laënnec Hurbon (Paris: Karthala, 2000), 75–95. See also
C. Fick, “The Haitian Revolution and the Limits of Freedom: Defining Citizen-
ship in the Revolutionary Era,” Social History [UK] 32:4 (2007), 394–414.
14 See Bernard Gainot, “La constitutionalisation de la liberté générale sous le Directoire
(1795–1800),” in Les abolitions de l’esclavage de L. F. Sonthonax à V. Schoelcher, 1793,
1794, 1848, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes/Éditions
unesco, 1995), 217–221.
15 Unless otherwise noted, parts of the following section are based on material previ-
ously published in C. Fick, “Revolutionary Saint-Domingue and the Emerging
Atlantic: Paradigms of Sovereignty,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel
Center 31:2 (2008), 121–144 and presented with permission.
16 Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti,” 27.
17 These would be expanded to include the United States; see below.
18 The so-called Quasi-War, lasting roughly from 1797–1798 to 1800, resulted from a
scandal, the xyz Affair, that erupted when it became known in the United States
that the three agents sent by President Adams to Paris to ease tensions between the
two countries during the Quasi-War were rebuffed, insulted, and expected to pay a
bribe if they wanted to begin negotiations with Minister of Foreign Affairs Charles
Talleyrand. See Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the
Haitian Revolution ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 124–127.
19 For the extent of commercial relations between Philadelphia merchants and Saint
Domingue during the 1790s, see James Alexander Dun, “ ‘What avenues of com-
merce, will you, Americans, not explore!’: Commercial Philadelphia’s Vantage onto
the Early Haitian Revolution,” Willian & Mary Quarterly 62:3 (2005), 357–364.
For a penetrating interpretive analysis of early American attitudes t oward (and
denial of ) its own créolité in the context of U.S.-West Indian connections, be they
political, economic, or cultural, see Sean X. Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies
and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
20 R. P. Adolphe Cabon, Histoire d’Haïti, 4 vols. ([1895–1919]; reprint, Port-au-Prince:
Éditions de la Petite Revue, 1940), 4:88–89; Vertus Saint-Louis, Aux origines du drame
d’Haïti: Droit et commerce maritime (1794–1806) (Port-au-Prince: L’Imprimeur II,
2006), 131.
21 For a fuller discussion of militarized agriculture under the regime of Toussaint
Louverture, see Claude Moïse, Le projet national de Toussaint Louverture et la Con
stitution de 1801 (Montreal: Les Éditions du cidihca, 2001), 62–65; James, Black
Jacobins, 242; Saint-Louis, Aux origines, 150–155; Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti,”
26–27.
22 Bibliothèque Nationale (bn) (France) mss, 12102. Correspondance de Toussaint
Louverture, vol. 2, no. 415. Ordonnance du Citoyen Toussaint Louverture, Général
en chef de l’Armée de Saint-Domingue, le Cap, 27 brumaire An 7 (November 17,
1798).
23 bn mss, 12102. Correspondance de Toussaint Louverture, vol. 2, no. 415. Ordon
nance, le Cap, 27 brumaire An 7 (November 17, 1798). On Toussaint’s administra-
tive initiatives, also see Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, 11 vols.
([1853–1860]; reprint, Port-au-Prince: F. Dalencourt, 1958), 4:11–12; Moïse, Le
projet national, 56–57; V. Saint-Louis, Aux origines, 133–134.
24 See discussion in “The Road to Independence,” above. For other specific provi-
sions of the treaty, see Rayford Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States
with Haiti, 1776–1891 (1941; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1969), 95;
Alexander de Conde, The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared
War with France, 1797–1801 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 138–140;
Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 144–161.

25 In Franklin Jameson, ed., “Letters of Toussaint Louverture and Edward Stevens,
1798–1800,” American Historical Review 16:1 (1910), 79–80. Stevens to Pickering,
Arcahaye, June 24, 1799.
26 In Jameson, “Letters,” 77. Stevens to Pickering, Arcahaye, June 24, 1799 (italics in
original).
27 In Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 83.
28 Quoted in C. Fick, “The Saint Domingue Slave Revolution and the Unfolding of
Independence, 1791–1804,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. D. Geggus
and N. Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 182–183.
29 On military control of the lives of the workers and supervision of plantation
production, see C. Fick, “The Haitian Revolution and the Limits of Freedom:
Defining Citizenship in the Revolutionary Era,” Social History [UK] 32:4 (2007),
409–412.
30 Quoted in Moïse, Le projet national, 104, 106 (articles 3 and 14 respectively). The
full text of the Constitution of 1801 is printed therein: 97–123.
31 Mats Lundahl, “Toussaint Louverture and the War Economy of Saint Domingue,
1796–1801,” in Caribbean Freedom, ed. H. Beckles and Verene Shepherd (Prince
ton/London/Kingston: Markus Weiner/James Curry/Ian Randle, 1996), 4, 9.
33 For a detailed account of the initial resistance of the forces still loyal to Toussaint
on the expedition’s arrival in February 1802, and on the defection of key generals to
Leclerc, see C. Fick, “La résistance populaire au corps expéditionnaire du général
Leclerc et au rétablissement de l’esclavage à Saint-Domingue (1802–1804),” in
Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises: Aux origines de Haïti, ed. Y.
Benot et Marcel Dorigny (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003), 130–136; and
especially James, Black Jacobins, 295–325.
34 For this phase of the independence struggle, in which numerous popular African
leaders refused to submit to the superior command of Dessalines, and for which
Dessalines and Christophe both led unrelenting campaigns to eliminate them, see
Fick, “La résistance populaire,” 144–148, and “The Saint Domingue Slave Revolu-
tion and the Unfolding of Independence,” 190–192.
35 The concept of a “Supreme Being,” as both universal and immaterial, existing
outside and beyond the realm of the human condition, could also contain an
embedded reference to the notion of a “Supreme Being” found in various African
religious belief systems that contributed to the evolution of Haitian vodou. It is
generally conceived of as a supreme, all-powerful but distant thing, or force of
nature, to which all other deities (loas), and mortals, must ultimately submit. As a
foundational document aiming to unify a country still composed in its majority of
a multiplicity of African cultures and ethnicities, such reference in the preamble to
the 1805 Constitution, if read in this light, might be plausible, but speculative. It is
worth noting, as Sybille Fischer points out, that the early independence constitu-
tions were written collectively, in committees, by men with formal training in
France, and by ex-slaves. In Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery
in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 228.
36 The designation of “white” to prohibit property ownership in Haiti was l ater
changed to “foreigner” and remained in effect until 1918 under the U.S. Marine
Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934).
37 Passages quoted in, and translated by Laurent Dubois and John Garrigus, Slave
Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804 (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
2006), 192–193.
38 On this point, see Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 232–236. In Haitian Kreyὸl, the
word nègre means simply: a person, a man, a Haitian, a human being, irrespective
of color and without negative connotation.
39 See Jean Casimir, “La révolution de 1804 et l’État,” in Genèse de l’État haïtien
(1804–1859), ed. M. Hector and L. Hurbon (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Presses
Nationales d’Haïti, 2009), 93.
40 Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti,” 30–31.
41 On more specific aspects of labor and property relations u nder the Code Henry,
including allocation of small family plots, health care, working hours, duties, and
mode of payment by owners to the workers, as well as taxes to the government,
see Michel Hector, “Une autre voie de construction de l’État haïtien: L’expérience
christophienne (1806–1820),” in Genèse de l’État haïtien, 255–281. Christophe’s an-
glophilia (and bitter hatred of the French) led him to prefer the anglicized spelling
of his name, Henry. See also Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti,” 32.
42 Alex Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race and Underdevelopment since
1700 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989), 88.
43 Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti,” 33. See also Paul Moral, Le paysan haïtien: Étude sur
la vie rurale en Haïti (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1961), 33.
45 Hector, “Une autre voie,” 267–268.
46 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 259.
47 These and other possibilities are discussed in Fischer, Modernity Disavowed,
245–260.
48 Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti,” 34. Considering that Haiti’s total land area is only
slightly more than ten thousand square miles (roughly the size of the state of
Delaware), and the above figure for Pétion’s land transfers pertain only to his
southern regime, the amount of land distributed in this manner was significant.
It also set the pattern and parameters for later land acquisitions, diverse local
property sales and transfers (often of portions of dilapidated or ruined plantation
estates), family inheritances, and the emergence of Haiti’s characteristically diverse
peasantry, including those without land of their own, or land without title.
49 Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti,” 34. For more detail on the sizes of the land grants
according to military rank and occupation see Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slav
ery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville, FL:
University Press of Florida, 2000), 93.
50 See Moral, Le paysan haïtien, 37.
51 M. Hector, “Les deux grandes rebellions paysannes de la première moitié du XIXè
siècle haïtien,” in Rétablissement de l’esclavage, 189–190.

52 See note 48 above. See also B. Éthéart, La problématique foncière en Haïti (Mon-
tréal: Les Éditions du CIDIHCA, 2014), 17–61.
53 See Sheller’s discussion of these historiographical trends in Democracy after Slavery,
89–92.
54 Most recently in Jean-Alix René’s innovative and challenging doctoral thesis, “Le
culte de l’égalité: Une exploration du processus de formation de l’État et de la
politique populaire en Haïti au cours de la première moitié du dix-neuvièeme siècle
(1804–1846)” (PhD diss., Concordia University, April 2014). Also see Sheller,
Democracy after Slavery, 89–141.
55 Sheller, Democracy after Slavery, 91–92.
56 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, State against Nation (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1990), 59–82.
57 Trouillot, State against Nation, 62.
58 Trouillot, State against Nation, 72–80.
59 Sheller, Democracy after Slavery, 243.
60 Article 44 of Pétion’s 1806 Constitution, in Fischer, Modernity Disavowed,
237–241.
61 On the contingencies of Bolívar’s unsuccessful attempts to gain adherence by his
creole compatriots to abolition, see Carmen Bohórquez, “L’ambivalente présence
d’Haïti dans l’indépendance du Vénézuela,” in Haïti: Première république noire,
ed. M. Dorigny (Saint-Denis/Paris: Société française d’histoire d’Outre-Mer/
Association pour l’Étude de la Colonisation Européenne, 2003), 227–240. See also
Clément Thibaud, “La culture de guerre napoléonienne et l’Indépendance des pays
bolivariens, 1810–1825,” in La France et les Amériques au temps de Jefferson et de
Miranda, ed. M. Dorigny and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Paris: Société des études
robespierristes, 2001), 115–124.
62 The indemnity was reduced in 1838 under the July Monarchy to 90 million francs
payable over the next thirty years, in addition to the initial French bank loan of 30
million (with compounded interest), i.e., the “double indemnity,” to pay the first
installment in 1825. For details and discussion of the entire indemnity question,
see François Blancpain, Un siècle de relations financières entre Haïti et le France
(1825–1922) (Paris: Harmattan, 2001), 43–78.
No mention was made of the Spanish part of Hispaniola that was originally
ceded to France in 1795 and then incorporated into the colonial state under Tous-
saint Louverture’s 1801 constitution. With total disregard for Haiti’s sovereignty as
of 1804, France agreed to return the territory to Spain during the post-Napoleonic
negotiations at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In 1822, President Boyer led an ex-
pedition into Santo Domingo to bring it back under Haitian sovereignty. In 1844,
following the liberal revolt to overthrow Boyer, the people of Santo Domingo
claimed independence from Haiti and became the Dominican Republic.
5
Cuban Counterpoint
Colonialism and Continuity in the Atlantic World
David Sartorius
On September 19, 1825, a bold call for Cuban independence cited “the instinct
that all men have to search for their freedom” as the impetus to end Spanish
rule on the island. For the authors of the manifesto, the tables had turned in
the epic contest between civilization and barbarism: a fter more than a decade
of war, the Americas were now the home of progress, justice, and liberty, and
Spain embodied the decay and backwardness of an outdated political and
economic order. According to the declaration, Cuba remained “under the do-
minion of a race of men who, to humanity’s disgrace, cannot enter into social
relations with civilized p eoples”; with plenty of recent examples of the heroism
of mainland patriots throughout Spanish America, Cubans could act on the
“sanctity of their rights” with the full support of the new republics. In turn,
Cuba’s strategic location at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico—it had long been
known as the Key to the Indies—meant that its independence would guarantee
the “peace, abundance, and prosperity” of all new nations in the Americas.
This appeal to f ree Cuba did not hail from Havana or Santiago de Cuba, or
any other locale on the island. It originated in Mexico City, where conveners
of a “patriotic meeting” promoting Cuban independence had directed a state-
ment to the nascent Mexican Congress.1 The group boasted the inclusion of
some resident Cubans as well as Mexican citizens, but of the sixty men who
signed the document, most were Mexican independence leaders and politicians.
While Cuban luminaries José María Heredia and F ather Felix Varela appear
on the list, even their famous names get lost among a Who’s Who of Mexican
independence and statehood: Vicente Guerrero, Antonio López de Santa Ana,
Nicolás Bravo, Anastasio Bustamante, Vicente Filosola, Manuel Gómez Pe-
draza, and many more. They all claimed to speak for the “effervescence that has
produced the desire for freedom in the public spirit” of Cuba.
On the island itself, evidence of this effervescence is spotty. Ventriloquizing
a desire for Cuban independence became a common gesture among leaders
and citizens of newly independent republics in Spanish America. Their opti-
mism and certainty often masked their own bumpy, uncertain transitions from
colonies to nations in the Americas. Cuba’s continued status as a colony until
1898 frustrated assumptions from abroad that an unstoppable desire for in
dependence existed on the island that would inevitably topple Spanish rule.
That an armed struggle against Spain did not occur until the second half of the
nineteenth century disrupts a narrative that sees events in the Atlantic world
between 1750 and 1850 coalescing to make the national independence of Ameri-
can colonies a foregone conclusion.2 Nevertheless, highlighting Cuba’s divergence
from common American patterns may obscure as much as it reveals. First, even
those onlookers who yearned for Cuba’s liberation were themselves unclear
about what political and economic practices constituted a new regional norm,
especially in light of fragile postcolonial predicaments.3 And second, to empha-
size continuity in Cuba and change everywhere e lse is to miss new dynamics of
colonial rule, exaggerate the newness of mainland Spanish American republican
and liberal experiments, and prioritize the political such that the sweeping social
and economic transformations that occurred on the island fade from view.
Those changes, coincidentally, have figured as the most common expla-
nations for continuity. Explaining the persistence of colonial rule in Cuba led
nineteenth-century observers, and more recent scholars too, to zero in on two
factors: sugar and slavery. In the wake of the Haitian Revolution, the argument
goes, the Cuban elite recognized the potential to pick up sugar production where
St. Domingue left off before the Haitian Revolution, and it realized the necessity
176 — David Sartorius
of a steady supply of African slave l abor in order to do so. Rather than risk the so-
cial instability that accompanied political transitions to nationhood elsewhere,
wealthy Cubans—of Spanish descent in the vast majority—opted for the mili-
tary safeguards, political control, and relaxed trade regulations offered by Spain.4
To the extent that talk of freedom held appeal, concerns about its contagion
among a growing slave population left white Cubans vigilant about the prospect
of “another Haiti.”5 The 1825 statement to the Mexican Congress tried to assuage
concerns that Cuban independence would incite revolutionary slave resistance by
noting that Spanish rule in Cuba looked nothing like the weak French state
and disorganized planters in late eighteenth-century St. Domingue. Few Cubans
appear to have been persuaded, and the extraordinary wealth generated by sugar
production throughout the nineteenth c entury left the Cuban creole elite, unlike
their counterparts on the mainland, to accept the continuity of Spanish rule. Seen
in this light, Cuba justifiably stands out as an exception to the period variously
termed the Age of Revolutions, the independence period, and the beginning of
the “modern period” in Latin American history.
As historians have sought to understand the period of independence as a
complicated balance of continuity and change, it is useful to revisit the assump-
tion of Cuban exceptionalism and opposition to the trends of the period.6 Such
polarity, with its deep roots, can prove difficult to unsettle. In 1940, Cuban
anthropologist, lawyer, and activist Fernando Ortiz published Cuban Counter
point: Tobacco and Sugar, in which he identified the dynamic of a “multiform
and persistent contrast” between modes of tobacco and sugar production and
the cultures that they s haped.7 This essay enlists that dynamic for a different pur-
pose as it considers the extent to which Cuba can be contrasted to the nations
in the Americas that emerged between 1750 and 1850. Did colonial rule exclude
Cuba from the experiments with liberalism, representative government, and
political participation that occurred elsewhere? Did the explosive economic
growth of the sugar economy continue older patterns of Atlantic commerce,
or did the abrupt changes on the island prevent the kind of economic stagna-
tion experienced in the rest of Spanish America? Answering these questions
requires critical distance from some basic assumptions about the politics and
economics of the “ever-faithful isle.”
Bread and Sugar: Continuity and Change in the Cuban Economy

Antonio López de Santa Anna, the Mexican general, future president, and
signer of the 1825 call for Cuban independence, saw no compatibility between
the island’s prosperity and the continuation of Spanish rule. In 1824, only
Cuban Counterpoint — 177
FLORIDA
AT L A N T I C
OCEAN
GULF
OF MEXICO
Straits of Florida
TH
E
BA
Havana H
AM
Matanzas AS
Pinar del Rio
Santa Clara
Cienfuegos
Sancti-
Spiritus
Ciego
Trinidad de Ávila
Isla de la Juventud
(Isle of Youth)) Camagüey
Las Tunas
Holguín
Manzanillo Bayamo Baracoa
Guantánamo
CARIBBEAN SEA Santiago
de Cuba
Cayman Islands
(U.K.)
0 50 100 150 mi HAITI

JAMAICA
0 100 200 km
Map 5.1. Cuba, ca. 1790–1860
months into his tenure as governor of Yucatán province, Santa Anna submit-
ted a proposal to the central government to lead an invasion of Cuba. Spain’s
presence in the region, and especially around Veracruz, he argued, jeopardized
Mexico’s independence and made its mining economy vulnerable. But other
enticing economic opportunities were at stake: a dozen Cuban exiles in Yuca-
tán had also persuaded him of the profits to be reaped by liberating Cuba, since
Mexico “would have to be compensated by a country of inexhaustible resources,
given its locale, ports, fecundity, and output.” And then there were Mexican
exports, which could buoy the fledgling national government in Mexico City
provided that they enjoyed unfettered access to Cuban markets. Santa Anna
realized that the regional economy was in transition and that its spoils were up
for grabs: Colombian ships w ere already dotting the Cuban coastline and Co-
lombian agents had hatched the failed Soles y Rayos de Bolívar independence
plot in 1823. “I repeat that this task belongs to the Mexican Nation and its
magnitude merits your concern,” he wrote to the war minister.8
In its final decades as a colony, New Spain had done its share to facilitate
Cuba’s economic rise: annual situados, or royal subventions, transferred reve-
nues from Mexico to Cuba in an attempt to invigorate new areas of the colonial
economy.9 Whereas Santa Anna in 1825 recognized Cuba’s (and perhaps Mex-
ico’s) potential to profit from Atlantic economic realignments, other observ-
ers a half c entury earlier were less optimistic about the region’s fortunes—and
about Spain’s ability to stimulate them. Independence-minded creole elites in
the American colonies were not unique in viewing imperial economic systems
as irretrievably outmoded. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
debates gained momentum in Western Europe about the merits and viability
of maintaining colonies. From Adam Smith to Montesquieu, economic and
political critiques of empire accumulated, and within the Iberian world, figures
such as Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes called for reforms based on a brutal
assessment of Spain’s policies in its colonies.10 When Jeremy Bentham exhorted
Spaniards in 1821 to “rid yourselves of the Ultramarine colonies,” he was mo-
tivated less by moral injustices of colonialism than his belief that their Ameri-
can colonies no longer generated profits.11 Critics of Spain’s excessive focus on
mainland silver mining cited the missed opportunities for sugar production in
the Spanish Caribbean. As Franklin Knight proposed, “Had Cuba not been a part
of the Spanish empire, it would undoubtedly have followed the earlier path
of St. Domingue, Barbados, or Jamaica.”12 This economic counterfactual had oc-
curred to many of those in Spanish America who felt the pinch of Bourbon
economic policies and began to wonder whether colonialism and long-
term profitability had ever been compatible and what the future might bring.
Among the various charges that Denis Diderot leveled against Spain, its rigid
economic policies illustrated the brutality characteristic of the Black Legend:
an inability to colonize according to the “true principles of commerce” (namely
mutual trade with independent countries) and greed that made “a wilderness of
her own country and a grave of America.”13
While the onset of independence movements in mainland Spanish America
might only have added to doubts about Cuba’s colonial status, the island’s eco-
nomic elite saw nothing but long overdue opportunity u nder Spanish rule, a
new and leading role in a changing Atlantic world. One year a fter a massive slave
rebellion began in St. Domingue, t hose Cubans with the means and clout to
direct the island’s economy formed in 1792 what became known as the Socie-
dad Económica de Amigos del País. The Havana group advocated for overhaul-
ing Cuba’s environment, society, and infrastructure in order to accelerate the
expansion of sugar, coffee, and tobacco production. Enlightenment ideas were
key to this endeavor, but the writings of Smith, Montesquieu, and Bentham
(often hard to acquire thanks to government censors) mattered less to most
members than scientific treatises of the period, especially t hose that provided
the botanical, chemical, and technological knowledge to improve the refine-
ment of sugarcane. It translated studies of sugar used by French planters and
technicians on St. Domingue, and for decades published its Guía de foraste
ros, an almanac for foreigners who might bring capital and commerce to the
island.14 Always on the lookout for new sources of revenue, Spanish officials
listened carefully to the appeals of the society. Beginning in 1789, when Spain
allowed the free trade of slaves in Cuban ports, Cubans won a number of con-
cessions over the course of three decades that allowed them to reshape the west-
ern and central parts of the island. The structure of land ownership and land
use changed drastically to clear land for sugar cultivation, and as Cuba became
the world’s top sugar producer, it did so in a period of an astounding increase in
sugar consumption: between 1800 and 1880 the amount of sucrose production
that reached the world market increased fifteenfold.15 Little surprise, then, that
planters and investors looked to agricultural expansion with wide-eyed confi-
dence and to a political system that frequently supported them.
The engineers of this transition often thought comparatively, depicting Cuba
as having mastered economic lessons that other regions had learned the hard
way. Arguments for the strict surveillance and harsh control of slave workforces
rested on the desire to avoid “another Haiti”—a fear of slave rebellion often
willfully disconnected from aspirations to match or exceed St. Domingue’s
successes in sugar. By the 1810s and 1820s reformers could also warn that Spain
should seek to avoid another Mexico, the loss of a prized colony due to mis-
management. One Santiago resident seeking to boost agriculture in the eastern
part of the island wrote to the king in 1811 that monopoly and trade restrictions
had wrecked New Spain’s tobacco economy and led to an época fatal that Spain
could forestall in Cuba.16 But these attempts to make Cuba a counterpoint
to its regional neighbors overlooked the deep connections between them that
blur the borders of nominally discrete case studies. Politically and economically
they often experienced linked fates both real and imagined, from the situa-
dos that Cuba enjoyed from New Spain to later Mexican designs for Cuban
independence.17 Beyond what Saint Domingue and the Haitian Revolution
represented in the abstract, arrivals to Cuba of p eople from Saint Domingue
during the height of the conflict had immediate and visible effects. In eastern
Cuba, French planters established coffee farms that used slave labor, marking
a change for the region but continuity for the planters and slaves themselves.
As Ada Ferrer points out, the revolutionary process in Haiti briefly relocated
a reactionary order to Cuba rather than destroying it outright: “People who
would have remained f ree in Saint-Domingue/Haiti became slaves once more
in Cuba. . . . And planters who had shipped coffee to the United States from
southern Saint-Domingue now grew it and shipped it from eastern Cuba.”18
Interconnected trajectories like t hese complicate assessments of Cuba’s excep-
tional status, a style of comparative thinking aided by the formation of national
units that rely on assertions of distinctiveness. Explaining or justifying why
Cuba took a different path than other countries can neglect the occasions on
which their paths crossed, merged, and ran parallel.
A further hindrance to understanding Cuba’s economic trajectory comes
in considering it within the context of the Atlantic world, a frame of reference
as much about time as it is about space. Given that other Caribbean slave socie
ties that produced sugar prospered (often briefly) much earlier through Atlantic
Ocean exchanges of capital, goods, and people, it is tempting to see Cuba as a
latecomer to the system, an island out of step with the rest of the region.19 Cer-
tainly, the waning of the transatlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century
complicated the expansion of slavery that accompanied the sugar revolution.
When Spain loosened restrictions on the trade in 1789, the slave population
more than doubled between 1792 and 1817. Yet Spain then signed a treaty with
Great Britain (and received a £400,000 incentive from Britain) to end the slave
trade to Cuba by 1820, and a clandestine slave trade flourished u ntil the 1860s
despite British cruisers surveilling the Cuban and African coasts and mixed
Anglo-Spanish commissions attempting to enforce the ban on the island. In
other words, Cuba remained an active participant in an Atlantic commercial
system in decline.
But other Atlantic worlds were possible. One difficulty of the Atlantic
framework for understanding nineteenth-century Cuba is that scholars have
often bracketed its period of relevance between 1500 and 1800, at which point
the end of certain European colonial projects in the Americas ruptured the
economic and political structures that constituted the Atlantic system. Never
mind that the majority of Caribbean islands remained under European rule
well into the twentieth c entury and most of the European powers in the At-
lantic continued to maintain colonies. Historians have recently attempted
to extend the periodization of the Atlantic world: Emma Rothschild, for ex-
ample, articulates a vision of “late Atlantic history,” and José Moya defines an
Atlantic world in the nineteenth century not by “early modern” standards but
by the markers of what tends to count for “modernity.” Suggesting an analyti-
cal path forward, they have identified new commodities, new ideas, and new
migrations and connections that do not correspond neatly to the patterns char-
acteristic of the earlier period.20
Seen in this light, Cuba appears not as an anachronism from a bygone era
of slavery and colonialism, but as an engine of a renovated Atlantic economy.
Technological advancements such as steam-driven sugar mills and rail trans-
port between plantation regions and ports plotted Cuban sugar production
squarely within the nexus of industrial capitalism. Dale Tomich has referred
to a nineteenth-century “second slavery” that infused new life into the econo-
mies of Cuba, Brazil, and the United States, and complicated swift or easy plans
for abolition.21 If we shift perspective to consider questions of consumption
and imports in these second slave societies, more new Atlantic connections
come into view. Slavery was vital to the development of profitable export pro-
visioning economies that used new technologies of mass production to pro-
vide sustenance for other slave societies. Brazilian coffee, for example, provided
the profits that allowed Brazilian planters to buy wheat flour from places like
Virginia, where slaves were active in wheat farming. Cuban demand for North
American wheat spiked in the late eighteenth century, to the benefit of the
fledgling economy of the United States. In fact, the Upper South’s targeting of
the Cuban market worried many Spanish officials, merchants, and wheat farm-
ers. Cheap U.S. flour disadvantaged Cuba’s own wheat farmers, located mainly
in the central and eastern parts of the island—to the contentment of many
planters and policy makers who argued that Cuba should devote itself to sugar
alone.22 Demand for subsistence goods in export-intensive agricultural areas
and port cities in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States reoriented the Atlantic
economy toward new regions on new terms.23 Moreover, imports of foodstuffs
in lieu of domestic production placed less pressure on planters to allow their
slaves to cultivate conucos, or provision grounds, and at least in some regions of
Cuba the rare instances when slaves could profit from their garden plots was
precisely during wartime disruptions of the Atlantic food import economy.24
Cuba remained, as Alejandro de la Fuente noted of sixteenth-century Havana,
“not just a place in the Atlantic but an Atlantic place,” although the Atlantic
looked quite different than it had in previous centuries.25
That Cuba, Brazil, and the United States anchored a distinctive nineteenth-
century Atlantic economy, both fueled by and fueling slavery, is a useful re-
minder that the persistence of slavery in the Americas and overseas commerce
did not depend on a single political form such as colonial rule, national inde
pendence, or empire. Indeed, all three systems w ere in play, and making Cuba an
exception to the transformations in the Atlantic world between 1750 and 1850
privileges one (national independence) over the others.26 Economic historians
have continued to explore the particular impact of colonialism and foreign
trade in the Americas, even after the pull of dependency theory weakened in
figure 5.1. Slaves making sugar in nineteenth-century Cuba:
The boiling house of the Asunción estate
the 1980s and 1990s. Research in this vein has generally demonstrated Cuba’s
similarity, more than disparity, with the emerging national economies of main-
land Spanish America, up to a point. Contrary to the assumption that foreign
trade uniformly disadvantaged the Latin American economies, other factors
now better explain “how Latin America fell behind.”27 The calculations of Linda
and Richard Salvucci of Cuba’s terms of trade in the nineteenth century il-
lustrate a surprising pattern. Although the end of colonial rule had severely
disrupted their export economies, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, and many
other Latin American nations generally experienced a rise in their terms of
trade throughout the nineteenth c entury. Some of their export sectors w ere
too small to yield significant benefits, and many gains derived from commod-
ity booms that exacted heavy economic tolls, but the fact of foreign trade itself
did not necessarily produce impoverishment. One might expect Cuba, with its
gargantuan export economy contributing to a decline in world sugar prices, to
have suffered in contrast. Instead, improvements in productivity (likely from
steam-powered mills and being one of the first countries in the world to use rail
transport) prevented declining terms of trade until 1847, and they began to rise
again in 1862.28 In other words, despite presumed differences between the f ree
trade that Spain allowed for Cuba and the free trade policies of new nations
(which often included fierce protectionism), both Cuba and the nations of
Latin America benefited, however indirectly and unevenly, from foreign trade.
Spain eventually closed the Cuban trade system for one conspicuous commod-
ity. Spanish officials fretted about the increasing volume of trade between
Cuba and the United States, and beginning in the 1830s, Spain imposed heavy
duties on wheat flour from the United States.29 The intended beneficiaries of
this protectionism were Spanish wheat farmers, not Cubans, and once the du-
ties took effect in the 1840s and 1850s, Spanish wheat imports to Cuba nearly
quadrupled.30
Together with the developments already mentioned, this aggressive policy
suggests several conclusions about Cuba’s “contrapuntal” economy in relation
to those of the mainland republics. First, Spanish strategies in Cuba w ere
neither afterthoughts nor sufficiently weak to indicate a “natural” decline in
imperial might and an opening for independence. In combination with the ac-
tive interventions of the Cuban elite, policy makers effected a transformation
that consolidated Spanish political control. This challenges commonplace
assumptions that independence and nationhood offered better alternatives
to presumably restrictive colonial relationships. Second, the significance of
new Atlantic realignments in the nineteenth century was not lost on Span-
iards or Cubans; the island was not artificially exempt from economic rela-
tionships developing among independent states because it remained u nder
imperial rule. Those realignments also adhere to a longer timeline that suggests
similarities and connections, not simply contrasts, with other Spanish colo-
nies and new nations. Finally, colonial officials worried not simply about the
possibility of Cuban independence but about the possibility of a new power,
namely the United States, acquiring commercial, if not political, control of the
island. Those fears w
ere not unfounded. By the 1830s, Cuban exports to the
United States had already exceeded those to Spain, and by the 1850s almost
half of Cuban exports went north.31 Instead of viewing that influence as a late
nineteenth-century development that fused U.S. political interests in Cuba to
increasing U.S. investments in Cuban sugar after the Ten Years’ War (1868–
1878), we might see concerns about competition with new foreign rivals as a
facet of the early nineteenth century that occasioned a powerful response from
Spain that resembles attempts in Mexico, Brazil, and other countries to shape
the contours of British and U.S. economic interventions.
Nevertheless, the impulse to single out Cuba, and the Spanish Caribbean
more broadly, as an outlier and exception has enjoyed a long history and no-
table adherents, including British scholar and colonial bureaucrat Herman
Merivale. In 1841 he romanticized the supposedly harmonious nature of the
Spanish Caribbean colonies before their economic takeoff and observed how
times had changed. He wrote that “the tropical colonies of Spain w ere com-
monwealths in an epoch when t hose of most other nations w ere mere factories;
they are now rapidly acquiring the degrading characteristics of factories, while
ours, we may hope, are advancing toward the dignity of commonwealths.”32
Overlooking a key connective story—how Britain’s sugar “factories” suffered
in part from direct competition with Cuba’s successful enterprise—Merivale,
like others, took a dim view of Cuba’s political fortunes relative to its economic
prosperity while still affirming the principle that colonies could achieve from
political communities for the common good.
¡Viva España! The Politics of Spanish Rule

Whether commonwealth or factory, Cuba was subject to laws and policies that
were never wholly determined by economic ambitions. The idealized memory
of a Spanish commonwealth based on noble, benevolent principles experienced
a lengthy afterlife on the island. Shortly a fter Cubans drafted a progressive con-
stitution in 1940, the historian and legal scholar Ramón Infiesta published
a monumental history of constitutionalism in Cuba. He traced the origins of
the island’s democratic traditions not to recent efforts to challenge Gerardo
Machado’s dictatorship and the political influence of the United States, nor to
the independence movement against Spain, but to Spanish colonialism. The
1812 Constitution, he argued, was situated at “the nexus between past Castil-
ian freedoms and a new democratic spirit.” While Infiesta admitted that the
membership of the Cortes of Cádiz betrayed the inclusive ideology expressed
in the constitution, he celebrated its advocacy of elections “that excluded any
regard for casta or of privilege” and that located politics “outside the radius”
of class influence.33 These w
ere certainly generous interpretations of “Castilian
freedoms,” and especially of the Cádiz Constitution; far from being race blind,
it offered only a narrow window of citizenship for free men of African descent
who proved their “virtue and merit.” For Infiesta, any flaws in Spanish consti-
tutional rule derived from constraints on civic life: obsessed with public order
and hunting down runaway slaves and bandits, local governments did little to
foster a democratic spirit beyond the realm of institutional politics inhabited
only by the privileged. Nevertheless, this early period of constitutional rule
under colonialism laid the groundwork, according to Infiesta, for the demo
cratic political culture that had culminated in a twentieth-century constitution
that has long set a political standard for many Cubans.34
The idea that Spanish rule had championed any freedoms, or that colo-
nial notions of sovereignty and political legitimacy might serve as models for
postindependence politics, was uncommon among Spanish American elites,
and has only recently has attracted the attention of historians in the case of the
Cádiz Constitution.35 More commonly, new nation-states defined themselves
against the old colonial regime and professed a commitment to representative
government and constitutionalism, in Jeremy Adelman’s words, “building on
the political achievements of defeating metropolitan monarchies.”36 In another
interpretation, however, “schizophrenic” independent states struggled to rec-
oncile republicanism with the “organicist and corporatist” ideologies left over
from colonial rule.37 To acknowledge the fuzziness of the transitions from col-
ony to nation in mainland Spanish America, especially in the realm of political
practices, is to invite curiosity about the explicit persistence of colonial politics
in Cuba, albeit in the context of new visions of the Spanish nation.
Despite widespread inequalities during the colonial period along the lines
of gender, race, and class, Cubans like Infiesta could look to the late nineteenth
century and cite some evidence of inclusive political practices. By 1898, Cubans
had come to enjoy freedoms of press and association, political parties modeled
on those in Spain, and, at the end of the independence war, even a last-minute
offer of full political autonomy within the Spanish empire. Aside from sepa-
ratist sentiment, the presumed unimportance of popular politics in Spanish
Cuba is often understood as the logical casualty of the simultaneous growth
of African slavery—and, for many scholars, a reason to exclude the island from
comparative considerations of nineteenth-century Spanish American politi
cal history. But innovations in Spain’s nineteenth-century empire raise simi-
lar questions to t hose relevant to the new republics about liberalism, popular
politics, civil society, and about imperial and national imaginaries not easily
contained within neat periodizations that end “the colonial period” with main-
land independence.38 In this light, the relationship between institutional and
popular politics in colonial Cuba becomes as ripe for analysis as it has been for
the rest of Spanish America during its “modern period.”39
One of the most apparent features of political life during Cuba’s contin-
ued colonial status was the surprising degree of popular support for Spain, in-
cluding that of f ree and enslaved p eople of African descent. In contrast to the
stable category of royalists who emerged out of the mainland independence
conflicts with patriots, loyalty to Spanish rule in Cuba was rarely a fixed or
permanent political identity; allegiance to Spain was contingent and flexible.
Given that all Cubans occupied some subordinate social or political position
under Spanish rule, the colonial state often recognized claims to privileges from
self-proclaimed loyal subjects more readily than demands for rights based on
elusive national citizenship. Racial inequality, just like other built-in colonial
hierarchies, contained within it the possibility of inclusion. And ultimately,
symbolic acts of loyalty to the imperial project, not the promise of citizenship
embodied in the 1812 Spanish Constitution, may have been what offered more
secure footing to some free men of color—not despite the widespread unrest
and in the Americas but precisely because of it. What many Cubans came to
realize in the years of imperial crisis, as they watched other regions of Spanish
America dissolve into violent conflict, was that loyalty, as opposed to exit, of-
fered a relatively stable position from which to argue for economic reforms,
improved social standing, or political recognition.40 As for much of the colo-
nial period, subordinate status, not equality among citizens, grounded political
subjectivities, so that even humbler colonials could speak to power in the lan-
guage of loyalty, so long as some means of expression was available. Just before
the constitution was promulgated, for example, Pedro Galdíz, a lower officer
of the pardo battalion in Havana, successfully lobbied the captain general for
a portion of normal monthly pay during months of rest. In 1811, he appealed
“with no pretension but obedience and hope for the return of our legitimate
sovereign to his throne” for a type of recognition that could not yet have been
granted by invoking the constitution. For many African-descended Cubans,
the constitution seems to have stood as one, but not the primary, front on
which they advanced struggles for survival, success, and mobility.41 On most
fronts, the language of loyalty figured prominently.
As in the new mainland republics, the constitution enjoyed a long afterlife
in Cuba, but on the island its limitations and possibilities became especially
manifest under the continuation of Spanish rule. Ferdinand VII abrogated it
in 1814, it was restored in 1820–1823 following a military coup in Spain, was
wrongfully reinstituted by Santiago’s governor in 1836, and its protections were
definitively placed out of reach from Cubans in 1837 with Spain’s decision to
govern the colonies by “special laws.”42 Cubans frequently looked favorably on
its guarantees of free press and association, particularly during its restoration in
1820. In an initial test of those freedoms, the restoration provoked lively public
commemorations that stretched the limits of what kind of public fraternizing
would be tolerated. Alejandro Ramírez, and army intendant, reported on five
straight days of celebration in Havana to celebrate the physical arrival of the
constitution. On April 15, a Spanish ship carrying the proclamation completed
its month-long voyage from La Coruña and was met by three Spanish regiments,
one of them proudly headed by a colonel who had guarded Cádiz in 1812 when
news of the constitution was initially proclaimed. Soldiers led music and me-
andering parades through the streets, and they eventually mixed with “paysa-
nos de toda ropa,” followed by “masses of blacks and mulattoes, all of them
with bouquets and little paper lanterns placed on long sticks, singing, drum-
ming, and shouting at whomever they encountered.” Amid the “infernal noise,”
Ramírez identified groups of negros “who shouted ‘Viva el Rey’ from a distance
when they heard of the Constitution’s victory.”43 This, for Ramírez, was the
desired outcome of loosening restrictions on public gatherings: however bois-
terous the Cubans of color might have been, they used public space to show
support for Spanish rule—a far preferable alternative to uniting in rebellion.
As his description continued, however, the intendant snuck in some suspi-
cion amid the praise. On the final night of the festivities, crowds proceeded
down Calle Muralla—renamed Calle de la Constitución—to a plaza featuring
the Arca de la Ley, a stone memorial to the constitution. There they sang patri-
otic hymns, toasted the new political order, and wore hats that bore the message
“Viva la Constitución.” Once again, soldiers mixed with civilians, “masses of
people of all classes, sexes, and colors,” but now many of the images and deco-
rations that he witnessed bore “triangles, squares, and other tools of masonry,
and a combination of three colors. . . . Blue-striped ribbons worn on their black
coats; such dress, according to some intellectuals of the Egyptian mysteries, was
analogous to the Triangular emblem.” The role of Masonic lodges in many Span-
ish American independence movements was a fresh memory to officials like
Ramírez, although Cuban lodges generally traced origins and ongoing relation-
ships to counterparts in Spain and generally survived intense government scru-
tiny.44 The concern at the end of the restoration celebrations seemed to locate
the potential for subversion in Masonic iconography—an anxiety undoubtedly
linked to understandings of the influences on mainland independence—much
more than assumptions about the rebellious nature of Cubans of color.
Throughout the week, Ramírez expressed ambivalence that characterized
the uneven development of public life in early nineteenth-century Cuba. He
could not help but observe that the events “gathered all of the elements capable
of generating disorder,” and that the loyal sentiments of the African-descended
participants were insufficient to overcome the subversive potential of general
revelry. He concluded that “although the desires and intentions of the pueblo
ere Spanish and Patriotic, the principle that set the machine in motion was
w
neither Patriotic nor Spanish, at the opposite extreme.”45 Could the medium
have been the message? Ramírez certainly thought so, and opportunities to
express support for colonial rule waxed and waned as authorities worked with
qualified success to limit the forms of popular public expression that voiced
political opinions, pro-Spanish or otherwise.
The second constitutional period ostensibly broadened opportunities for
more Cubans, citizens or not, to engage in political discussion, but even those
liberties had their limits: government censors issued 147 denunciations to vari
ous licensed newspapers in the course of the Trienio.46 After major turning
points away from expanded rights—in 1823, in 1837, with the announcement
of “special laws,” and a fter the slave revolts and La Escalera conspiracy in the
1840s—moderate reforms coming from Madrid often faced skepticism from
officials on the island, such as Captain General Luis Dionisio Vives’s refusal in
1823 of Spain’s continuation of associational freedoms after the constitution’s
nullification. Such austerity left figures like Father Félix Varela, once a Cuban
delegate to the Cortes, to relocate political discussion off of the island—in Va-
rela’s case to the United States, where he published El Habanero in Philadel-
phia and advocated Cuban independence. The restrictions placed on public
space and association, political discussion, and publications may have intended
to squelch seditious and revolutionary activities, but they also limited even ex-
pressions of support for Spanish rule.
Before 1837, the creole elite had won economic concessions in the absence of
political representation, but the announcement of “special laws” for the island
rightly struck them as explicitly silencing. Drawing on the ill-fitting rhetoric
of human bondage, a furious José Antonio Saco, now stripped of his position
in the Cortes, accused Spain of “reducing f ree citizens to political slavery” and
wondered how it could cite fears of slave rebellion to justify its decision, given
that Spain had created the system itself: Cubans owned “slaves that the Govern-
ment itself brought us and forced us to buy.”47 Ramón de la Sagra, the Spanish
agriculturalist who studied and taught in Cuba and often sparred with Saco,
tried to give the decision a positive spin. From Paris he published an analysis of
the constitution’s suspension in Cuba that saw special laws as a privilege, not
an insult, bestowed on white Cubans. They had the resources they needed to
prosper, and lost representation in the Cortes was a small price to pay to pre-
vent political freedoms from becoming “a seductive spectacle for an unhappy
race that can neither understand nor enjoy them.”48 Things could still improve
for the white population, but more importantly they were now less likely to be
destroyed altogether.
All the while, talk of independence remained relatively muted. Annexation
to the United States increasingly piqued the curiosity of slave-owning Cubans,
reformers seeking autonomy u nder colonial rule floated various designs for
“Spanish Cuba,” and a handful of planters found a modest platform to make
their interests heard in Madrid. In the 1840s and 1850s, Saco was a frequent
spokesmen for Cuban planters and slave owners who met with limited success
when they argued that white immigration and an end to the slave trade might
create a Cuba worthy of constitutional protections. Although Cubans didn’t
disappear entirely from the Spanish political scene, they had to adapt their
rhetoric to fit their exceptional and subordinate status. Francisco Muñoz del
Monte, a wealthy Santiago liberal who became a regular presence in the court
of Isabel II during the 1850s, wrote frequently for a Spanish periodical called
La América. He still celebrated the merits of freedom, but he now paired it
with order as a necessary preventive balance for unchecked liberties. He tried
to fuse the interests of the Spanish and Cuban bourgeoisie with appeals to the
“Iberian race” and fraternal harmony. And he watched with some exasperation
after 1854 as political parties proliferated in Spain, mindful that Cubans were
left out of such debates. In an article about the many “liberal parties” in Spain,
he reminded readers that Spanish liberals and conservatives alike could trace
their origins to the liberal ideals of the 1812 Constitution.49
As long as slavery and racial differences existed on the island, the Spanish
government seemed disinclined to encourage hopes for the extension of con-
stitutional rights. We should not see in this an absence of politics altogether—
either as two-dimensional conjecture about Iberian absolutism or as a contrast
to democratic American republics, themselves reckoning racial divisions with
rights talk. Again, the promise of constitutional rights and liberal government
was only one mechanism by which Cubans could achieve inclusion and justice.
And as the 1812 Constitution made no attempt to curb slavery and excluded
slaves from any claims to citizenship, many slaves themselves pursued political
paths with older origins. Alejandro de la Fuente has discussed how the persis
tence of slaves in Cuban courts helped transform the centuries-old legal cus-
tom of coartación, or slaves’ self purchase, into an institution understood as a
right—though not without disagreements by planters and the colonial govern-
ment.50 One syndic in 1852 affirmed the freedom claim of a slave woman named
Catalina because she had traveled with a former owner to Spain, where slavery
did not exist. He reasoned that “the right of post-liminy was established to
promote freedom . . . according to the wise and enduring l egal code formulated
by Alfonso X, ‘All worldly rights always advance the interests of freedom.’ ”51
Here was an invocation of freedom that did not depend on constitutional guar-
antees or the threat of anticolonial revolt. The fact that this anecdotal evidence
does not necessarily congeal into a well-defined pattern is precisely the point:
this was a system of exceptions and special cases. With the rules themselves
frequently in transition, aspiring to citizenship under the Spanish constitution
was rarely a stable political stance that would be uniformly recognized as al-
legiance to Spain.
Nevertheless, on the eve of Cuba’s first war for independence, there began
to appear a slight softening of the parallel rigidity among Cuban leaders to the
enslaved and free descendants of Africans. Certainly, the U.S. Civil War and
slave emancipation had dampened enthusiasm for annexation, and former
adherents rerouted their discontent in the direction of colonial reform. Over
two decades after the alleged conspiracy of La Escalera, which led to a brutal
crackdown on slaves and free people of color alike, the free-colored militias
had been reinstated, whitening the population became a more common goal
of elites, and deceptive discussions about “free” African migrant labor at least
acknowledged that slavery would not last forever. Each of t hese developments
pointed to a need or desire for better social integration despite a wide gap
between its principles and practice. Together, they ostensibly placed Cuban
creoles in a stronger position to critique the political fractures and exclusions
they had long suffered. Even though the Junta de Reformas de Ultramar that
convened in 1865 could not align the interests of its Puerto Rican, Cuban, and
metropolitan constituencies, it nevertheless offered a limited space for political
deliberation. Ironically, 1865 was also the year of the founding of the Sociedad
Abolicionista Española, an organization that would debate the role of former
slaves and Cuba’s sizable f ree population in preserving support for Spanish rule.
To what extent might this openness in the 1860s have been extended to the
exclusions and exceptions made for Cubans of African descent? The captain
general himself seemed optimistic. Domingo Dulce acknowledged the “civiliz-
ing aptitude” of the f ree population of color and urged the Ministerio de Ultra-
mar to loosen up. Since he had arrived in Cuba in 1862, free p eople had achieved
success in many professions, “even music and poetry,” and Dulce recommended
removing legal obstacles to their contribution to the “expansive and fusionary
Spanish race.” He warned that the ministry should not “draw up special laws for
the libres de color, nor deprive them de facto and de jure of the equality before
the law that they have possessed and still possess, although t here are only few
slight differences to repeal.” The work of dismantling legal inequalities within
the island might have been the necessary condition for holding at bay special
laws in general, as, Dulce predicted, the “divergence of aspirations between
the majority of the inhabitants and a minority of peninsulares will disappear.”
Ultimately, though, he admitted that the “progressive amalgamation of race
will be the work of time and not of legislation,” and by 1868, time for musing
about a racially amalgamated empire or political equality was interrupted by
the outbreak of Cuba’s first war for independence.52
While the treaty that ended that war effected an unprecedented expansion
of the public sphere—far more opportunities for political deliberation, includ-
ing the founding of conservative and liberal political parties—1868 begins a
narrative of independence that differs from that of the other Spanish American
colonies in that a national vision preceded political independence. That vision,
as Ada Ferrer so persuasively articulates, was built less on the ideas of biological
and cultural mixing, which fueled calls for national unity in the nineteenth-
century republics, but “as the product of a revolutionary cross-racial alliance—a
formulation that ostensibly acknowledged the political actions of nonwhite
men and therefore carried with it powerful implications for racial and national
politics in the peace and republic to follow anticolonial insurgency.”53 What
happens, asks Jeremy Adelman of approaches to Spanish American indepen
dence, if we “do not suppose the existence of the nation, either as social forma-
tion or as idyll, before empires crumbled and the fires of revolution began to
spread across colonial hinterlands?”54 What happens if we examine Cuba’s his-
tory as counterpoint and harmony alike: questions of political inclusion that
shaped the trajectories of all American nations, but with Cuba’s strugg le for
independence and race-transcendent nationalism a marked distinction from
the creole-led movements of the early nineteenth century.
Conclusion
Another appeal for Cuban independence, made almost thirty years after the
statement to the Mexican Congress, characterized anticolonial rebellion as
an inevitable and foreseeable event by midcentury, prophesying that “down-
trodden peoples, brutalized by ages of oppression, w ill rise in the rude maj-
esty of their ungovernable might.” Indeed, by now Cuban desires for political
emancipation could be historically documented: the author cited an 1823 plea
to Simón Bolívar for help, an 1826 plea at the Congress of American States in
Panama, the 1828 conspiracy of the Aguila Negra, and the Santiago governor’s
1836 attempt to reinstate the Cádiz Constitution. This time, the call came from
neither a Cuban nor Mexican but a U.S. southerner. Samuel R. Walker was a
New Orleans filibuster who made the case for independence in 1854 to John
Perkins, a Democratic Louisiana congressman; he had in mind more than a
moral crusade against “the divine right sacrilegiously claimed by imbecile king-
craft.” A free Cuba, for Walker, was a vital issue for the southern economy.
“The articles we produce are t hose they most need,” he insisted, and E ngland
or France would never “have suffered such an incubus to have existed at the
outlet of even their petty rivers, weighing down their commercial advance-
ment.” Political solidarity did not lie far from his economic ambitions, and
although a full-scale invasion of Cuba might upset the delicate racial balance,
Walker still asked what “the United States, the center from which t hese rays di-
verge, [would] be willing to contribute to the cause of freedom and humanity.”55
His assessment echoed the sentiments of the Mexican supporters of Cuban
independence in 1825, who claimed that Cuba needed the strong “protection
of a friendly nation” in order to secure its liberty.56 As in much of the American
hemisphere’s history, economic and political motivations rarely separated neatly
as factors in expansionary projects.
If that rhetoric portends later justifications for the 1898 U.S. intervention
in Cuba’s final war for independence, it should also alert us to a persistent
counterpoint between the harmonious “family of nations” in the nineteenth-
century Americas and the expansionary and paternalistic ambitions of some
of its members, including, but not limited to, the United States. Even as Euro
pean empires expanded throughout the c entury, and still controlled much of
the Caribbean, observers from new American nations commonly proclaimed
the incompatibility between colonial rule in Cuba and regional capitalist de-
velopment. But the experiments with inclusionary politics and economic inno-
vation in the last decades of Spain’s presence in the Americ as allow us to unfix
liberalism and capitalism from their association with the nation-state. Not that
Cuba alone diverged from this presumed norm. While colonialism on the is-
land rarely approximated the liberal imperialism claimed and theorized by the
British and French in their nineteenth-and twentieth-century global exploits,
it was never the sole site of imperial allegiances, enduring racial hierarchies,
and coerced labor in the Americas.57 Th ose phenomena remained v iable and
prominent even in the new nations that were gradually and unevenly shaped
in opposition to them. Counterpoint—between colony and nation, equality
and subordination, rights and privileges—might involve different contours and
rhythms, but the melodies are intrinsically interdependent.
This point was not lost on Fernando Ortiz. The oppositions that he delin-
eated in Cuban Counterpoint never remained distinct; rather, the historical
processes by which they informed and transformed each other laid the foun-
dation of Ortiz’s wide-ranging concept of transculturation. And this insight
offers a way to understand Cuba as an integral part of the Age of Revolutions
rather than a curious exception to it. Perhaps the loudest counterpoints are
to be found not between individual cases but within them. Cuba, for all of
its continuity, became a laboratory for experiments in economic and political
reform throughout the nineteenth century. If preserving slavery was the criti-
cal explanation for maintaining colonial rule, the hierarchies that bolstered it
could be mobilized not simply for economic exploitation but for membership
in a public or political community that was unequal by design. The privileges
and paternalism characteristic of Spanish colonial rule held the attention of
many Cubans at the same time that the rights and freedoms attributed to in
dependent nation-states were being hammered out elsewhere. Situating Cuba
alongside the new nations in the Americas brings into sharper view the colo-
nial foundations of the various “national” political cultures that emerged and
the “modern” features of European empires.
Notes
1 Representación al soberano congreso mejicano por los miembros de la reunión patriótica
promotora de la libertad cubana (Mexico City: Imprenta de la Aguila, 1825). Rare
Books Division, Library of Congress. For statements of support for Cuban indepen
dence from committees formed in other Mexican cities and towns, see Archivo de la
Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico City (hereafter asre), L-E-1333, números
3 and 4. On other foreign efforts to liberate Cuba, see Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez,
Manual de historia de Cuba (Madrid: Ediciones Madras, 1985), 285–287, 298–299.
2 Arturo Sorhegui D’Mares explores the Havana elite’s response to the Age of Revolu-
tions in “La Habana y el proceso de la primera independencia en Hispanoamérica,”
in Repensar la independencia de América Latina desde el Caribe, ed. Sergio Guerra
Vilaboy and Emilio Cordero Michel (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2009),
268–304.
3 Concerns that new republics did not measure up to European-derived definitions
of political and economic success echoed the concerns of postcolonial scholarship
with troubling a shopworn image of the region’s new nations as “variations on a
master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe,’ ” in the words of Dipesh
Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Differ
ence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27. Tulio Halperín Donghi
emphasizes Argentina’s divergence from the presumptive model of nationalism
developed by Benedict Anderson in his influential text Imagined Communities
(London: Verso, 1983). See Halperín Donghi, “Argentine Counterpoint: Rise of the
Nation, Rise of the State,” in Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writ
ing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, ed. Sara Castro-Klarén and
John C. Chasteen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press / Woodrow Wilson
Center Press, 2003), 33–53.
4 The argument is ubiquitous, but two recent examples can be found in José A.
Piqueras, “La siempre fiel isla de Cuba, o la lealtad interesada,” Historia Mexicana
58:1 (2008), 427–486, and Dominique Goncalvès, Le planteur et le roi: L’aristocratie
havanaise et la coronne d’Espagne (1763–1838) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2008).
5 On the circulation of information about the Haitian Revolution in Cuba, see
María Dolores González-Ripoll, Consuelo Naranjo, Ada Ferrer, Gloria García, and
Josef Opartný, eds., El rumor de Haití en Cuba: Temor, raza y rebeldía, 1789–1844
(Madrid: csic, 2004).
6 See, for example, Peter Guardino, The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture
in Oaxaca, 1750–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Sarah C.
Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa,
Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); and
Karen Caplan, Indigenous Citizens: Local Liberalism in Early National Oaxaca and
Yucatán (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
7 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 5.
8 Antonio López de Santa Anna to the Secretario del Ministerio de Guerra y Marina,
August 18, 1824, amre 3–14–5155.
9 Alan J. Kuethe, “El situado mexicano, los azucareros y la fidelidad cubana: Com-
paraciones con Puerto Rico y Nueva Granada,” in Las Antillas en la era de las luces y
la revolución, ed. José Antonio Piqueras (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2005), 301–318.
10 See Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 22–33; and Gabrielle B. Paquette, Enlight
enment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808 (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
11 Jeremy Bentham, “Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria,” in Colonies, Commerce, and
Constitutional Law: Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria and Other Writings, ed. Philip
Schofield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1–194.
12 Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 28.
13 Quoted in Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Prince
ton University Press, 2003), 92, 106.
14 Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio: Complejo económico social cubano del
azúcar, 3 vols. (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978), 1:105–112. Initially
known as the Sociedad Patriótica, the organization had at least a dozen different
names in its first century but remains best known as the Sociedad Económica de
Amigos del País. On the library and publications of the Sociedad, see Izaskun
Álvarez Cuartero, Memorias de la Ilustración: Las Sociedades Económicas de Ami
gos del País en Cuba (1783–1832) (Madrid: rsbap Delegación en Corte, 2000),
107, 213–214, 222.
15 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New
York: Penguin Books, 1985), 197. The world’s population did not even double
in that same period. On sugar expansion, see Mercedes García Rodríguez, La
aventura de fundar ingenios: La refacción azucarera en la Habana del siglo XVIII
(Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2004), and Entre haciendas y plantaciones:
Orígenes de la manufactura azucarera en la Habana (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias
Sociales, 2007). On land tenure, see Imilcy Balboa Navarro, De los dominios del rey
al imperio de la propiedad privada: Estructura y tenencia de la tierra en Cuba (siglos
XVI–XIX) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2013).
16 Martin José de Palacios to Fernando VII, September 25, 1811, Archivo General de
Indias, Seville, Sección Ultramar, legajo 318, cited as “Memorial de un vecino de
Santiago de Cuba sobre propuesta de reformas, 1811,” in El departamento oriental en
documentos, Tomo II (1800–1868), ed. Olga Portuondo Zúñiga (Santiago de Cuba:
Editorial Oriente, 2012), 52–65.
17 On eighteenth-century connections, see Arturo Sorhegui D’Mares, “La Habana y
Nueva España, el Mediterráneo americano y la administración española en el siglo
XVIII,” in La Habana en el Mediterráneo americano (Havana: Imagen Contem-
poránea, 2007), 221–252.
18 Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 182. See also Olga Portuondo Zúñiga, Santiago
de Cuba, los colonos franceses y el fomento cafetalero, 1798–1809 (Santiago: Editorial
Oriente, 1992).
19 Philip D. Curtin critiqued the assumption that recognizing the ultimate successes
of Saint Domingue and Cuba means that “we half expect them to have been big at
the beginning” of European colonization in the Americas, although he also claims
that the end of slavery was “out of phase.” The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Com
plex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 27,
189.
20 Emma Rothschild, “Late Atlantic History,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic
World, c. 1450–c. 1850, ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 634–648; José C. Moya, ”Modernization, Modernity, and
the Trans/formation of the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century,” in The
Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R.
Seeman (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2007), 179–197. See also
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “Continuity and Crisis: Cuban Slavery, Spanish
Colonialism and the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century,” in Cañizares-
Esguerra and Seeman,The Atlantic in Global History, 199–217; Frederick Cooper,
Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), chap. 4; Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of
Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), and Rebecca J.
Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of
Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
21 Dale Tomich, “The ‘Second Slavery’: Bonded Labor and the Transformation of
the Nineteenth-Century World Economy,” in Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor,
Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004),
56–71.
22 Linda K. Salvucci, “Supply, Demand, and the Making of a Market: Philadelphia
and Havana at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” in Atlantic Port Cities:
Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, ed. Franklin W.
Knight and Peggy Liss (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 40–57.
23 Dan Rood, “Slavery and the Amber Waves of Grain: Trade, Technology, and
Middle-Class Consumption in the Richmond-Rio Circuit, 1760–1860,” unpub-
lished essay. See also Richard Graham, Feeding the City: From Street Market to
Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860 (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2010), and Andrew Sluyter, “The Hispanic Atlantic’s Tasajo Trail,” Latin Ameri
can Research Review 45:1 (2010), 98–120. For an eighteenth-century contrast, see
Celia P. Torre, “La alimentación en Cuba en el siglo XVIII,” Revista de Humani
dades [Monterrey] 19 (2005), 101–116.
24 David Sartorius, “Conucos y subsistencia: El caso del ingenio Santa Rosalía,” in
Espacios, silencios, y los sentidos de la libertad: Cuba entre 1878 y 1912, ed. Fernando
Martínez Heredia, Rebecca J. Scott, and Orlando F. García Martínez (Havana:
Ediciones Unión, 2001), 108–127. See also Jorge Ibarra Cuesta, Marx y los historia
dores: Ante la hacienda y la plantación esclavistas (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias
Sociales, 2008), 186–187.
25 Alejandro de la Fuente (with the collaboration of César García del Pino and Ber-
nardo Iglesias Delgado), Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 223.
26 For a history of slavery and sugar that juxtaposes imperial and constitutional
politics in Brazil and Cuba, see Márcia Berbel, Rafael Marquese, and Tâmis Parron,
Escravidão e política: Brasil e Cuba, c. 1790–1850 (São Paulo: Editoria Hucitec,
2010).
27 Stephen Haber, ed., How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic His
tory of Brazil and Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
28 Linda K. Salvucci and Richard J. Salvucci, “Cuba and the Latin American Terms
of Trade: Old Theories, New Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31:2
(2000), 197–222. They note that income terms of trade r ose, and the decline was
limited to the net barter terms of trade and to single factoral terms of trade.
29 Antonio Santamaría García and Alejandro García Álvarez, Economía y colonia:
La economía cubana y la relación con España, 1765–1902 (Madrid: csic, 2004),
chap. 3.
30 Salvucci and Salvucci, “Cuba and the Latin American Terms of Trade,” 211. This did
not deter the “natural” trade relationship between the United States and Cuba: in
the second half of the nineteenth century, the flour trade increased at an average of
8.8 percent per year.
31 See Nadia Fernández de Pinedo, “Cuba y el mercado azucarero en el siglo XIX,”
in Azucar y esclavitud en el final del trabajo forzado, ed. José A. Piqueras (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), 271–290; Linda K. Salvucci, “Atlantic
Intersections: Early American Commerce and the Rise of the Spanish West Indies
(Cuba),” Business History Review 79 (Winter 2005): 781–809; Julio le River-
end, Historia económica de Cuba (Havana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 1974),
382–394; Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio, 3:80.
32 Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies (1841; reprint, New York:
Kelley, 1967), 41, cited in Sidney W. Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean
Themes and Variations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 211.
33 Ramón Infiesta, Historia constitucional de Cuba (Havana: Editorial Selecta, 1942),
31. On questions of race and the 1940 Constitution, see Alejandra Bronfman, Mea
sures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1902–1940 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 171–178.
34 Marifeli Pérez-Stable notes that anti-Batista opposition during the 1950s “rallied
around the Constitution of 1940”; after the Cuban Revolution, the restoration of
the 1940 Constitution has figured prominently on the agenda of many exiles, in-
cluding José Morell Moreno, who served as a justice of the Cuban Supreme Court
during the 1950s. See The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy, 3rd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 82, and José Morell Moreno Papers,
Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.
35 See, for example, Scott Eastman and Natalia Sobrevilla, eds., The Rise of Consti
tutional Government in the Iberian World: The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution
of 1812 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015); François-Xavier Guerra,
Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Madrid:
Mapfre, 1992); Cortes y Constitución de Cádiz, 200 años, ed. José Antonio Escudero
(Madrid: Espasa, 2011); and Roberto Breña, El imperio de las circunstancias: Las
independencias hispanoamericanas y la revolución liberal española (Madrid: Marcial
Pons / Colegio de México, 2012).
36 Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution, 370. See also Adelman’s “Introduction:
The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History,” in Colonial Legacies: The
Problem of Persistence in Latin American History, ed. Jeremy Adelman (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 1–13.
37 Howard J. Wiarda, The Soul of Latin America: The Cultural and Political Tradi
tion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 102. See also Stanley J. Stein
and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic
Dependence in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), esp. chap. 6.
38 For a sophisticated consideration of this perspective, see Josep M. Fradera, Colonias
para después de un imperio (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2005).
39 The literature is extensive. A few recent examples of English-language monographs
include: Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico
and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Peter Guardino, Peas
ants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State: Guerrero, 1800–1857
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Hilda Sabato, The Many and the
Few: Political Participation in Republican Buenos Aires (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2002); Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race,
and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004); James E. Sanders, Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class
in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004);
Cecilia Méndez, The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of
the Peruvian State, 1820–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and
Pablo Piccato, The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican
Public Sphere (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). On the relationship
between the constitution of popular politics and the discourse of modernity, see
James E. Sanders, “The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Contesting Modernity
in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America,” Latin American Research Review 46:2
(2011): 104–127, and Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart, eds., When Was Latin Ame
rica Modern? (New York: Palgrave, 2007).
40 Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms,
Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), chap. 7.
41 Antonio de Castro to the Captain General, January 23, 1811, agi, Cuba, Leg. 1766,
Núm. 38. Ann Twinam exhaustively demonstrates how militia service laid a
groundwork for claims to vassalage and citizenship by free men of color in Purchas
ing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish
Indies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).
42 See Olga Portuondo Zúñiga, Cuba: Constitución y liberalismo, 2 vols. (Santiago de
Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 2008).
43 Extracto de sucesos ocurridos en la Habana, remitido por el Intendente de Ejército
al Secretario de Estado y del Despacho en Madrid, n.d., Roque Garrigó, Historia
documentada de la conspiración de los Soles y rayos de Bolívar (Havana: Imprenta
“Siglo XX,” 1929), 180.
44 Eduardo Torres-Cuevas, Historia de la masonería cubana: Seis ensayos (Havana:
Imágen Contemporánea, 2004), 48–50. Victor M. Uribe-Urán notes that main-
land Latin American Masonic networks had links to France and Britain more than
Spain. “The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America during the Age of Revolu-
tion,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37:1 (2000), 425–457. See also
Jossianna Arroyo, Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013).
45 Garrigó, Historia documentada, 94, 97.
46 J. M. de Andueza, Isla de Cuba pintoresca, histórica, política, literaria, mercantil é
industrial (Madrid: Boix, 1841), 112. See also Juan José Sánchez Baena, “Libertad de
ideas y prensa en Cuba (1810–1823),” in Los colores de las independencias iberoameri
canas: Liberalismo, etnia, y raza, ed. Manuel Chust and Ivana Frasquet (Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2010), 55–87.
47 José Antonio Saco, Exámen analítico del informe de la comisión especial nombrada
por las Cortes . . . (Madrid: Oficina de D. Tomas Jordan, 1837), 19.
48 Ramón de la Sagra, Apuntes destinados a ilustrar la discusión del artículo adicional
al proyecto de Constitución que dice “Las provincias de ultramar serán gobernadas por
leyes especiales” (Paris: Impr. de Maule et Renou, 1837), 32.
49 Olga Portuondo, Un liberal cubano en la Corte de Isabel II (Havana: Ediciones
Unión, 2002), 69.
50 Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coart-
ación and Papél,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87:4 (2007), 655–692.
51 Gloria García Rodríguez, La esclavitud desde la esclavitud: La vision de los sier
vos (1996; reprint, Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2003), 168. The derecho
de postliminio was a Roman legal provision that restored the rights of citizenship
to returning prisoners of war. See García Rodríguez, La esclavitud desde la esclavi
tud, 203.
52 Cárlos de Sedano y Cruzat, Cuba desde 1850 á 1875: Colección de informes, memo
rias, proyectos y antecedentes sobre el gobierno de la isla de Cuba, relativos al citado
período que ha reunido por comisión del gobierno (Madrid: Imprenta Nacional,
1873), 295. Dulce contrasted the “active, enterprising and dominant Anglo-Saxon”
race, whose presumed unity in the United States rested on the destruction of the
territory’s indigenous population, to the “Latin race,” which was more conservative
in its actions and built its unity on the absorption of different groups.
53 Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 4.
54 Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution, 344. For a recent consideration of this ques-
tion, see José M. Portillo Valdés, Crisis atlántica: Autonomía e independencia en la
crisis de la monarquía hispana (Madrid: Fundación Carolina, Centro de Estudios
Hispánicos e Iberoamericanos, 2006), and José Antonio Piqueras, Bicentenarios
de libertad: La fragua de la política en España y las Américas (Barcelona: Ediciones
Península, 2010).
55 Samuel R. Walker, Cuba and the South (New Orleans, May 20, 1854), Rare Book
Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. On southern filibustering, see
Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America
56 Representación al soberano congreso mejicano, 4. On Mexico’s interests in Cuba, see
Rafael Rojas, Cuba mexicana: Historia de una anexión imposible (Mexico City:
Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 2001).
57 See, for example, Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberal
ism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), and
Josep M. Fradera, “Reading Imperial Transitions: Spanish Contraction, British
Expansion, and American Irruption,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making
of the Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 34–62.
6
Atlantic Transfor mations

and Brazil’s Imperial Ind ep end ence
Kirsten Schultz
In important ways Brazil became a new country in the early nineteenth

century. Following its exit from the Portuguese empire in 1822, it faced strug
gles over national authority and regional autonomy, including quests for
provincial secession. The formation of a Brazilian nation-state—the most en-
during nineteenth-century American monarchy—also entailed reckoning with
transatlantic and national debates about slavery and reconsolidating an export
economy in the midst of Britain’s rise to industrial eminence. In all of these
challenges Brazil shared conflicts and debates that shaped other new countries
of the Americas. Yet, as has been noted often, Brazil faced the least conflictive
path to independence. Brazilians recognized the heir to the Portuguese throne
as a leader of independence; the new monarchy successfully defended its sover-
eignty over most of the territory of the former Portuguese colony; and in the new
commercial regime of open ports and direct trade with Britain, landowners and
merchants invested in the rapidly growing coffee export economy and agreed
that preserving the slavery that sustained this economy was paramount.
Was Brazil, then, the least new of the new countries? Understanding how
Brazilians consolidated a monarchical national state, fostered a new coffee
economy, and defended slavery to hold together as the largest, most pros-
perous, and most politically stable South American country in the nineteenth
century requires a long historical vision. The transformations that made Brazil
both new and more economically prosperous and politically stable than many
of its American neighbors should be traced through the whole eighteenth
century and into the early decades of the nineteenth. This is not to suggest that
the roots of Brazilian nationhood, or of a Brazilian nation-state, arose early
in Brasil-Colônia, or that ideas and institutions of nationhood and statehood
were uncontested a fter the 1830s. Rather, examining Brazil’s transformations
within the Portuguese empire’s long eighteenth century illuminates the ways
in which it became part of a dynamic Atlantic world in the context of a global
empire—and how Brazil’s place within that empire shaped how p eople on
both sides of the Atlantic experienced the crises that ultimately led to Brazilian
independence and adapted to a world increasingly defined by British industrial
and military power.1
The eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth encom-
passed interrelated economic, political, and administrative transformations,
interpreted and addressed in various ways within the Portuguese royal court
and at the local level in Brazil. They redefined the Portuguese empire, while
people in both Portugal and Brazil forged a transatlantic political culture that
mixed allegiance to, and critique of, monarchy and royal administration. At
the start of the eighteenth century Brazil was part of an empire in transforma-
tion and a dynamic Atlantic world, linked to global markets through exports
of agricultural commodities and gold, and imports of h uman chattel. By the
middle of the c entury, the Crown had recognized Brazil’s primacy among its
territories by investing in diplomatic, administrative, and commercial policies
that sought to leverage the “continental” potential of the American ultramar
as a guarantee of the monarchy’s independence within Europe. In the wake of
the Napoleonic crisis and the Portuguese royal court’s move to Rio de Janeiro
in 1808, the legacies of t hese policies w
ere manifest yet divergent. Rio-centered
political elites worked to preserve the American and imperial f uture envisioned
by eighteenth-century royal officials by liberating Brazil from colonial status
within Portuguese politics and imperial commercial policy. By the 1830s t hese
elites had forged a new independent state—a constitutional monarchy called
202 — Kirsten Schultz
the Empire of Brazil—and defended it against challenges from Portugal and
within Brazil.
Although one royal family holding the thrones in Portugal and Brazil
brought entanglements and uncertainties, Pedro I’s abdication to his young
Brazilian-born son, Pedro II, in 1831 affirmed the separation between Europe
and America. British abolitionism notwithstanding, leaders of the new Brazil-
ian empire also negotiated international recognition of independence and a
diplomatic framework for gradual abolition that allowed for an expansion of
slavery in the short term, enabling—as slave traders and slave owners insisted
it would—the expanding production of wealth within a global economy that
had long linked Brazil and Great Britain via Portugal. The elimination of Por-
tugal from this network served the “interests of commerce” and opened the
economic and political potential of Brazil, promoted by eighteenth-century
royal officials and secured under a nineteenth-century empire linked directly if
informally to industrializing Britain.
At the same time, the defense of American empire and its economic poten-
tial was inextricably linked to quests to politically transform the former colony
from within. As recent historical scholarship has shown, a plurality of political
projects, both old and new, shaped a complex articulation of state and nation-
hood in the first half of the nineteenth century. Institutional and economic
continuities (slavery, monarchy, export production, British markets and mer-
chants) provided frameworks within which p eople in Brazil sought to define a
new nationhood in law, in political and economic practice, and in culture. In
the process, visions of vassalage, monarchical authority, nationhood, and the
state’s sovereignty over the territory of Brazil, including its vast hinterland and
disputed border zones, effaced local authorities and autonomies. As vassalage
was transformed into citizenship, the ideals and practices of cultivating alle-
giance to the state and thereby forging a unified social and political order in
the name of nationhood underwrote an entrenchment of old hierarchies and
exclusions, as well as new understandings of the imperatives of territorial unity
and political authority. Thus, notwithstanding the dynastic, geographic, and
socioeconomic continuities so often cited as having set Brazil apart from its
Spanish American neighbors, throughout the nineteenth century people living
in the vast territory claimed by the new Empire of Brazil, like their counter
parts across the hemisphere, contended with the contingencies and contradic-
tions of a new sovereignty, even as the f ree reaped the rewards and slaves bore
the burdens of Brazil’s export prosperity linked to an expanding, industrial
capitalism.
Atlantic Transformations and Brazil’s Independence — 203

Global Empire and Portuguese America in the Eighteenth C entury
From the fifteenth century, the Portuguese empire was a leading participant
in the creation of a complex global economy that by the late sixteenth century
linked the flow of American silver toward China and the Atlantic trades in
sugar and slaves. It was a growing economy shaped, and reshaped, by rivalry.
What Charles Boxer called “the global struggle with the Dutch,” began during
the Union of the Iberian Crowns (1580–1640) and ended after the restoration
of Portuguese sovereignty u nder the leadership of the House of Braganza. It
led to the loss of the Moluccas (1605) and fortresses in Ceylon (1638–1658) as
well as lengthy efforts to fend off the Dutch in Africa (El Mina in 1638 and Lu-
anda from 1641 to 1648). These wars were costly and disastrous for Portuguese
Asian trade; in the 1630s, in contrast to the 1580s and 1590s when the carreira
da India comprised as many as fifty-nine ships, fewer than two ships arrived
at Lisbon per year with no significant increase in the following two decades.2
In the second half of the seventeenth century the attention of royal offi-
cials in Lisbon shifted from the Estado da Índia, the Indian Ocean network
of fortresses, merchant communities, and administrative cities, toward the At-
lantic, following the generation of revenue. Yet the shift from east to west was
complex. The Dutch had set their sights on the Americas as well. In the 1620s
they attacked Salvador da Bahia and the following decade occupied the neigh-
boring capitancy of Pernambuco—where the Portuguese u nder Spanish Haps-
burg sovereignty had consolidated the first large-scale sugar and slave society in
the Americas. To revitalize the Brazilian enterprise, the newly restored Portu-
guese Crown founded the Companhia Geral do Comércio do Brasil in 1649,
providing a new venue for investment (in many cases from New Christians)
with rights to import cod, oil, and wine into Brazil, and the duty to organize
and share in the revenue from transatlantic fleets laden with slaves and sugar;
one of these fleets was instrumental in expelling the Dutch from the Brazil
in 1654. The renewed growth of Brazil’s sugar economy was limited, however,
by concurrent transformations in transatlantic commerce. As the English, the
French, and the Dutch established plantations in the Caribbean, the price of
sugar declined; Portugal’s revenues reached a low in the 1680s. And when Bra-
zilian trade revived, its revenues could not compensate for what had been lost
in Asia. Nor could new links between Brazil and the Estado da Índia via the
Cape route—especially the trade in Brazilian tobacco—reverse the trend of
declining imperial revenue.3
A dramatic transformation and the preeminence of what some have called
an “Atlantic system”—based on the intricately linked export economies of
Brazil and Africa—took shape only at the end of the seventeenth century,
fueled initially, yet not entirely, by the discovery of gold in Portuguese Ame
rica’s hinterland. The adaptation of slavery to the production of gold across
the uplands beyond Rio and São Paulo ensured that bound Africans would
remain the base of Brazil’s production. Despite the challenges of administering
new settlements and extracting new resources, by the turn of the eighteenth
century the empire was once again providing substantial financial resources
to the Crown. Gold from Brazil had become part of a complex international
political-economic conjuncture. Even as wars in Europe at the beginning of
the century disrupted existing trade and commerce, they created new oppor-
tunities for Brazilian exports. In a context of war and commercial potential,
the Crown of Portugal committed to a new alliance with England, signing the
Methuen Treaty in 1703; it provided for low tariffs on Portuguese wines sent
to England and ensured open markets in Portugal for Eng lish woolens. For
Portugal, the result was a trade deficit with E ngland, paid for with Brazilian
gold. As royal officials at the time observed, it was the price of alliance with a
formidable European power that would protect Portuguese territories from
Franco-Spanish aggression.4 For England, Brazilian gold sustained the mo-
mentum of its own eighteenth-century commercial enterprise. Brazil found a
new place linked to Britain in a global economy that was, as Tutino explains,
dynamic and polycentric.5
With the new Brazilian mining economy playing such a vital role in the
Atlantic economy and imperial policy, the Crown remained committed to estab-
lishing control over new areas of settlement in Brazil. As thousands of settlers
from Bahia, Pernambuco, São Paulo, and Portugal traveled both the official
caminhos and newly forged and often clandestine paths to as Minas, the Crown
first aimed to defend its sovereignty in America by limiting access to the min-
ing region, and then turned to administrative and fiscal reforms that officials
hoped would forge effective governance.6 As officials on both sides of the At-
lantic noted, governing and ensuring a steady stream of revenue from Brazilian
mines carried high costs. Along with officials’ salaries and the cost of freight
and of building and staffing foundries, the Crown had to invest in forces of
order: by the 1720s a troop of professionally trained dragoons was stationed
in Minas to assist locally recruited militias in escorting gold shipments and, at
times, to suppress revolts. Over time the Crown began to assume the costs of
defending the Brazilian coast, once a burden borne by the residents of coastal
cities. Yet if the costs of governing Minas Gerais grew, the economy that took
shape around mining in the hinterland also afforded the Crown sources of rev-
enue beyond the quinto (royal tax), including tolls on roads that were used to
export gold and transport needed supplies to and within the region. Much of
Frontier of Treaty of Tordesilas (1494)
Portuguese territory according to the Treaty of Madrid (1750)
Frontier the Treaty of San Ildefonso (1778)
Present-day borders of Brazil
N
on River
Amaz Belem São Luís
Recife
er
o R iv
isc
nc
São Fra
Salvador
Cuiabá
iver
Vila Rica do Ouro Preto

R
ná
ra
Pa
São Paulo
Rio de Janeiro
PACIFIC
OCEAN
AT L A N T I C
OCEAN
0 500 mi
0 800 km
Colonia do Sacramento
Map 6.1. Brazil in the eighteenth c entury
this revenue was spent locally to sustain fiscal administration and infrastruc-
ture. Such investment “helped to reinforce government control and ultimately
rendered possible the very construction of Brazil.”7
In the second half of the eighteenth century, even as gold exports entered a
period of decline, the Portuguese imperial shift from east to west endured. On
the one hand, gold exports were but one source of revenue from a larger and
more diverse export economy that generated revenue through customs tariffs.
Indeed, as Stuart Schwartz observed, as “the gold cycle” lost dynamism around
midcentury, agricultural production, including a revived sugar economy, out-
paced mining. In 1760, he explains, “when Brazilian exports w ere valued at
4,800,000 milréis, sugar accounted for half of that figure and gold for 46%.”8
While the mix of gold and agricultural exports ensured that Brazil remained a
very lucrative enterprise for the Crown, in the Estado da Índia revenues stag-
nated and the Portuguese faced not only European rivals but also the ambi-
tions of local rulers who sought to increase the territories under their control
at the expense of the Portuguese.9
Facing what appeared an irreversible decline of the Asian empire and the
growth of Brazil, royal officials began to articulate a new vision of an Atlantic
American empire. Led by Brazilian-born Alexandre de Gusmão (1695–1753) and
bolstered by increasing geographic and cartographic knowledge of the Ameri-
can hinterlands, the Portuguese Crown renegotiated the borders between
Spanish and Portuguese America; the new Treaty of Madrid (1750) displaced
the Treaty of Tordesillas by upholding the principle of uti possidetis (occupa-
tion) in Africa and Asia as well as the New World. The size of Portuguese claims
doubled to include the vast basin of the Amazon River, while an exception was
applied in Río de la Plata where the Portuguese relinquished claims to the Co-
lonia do Sacramento. Although the southern borders of Portuguese America
continued to generate disputes and the Treaty of Madrid was revised by the
Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1777, the new western borders would endure.10
João V’s successor, José I (r. 1750–1777), and his powerful prime minister,
the future Marquês de Pombal, took up the challenge of crafting administrative
and economic policy for the Amazon region and of ensuring that the w hole
empire remained prosperous. Pombal pursued reforms, often compared to
those of the Bourbons in neighboring Spain and Spanish America, intending
to strengthen Portugal’s position in Europe. Without abandoning the Luso-
British alliance, he sought to diminish Portugal’s trade deficits with E ngland by
promoting manufacturing to reduce imports and establishing the Alto Douro
Company in Portugal to curtail English control of the wine industry. Beyond
what Kenneth Maxwell described as a “nationalization” of Portugal’s economy
through import-substitution, Pombal sought to develop colonial economies in
the interest of both security and imperial trade. To exploit the Amazon basin,
Pombal created the Companhia Geral do comércio do Grão Pará e Maranhão
(1755), promoting the expanded use of African slave labor, the settlement of
Azorean immigrants, and the diversification of the northern economy, espe-
cially the cultivation of cotton and rice. To consolidate de facto royal control
over the Amazon, he entrusted his brother, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça
Furtado, with the task of devising a policy for the region’s indigenous population;
the Directorio que se deve observar nas Povoações dos Indios do Pará, e Maran
haõ was published in Lisbon 1757.11 A centerpiece in the Pombaline effort to
achieve what Ângela Domingues has called the “occidentalization of Amazo-
nian space” through greater settlement, in the wake of the expulsion of the
Jesuits from the Portuguese empire in 1759 the Diretório provided the frame-
work for governing and appropriating the labor of the indigenous populations
formerly supervised by that order.12
As Pombal began to implement his reforms, in recognition of the growing
economic and strategic importance of the Brazilian South and to further shore
up Portuguese control of frontier territories there, in 1763 the Crown moved
the capital of Brazil from Salvador, Bahia, to Rio de Janeiro. The Crown sent
out cartographers, engineers, and natural scientists in expeditions intended to
increase knowledge of the potential of its territories. To enhance its defensive
and administrative capacities, the Crown raised auxiliary cavalry and infantry
regiments throughout Brazil and established juntas da fazenda (exchequer
boards) in each captaincy. The end of the requirement that ships sail within the
fleet system, in turn, gave a select group of merchants more flexibility in adapting
to supply and demand. In response to the British seizure of Havana in 1762,
officials on both sides of the Atlantic began a series of projects aimed at fortify-
ing the Brazilian coast. To further security and, above all, to keep commerce
Portuguese and Brazilian, the Crown barred foreigners from Brazil’s ports.13
Although Pombal fell from power following the death of Dom José in 1777,
much of his reform vision weathered the criticism that found voice in the new
royal court of Maria I (1777–1816). Brazilian planters and merchants, Portu-
guese royal officials, and what Maxwell calls “the merchant-industrial oligar-
chy” enriched by Pombaline protectionism continued to recognize both the
overwhelming importance of Brazil within the imperial economy and that the
new controls on commerce within the empire had diminished trade deficits
with Britain and dismantled “the commanding role” earlier played by the Brit-
ish merchants in Portuguese ports. Led by Pombaline protégé Rodrigo de
Sousa Coutinho, in the last decade of the eighteenth century Portuguese royal
officials continued to foster the diversification of Brazil’s export agriculture as
well as the revival of mining. Thus, as Maxwell observes, “the South Atlantic
dimension of the long Portuguese eighteenth century . . . set the chronological
framework for the whole epoch.”14
While the Portuguese defended mercantilist policies throughout the century,
what contemporaries called the antigo sistema colonial proved “pervious.” Por-
tuguese imperial commerce linked to northern, central, and southern European
shipping and finance; it included direct trade in certain commodities (i.e.,
cod) between northern Europe and Brazil; it extended to “intercolonial ex-
change” between Africa and the Indian Ocean network and, above all, to the
transatlantic slave trade, much of which was controlled by Portuguese African
and Brazilian traders. In Brazil, both trade with Portugal and the slave trade
between Brazil and Africa fueled the development of local and regional econo-
mies, expanding commodity production, and a wealthy landed and mercantile
elite.15 Thus, in Brazil, as Tutino has noted of other American contexts, the ter-
rain of the eighteenth-century commercial economy was not only defined by
exchanges between metropoles and colonies, but also encompassed regional and
subregional economic centers and ports linked in complex ways to each other
and to global trade networks.16
The porosity of a global empire defined by what one royal official called the
“interests of commerce” also shaped the ways in which royal officials perceived
political-cultural challenges to Portuguese authority. If investment in the de-
fense of the Brazilian coastline reduced the potential of foreign aggression, the
problem of cultivating political allegiance and gaining administrative and fiscal
control over the extraction of wealth proved to be more challenging and en-
during. In the newly settled mining region, in the first three decades of the eigh
teenth century the Crown faced both violent challenges to political order and a
general disregard for royal authority. The Crown also faced revolts against taxes
in the 1710s in Salvador and São Paulo, as well as armed conflict between plant-
ers of Olinda and wealthy merchants in Recife. The Crown responded with
force, as it had in Minas, to restore order and maintain control. In the first half
of the eighteenth century, as officials negotiated the implementation of taxes
and the recognition of local institutions, they also promoted public and collec-
tive displays of allegiance and afforded urban life and urban planning greater
space in royal policy.17 It would be in urban centers where, in the last decades of
the eighteenth century, residents would receive and share news of challenges to
monarchy and empire taking shape in North America, France, and Haiti, and
where residents would mount their own conspiracies against royal government
and rebellions against the social order that royal authority upheld. The Crown
successfully confronted these challenges too—most famously the Tiradentes
conspiracy of 1789 in Minas Gerais—with force and exemplary punishment.18
Throughout the eighteenth century the Crown also contended with an ef-
fective absence of its authority in the vast hinterlands of Portuguese America.
The Pombaline Directory envisioned assimilating Indians into colonial society
as laborers. In practice, the lack of resources for interior administration, local

initiatives that contradicted royal policy, the corruption of directors, the en-
croachment on indigenous villages and lands as settlers pushed into territo-
ries u nder Indian control, the Indians’ resistance to such settlement, and Por-
tuguese perceptions of indigenous savagery, all mixed to stimulate local and
royal efforts to militarize the hinterland and enslave, remove, and in some cases
exterminate indigenous populations without effectively enhancing the gover-
nance of territories far from the historic, mostly coastal, centers of settlement.
Indeed, as Hal Langfur explains, while in the hinterland of Minas the Crown
sought to create a “forested no-man’s land, peopled by native antagonists
whose enmity . . . would prevent unauthorized access to and smuggling from
the mines to the coast,” even this “enforced absence” proved difficult to sustain
in practice. African slavery too presented challenges to sovereignty; through-
out Brazil slaves who escaped from plantations formed communities, called
mocambos or by the eighteenth-century quilombos, which were economically
viable and politically autonomous. In the late seventeenth c entury royal au-
thorities had turned to military force to dismantle the large, populous, and
long-established República dos Palmares in northeastern Brazil. Yet the use
of force on the margins of Portuguese settlement, often at odds with the local
imperatives of negotiation, did not mean that the sovereignty proclaimed by
treaties became reality on the ground. Indeed, at the turn of the nineteenth
century much of the territory claimed by the Portuguese Crown encompassed
an “archipelago” of autonomous indigenous communities and quilombos.
They sustained “territorialized resistance,” as one historian describes it, to set-
tlement and enslavement in places both remote from and adjacent to centers of
economic and political power.19
Still, the fractured geography of governance and sovereignty notwithstand-
ing, as royal officials in Portugal assessed Napoleon’s undeniable ambition and
the prospects of another European war, Brazil’s potential loomed large. Rec-
ognized throughout the eighteenth century in diplomatic, commercial, and
administrative policies that promoted settlement of American hinterland,
urbanization, investment in administrative and judicial institutions, and the
cultivation of political allegiance, Brazil had become the foundation of Por-
tuguese wealth and power. Its potential grew as revolutionary ex-slaves took
down the export production of sugar and coffee in Haiti, the Atlantic leader in
both before 1790, opening new markets for Brazilian growers. As chief of the
royal treasury Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho surmised in 1803, “Portugal by itself
is not the best and most essential part of the monarchy.” If a war were to leave
Portugal devastated, he concluded, “it was incumbent upon its Sovereign and
its Peoples to go and create a powerful Empire in Brazil.”20
Crisis, Independence, and Sovereignty
When in 1807 Napoleon ordered an army to march across Spain and occupy
Lisbon, he brought to an end the neutrality that sustained the Portuguese com-
mercial empire in the last quarter of the eighteenth c entury as well as recent
debates within the Portuguese royal court about capitulation to the French or
alliance with the British. In response, Prince Regent Dom João, ruling in place
of his incapacitated mother Maria I, established a regency, counseled his vas-
sals against armed resistance, assured them they would endure his absence only
“until the General Peace” was attained, and, with thousands of courtiers and
a British naval escort, crossed the Atlantic.21 While Brazil officially became a
short-term haven from war and occupation, key royal counselors saw the move
to Brazil as a continuation of eighteenth-century visions of Western ascendance
and recent conjecture about American potential. Sousa Coutinho, now min-
ister of foreign affairs and war, dramatically restated his optimistic appraisal of
the reorganization of imperial space. Rather than embarking on an exile, the
prince regent, he posited in the “Declaration of War against the French,” was
headed for “a new empire, which he will create.”22
In the years that followed, royal officials insisted that the “new empire” stood
against revolution and in defense of political tradition and hierarchy, while rec-
ognizing that it would also bring significant change. In Bahia in 1808, before
arriving at Rio, the prince regent issued a charter that opened Brazil’s ports
to allow commerce and the collection of revenue to continue during the war
and the occupation of Portugal. Officially defined as “interim and provisional,”
merchants and officials across the empire recognized that the measure marked
the end of the “old colonial system” of mercantilist monopoly and the begin-
ning of “free trade” for Brazil. In a time of war and British naval and com-
mercial dominance in the Atlantic, trade links to Britain became direct, while
markets for Brazilian export commodities grew steadily in the 1810s.23
As the Peninsular War ended in 1814, demonstrations of political alle-
giance and transatlantic solidarity began to fracture. Vassals of the Portuguese
monarchy questioned the empire’s new configuration, with its capital in Rio.
In 1817 in Pernambuco, as sugar prices fluctuated and the fiscal demands of
the Rio government appeared to jeopardize prosperity, provincial elites staged
an insurrection demanding more autonomy. The same year, discontent in Por-
tugal with postwar conditions led a group of officers to plot against the in-
terim government of British marshal Beresford in favor of “independence” and
a constitutional monarchy. Although the Crown moved swiftly and success-
fully to repress both movements, it faced growing criticism of the political
and economic ramifications of the alliance with G reat Britain, expressed in an
ex-patriot press in London, in public squares in Portugal and Brazil, and at the
royal court itself.
The key concern among Portuguese merchants was a new commercial re-
gime, created by the Treaties of Commerce and Navigation of 1810, upheld in
subsequent agreements, and characterized by Alan Manchester as “British pre-
eminence” in Brazil. Desired by imperial and commercial interests in London
before the transfer of the court, temporarily undercut by the 1808 charter that
opened Brazil’s ports to all nations, the 1810 treaties gave British traders and
goods a preferential status in Brazilian ports: import duties of 15 percent on
British goods were lower than those applied to Portuguese merchandise and
other international goods. And while Portugal gained “most favored nation”
status within the British empire, Brazilian sugar and coffee, “articles similar
to the products of the British colonies,” w ere denied direct entrance to Brit-
ish markets. Within Brazil the British also gained the unreciprocated privilege
of selling retail. Although the 1810 treaties were at first accepted in Portugal
as essential in wartime, when it became clear that the postwar regime would
not bring changes that favored merchants in Portugal, acceptance gave way to
disenchantment.24
In Brazil, if merchants and local economies did not suffer as dramatically
from the opening of Brazil’s ports, many residents viewed the British as hav-
ing gained the upper hand in trade and, as some protested, in local economies
as well. Complaints about the British presence in local markets and frictions
generated by growing British communities in Brazilian port cities resonated
with perceptions of the larger threat of Great Britain’s imperial ambition in
South America. Brazilian elites especially opposed British demands that the
Portuguese Crown curtail the slave trade. While the presence of royalty in Rio
de Janeiro had raised questions about both the moral and cultural effects of
slavery, and the Haitian Revolution had raised doubts about security, the ma-
jority of Luso-Brazilian elites saw slavery as integral to imperial prosperity.25
At the end of the decade the perception of besieged economic and political
sovereignties and a more general dissatisfaction with the local politics of the
new political economy of empire, the “internal conflicts” of the Luso-Brazilian
empire came to a head and laid bare the political limits of the wartime impe-
rial reconfiguration. The center of the crisis formed not in the royal court of
Rio de Janeiro, but in Portugal where the Crown failed to convince its vas-
sals of the promise of a new American future. Instead both the British postwar
occupation and the opening of Brazil’s ports were read as signs of the former
metropolis’s new “colonial” status. In Portugal growing criticism of the trend
t oward “national decadence” focused on the nature of sovereignty itself. In Au-
gust 1820 a group of property o wners, merchants, low-ranking military officers,
magistrates and clergy, and some members of the nobility in Porto, called on
Dom João to return to Portugal. Th ere the monarch could usher in a “regenera-
tion” of the Portuguese nation by convoking the Cortes, a formerly consultative
institution that represented the kingdom in the reunion of three estates. In-
spired by the experience of Cádiz in 1812, they called on representatives to write
a constitution for Portugal and its empire.
While the movement professed loyal to the monarchy, its loyalty was based
on Dom João’s allegiance to the Cortes and a new constitution that would
circumscribe royal power and restrict it to the role of executive. The nation,
not the Crown, would be sovereign. The news of the rebellion reached Rio in
October 1820. A steady stream of rumor and reports followed, including news
that confirmed the spread of the rebellion to Lisbon where the Cortes Gerais,
Extraordinárias e Constituintes da Nação Portuguesa, would convene. As royal
counselors debated how to respond, political actions in Brazil redefined emerg-
ing challenges. Beginning in January 1821 local expressions of support for the
Cortes from officials and Portuguese troops in the Northeast and in Rio began
to include demands that the Spanish Constitution of Cádiz, drafted in 1812
during the French occupation of Spain and recently reimplemented at the in-
sistence of Spanish military men, serve as a provisional charter of the global
Portuguese nation. In response, Dom João pledged support for the delibera-
tions of the Lisbon Cortes.26
When, in recognition of the Cortes’s demands, Dom João set sail for
Portugal in 1821, he left b ehind his son Dom Pedro as regent of Brazil and
uncertainty about w hether the new constitutional order would endure and,
if it did, what it would mean for the empire. One draft of a new Portuguese
constitution defined the Portuguese nation as the “union of all Portuguese of
both hemispheres,” including “free men born and living in Portuguese terri-
tory” and “the slaves born in the ultramarine possessions that obtain manu-
mission.”27 Thus, the ideal of national representation would itself serve as the
basis for future imperial integrity and prosperity. In practice, imperial integrity
would be guaranteed by the presence in the Lisbon Cortes of deputies from
Brazil, elected to provide representation for each province and, with other
representatives of the Portuguese “nation,” to deliberate on the “new order of
things.” Yet constitutionalist politics and political culture produced manifold
visions and debates. Within the now uncensored press, pamphleteers raised
the question of w hether the nation, monarchy, and empire w ere coterminous.

ere they products of history and tradition, language and law, and a will to live
W
together in a political community, or illusions that would succumb to percep-
tions of cultural, geographic, and racial differences?28
Indeed, although Dom Pedro accepted his father’s pledge to defend the
future constitution and respect the authority of the Lisbon Cortes, by the m iddle
of 1822, the ideal of a constitutionally sanctioned representation that promised
to preserve the unity of the empire became the basis of rupture. As “citizens” on
both sides of the Atlantic debated the empire’s future, many in Brazil began to
claim publicly that the promised representation and “equality of rights” would
not necessarily serve what they defined as Brazilian “interests” and “causes.”
At the same time, by August 1821, with Brazilian delegates a minority, and be-
fore many of them had arrived in Lisbon, the Cortes began to pass measures
interpreted in Brazil as efforts to “reduce Brazil to the old status of colony”:
commercial regulations that had inhibited the interests of peninsular mer-
chants were repealed; Rio was stripped of its status as a political capital with
the creation of provincial governments directly subordinate to Lisbon; addi-
tional troops w ere sent to Brazil; the high courts established in Rio following
the transfer of the court w ere abolished; and, perhaps most threatening, Prince
Regent Dom Pedro, heir to the throne, was ordered, as his father João VI had
been in 1821, to return to Portugal.29 Thus, as was the case in the Cádiz delib-
erations, as the promoters of the Lisbon Cortes offered constitutionalism as a
way to integrate the empire through representation, Portuguese representatives
worked to affirm Lisbon’s rule within the empire. As in Spain’s domains, first
in Cádiz and then with the 1820 reinstitution of the constitution, the attempt
to use constitutional liberalism to integrate an empire came with limits and
impositions that led American representatives and those they represented to
consider separation.
Local and provincial governments in the Brazilian Northeast, with strong
commercial ties to Portugal and the first to embrace constitutionalism, re-
mained loyal to the Cortes that, in turn, acknowledged their authority, seek-
ing to drive a wedge between them and Dom Pedro’s regency. In Bahia, armed
conflict between Portuguese expeditionary forces and local Brazilian regi-
ments left Portuguese merchants and the military governor in Salvador to face
mounting opposition to the Cortes in nearby towns and the countryside. Some
refugees from the city, including militiamen of color, together with slaves and
other laborers, saw an end to Portuguese sovereignty as an opportunity for so-
cial change; at the same time plantation and sugar mill o wners surmised that
a government led by Dom Pedro would preserve slavery and the social hierar-
chies that underwrote their wealth.30
figure 6.1. An emperor for a New World empire: Acclaiming Dom Pedro, 1822
Contrasting visions of uncertain changes could lead to a common pursuit of

separation. In Rio and surrounding provinces the Cortes’s decrees also inspired
people with diverse political and social aspirations to mobilize in support
of the prince regent’s remaining in Brazil. Dom Pedro responded favorably,
pledging in January 1822 to defy the Cortes and stay.31 The following May, with
increasing organized support for his leadership, Dom Pedro complied with a
request from Rio’s city council to call a representative body that would evaluate
the conditions for union between Portugal and Brazil, and whether and how
the constitution drafted by the Lisbon Cortes would apply to Brazil.32
Dom Pedro hoped that the new assembly in Rio and the Cortes in Lisbon
would work together to maintain the integrity of the Portuguese monarchy and
empire, a vision similar to the 1821 Plan de Iguala that aimed to hold Mexico
and Spain together u nder Bourbon sovereignty. But in Rio in 1822 public sup-
port for “independence” as a guarantee of Brazil’s post-1808 status began to take
shape.33 Meanwhile, in the Lisbon Cortes, as representatives from Brazil defended
autonomy, the majority of delegates expressed skepticism about the maintenance
of a government in Brazil led by the prince regent. On September 7, informed of
the Cortes’s decision to defend its undivided sovereignty over American ter-
ritory with force, Dom Pedro pledged to secure Brazil’s complete separation
from his native Portugal. In October, Dom Pedro was acclaimed emperor of
the new Empire of Brazil. Originally called as a “Luso-Brazilian Assembly,” the
representatives gathered in Rio de Janeiro were charged to write the new em-
pire’s constitution.34
To consolidate the Empire of Brazil, Dom Pedro and his allies faced the chal-
lenges of establishing the empire’s sovereignty in all the territory of the for-
mer colony and of defining political practice. While Brazil’s independence is
often seen as a relatively peaceful counterpoint to the violent struggles that
unfolded across Spanish America, Dom Pedro’s rupture with the Cortes was
challenged. The confrontations between t hose defending the new empire and
those defending Portuguese sovereignty, provincial autonomy, or both, were
often bloody. To gain control over the North and the South Dom Pedro and
his allies purchased arms and recruited foreign military officers; naval forces
led by Thomas Cochrane aided local insurgents’ ultimately successful blockade
of Salvador, together forcing the departure of Portuguese forces in July 1823.
Following two years of fighting that included the use of brutal and at times
indiscriminate force the empire’s armies prevailed.
The effort to define constitutional practice in Brazil, if less bloody, was no less
contested. As the new Constituent Assembly debated the scope of the emperor’s
and its own authority, a nativist press inflamed tensions between Brazilian-and
Portuguese-born residents of Rio de Janeiro, leading Dom Pedro to denounce
the assembly as a source of disorder. He sent troops to disband it. The Con-
stitution of 1824, written by a council of men subsequently appointed by Dom
Pedro and promulgated by him in March of that year, recognized both a gen-
eral assembly and the emperor as representatives of the “Brazilian Nation.” It
also established central administrative authority over local sovereignties and
provincial autonomies.35
Although Brazil’s fight for independence stood in contrast to that of Spanish
America, where a once vast empire fragmented into ten different and debated
nations, the new empire continued to face local and regional challenges. In-
deed, beyond Rio de Janeiro the new constitutional order was rejected. As was
the case in 1817 and 1822, the northeastern provinces rebelled against monarchi-
cal authority and proclaimed their own understandings of liberal governance.
Allegiance to a new “Confederation of Ecuador” took shape in Pernambuco
and in the northern provinces of Alagoas, Paraíba, Río Grande do Norte, and
Ceará. In response, lacking Portuguese recognition of Brazil’s independence
and anticipating the arrival of Portuguese forces, Dom Pedro’s government had
Brazil in the early 1850’s
Provincial boundaries in 1850’s
Present-day borders of Brazil
N
on River
Amaz
AMAZONAS
PARÁ ~
MARANHAO CEARÁ RIO GRANDE
DONORTE
PARAIBA
PIAUÍ
PERNAMBUCO
er
o R iv ALAGOAS
isc
SERGIPE
nc
São Fra
BAHIA
GOIÁS Salvador
MATA GROSSO
MINAS GERAIS
iver
Vila Rica do Ouro Preto

R
SÃO ESPIRITO SANTO

ná
PAULO
ra
Pa RIO DE JANEIRO
Sao Paulo Rio de Janeiro
PACIFIC PARANÁ
OCEAN
SANTA CATRINA AT L A N T I C
OCEAN
RIO GRANDE
DO SUL
0 500 mi
Colonia do Sacramento 0 800 km
Map 6.2. Brazil in the nineteenth century
to calculate w
hether a deployment of forces to assert authority in the North
would jeopardize the defense of Rio de Janeiro. Mobilizing British mercenaries
and local allies, imperial forces defeated the Confederation; its leaders w ere
arrested and incarcerated or executed.36 In the South, the empire had less suc-
cess. In the mid-1820s rebels in the Banda Oriental challenged Dom Pedro’s
authority and Brazilian sovereignty and aligned themselves with the United
Provinces of Río de la Plata. By 1827, after decisive defeat on the battlefield and
with Great Britain mediating the dispute, Brazil had to recognize the loss of
the territory that three years later became Uruguay.
Following these initial decades of conflict, the empire went on to preside
over a political stability and prosperity that stood in sharp contrast to much of
the Americas for decades. The question of why has elicited numerous debates.
Historians have examined the complex social and political arrangements of the
early nineteenth c entury in which Brazilians negotiated transformations and
continuities. The development of an economy of export diversity during the
long eighteenth century, promoted by Portugal while always linked to Brit-
ain, also underwrote early national stability. During the wars that shook the
Atlantic world from 1790, Brazil gained new export opportunities opened by
the slave revolution in Haiti, became the center of a global empire in 1808, and
found prosperity in expanding export growth increasingly linked directly to
Britain during the years after 1810. When the conflicts that led to the experi-
ment in liberalism and then Brazilian imperial separation came to a head in the
early 1820s, Brazilian export prosperity linked to British commercial ascen-
dancy held strong. As it rose to global industrial and military hegemony, Great
Britain facilitated the independence and unity of Brazil. Britain mediated border
disputes, negotiated international recognition of the empire’s independence,
and financed the 2 million pounds sterling the empire agreed to pay Portu-
gal as an indemnity. All that opened the way for formal guarantees of British
traders’ rights to operate in Brazilian ports, facilitating their dominant place
in Brazil’s commercial and export economy during a period of g reat growth
as the cultivation and export of coffee expanded in the region around Rio de
Janeiro.37 The Empire of Brazil, in this sense, inherited Portugal’s historic com-
mercial and political alliance with Great Britain, as the latter soared to new
power and prosperity.
The new Brazilian empire also inherited ongoing negotiations over the
future of the slave trade as British foreign policy embraced the use of politi
cal and economic power and recognition of South American independence as
leverage for demanding the immediate end of the trade between Africa and the
new states. In Brazil, some powerful political elites, including José Bonifácio
de Andrada e Silva, expressed support for the end of the slave trade and of the
institution of slavery in the future. They also insisted, pointing to recent events
in Haiti, that only a very gradual and nonviolent abolition would avert disas-
ter for Brazil’s export economy. A fter two centuries of plantation production
grounded in slavery and a second century in which the bondage of Africans
became the base of gold mining, slavery was deeply entrenched in Brazilian so-
ciety; slaves supplied the labor on both plantations and more modest holdings,
in mines and cities. As the Brazilian political elite staunchly upheld both the
trade and slavery itself, even as most new Spanish American republics agreed to
abolish the trade in the 1820s, within British official circles Brazil became “the
slave trade personified.”38
Between 1821 and 1826 in both London and Rio de Janeiro, in negotia-
tions over recognition of independence and commercial arrangements between
Great Britain and Brazil, British and Brazilian representatives took up the ques-
tion of a time frame for ending the slave trade as well as of how to characterize
the Empire of Brazil’s commitment to earlier conventions between Portugal
and Great Britain, which limited the trade to below the equator. Some in the
British cabinet expected an agreement that would make the end of the slave
trade a condition for recognition of independence. British officials, however,
also saw a need to balance the moral project of abolition with the commercial
interests of their own empire. Accepting Brazil’s refusal of immediate abolition,
the British government recognized Brazilian independence in 1825 prior to a
settlement over the question of the trade. The British maintained their com-
mitment to abolition by stipulating that the Empire of Brazil could not unite
with former Portuguese colonies in Africa, a u nion that would have created a
national, rather than international, transatlantic slave trade. After a new round
of negotiations the following year, the governments of Great Britain and Brazil
ratified an antitrade treaty in 1827. Brazil agreed to observe the obligations of
earlier treaties that limited the trade to south of the equator; beyond the line, it
had three years to continue the trade before the British would begin to regard
it as piracy.39
Although the treaty found support among Dom Pedro’s closest allies, many
among the political elite regarded the outcome as the unfortunate result of the
emperor’s excessive power and British imperial ambitions.40 As the negotia-
tions over the treaty had unfolded, another political crisis contributed to an
erosion of both elite and popular confidence in the emperor. Following Dom
João’s death in Portugal in 1826, Dom Pedro’s interest in Portuguese politics,
specifically his daughter’s claims to the throne, called into question his political
allegiances and priorities, especially among Brazilian-born elites who feared a
reunion with Portugal. Feelings of uncertainty over the political f uture of Bra-
zil mounted in the context of fiscal crisis (the Bank of Brazil, founded on the
arrival of the royal court to Rio, closed in 1829), while the loss of territory that
became Uruguay on the Río de la Plata left military commanders disenchanted
with the imperial government. In 1831, as demonstrations both for and against
his authority engulfed the city of Rio de Janeiro, Dom Pedro abdicated to his
five-year-old son and namesake.41
The end of Pedro I’s reign marked the end of the decades of conflicts and
transition that made Brazil a new country—a constitutional monarchy of vast
territorial claims that found a rising prosperity for a powerful few by sustain-
ing export production grounded on growing numbers of enslaved laborers. In
Portugal’s American empire responses to the crises shaped by the Haitian Revo-
lution, the fall of the European empires, and the rise of British industrial hege-
mony were conditioned by the ways eighteenth-century Brazil had become a
dominant export economy, first within the Portuguese empire and then linked
to Britain during the key decade of conflict and transition after 1810. Initially,
revolution in the United States, France, and Saint Domingue provided oppor-
tunity, as Brazilian exports took the place of Caribbean competition undermined
by local violence. With the arrival of the Portuguese court in Rio, the colony
continued to prosper while guaranteeing the survival of the monarchy. The cri-
sis of authority in Brazil and Portugal that followed the Napoleonic wars led to
an embrace of a monarchy “emancipated” from absolutism by “national sover-
eignty.” In the 1820s in political discourse and practice, the residents of Brazil’s
historic urban centers, together with statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic,
came to recognize Brazil as an “autonomous political body.”42
The economic basis for the empire’s prosperity—export commodities made
by slave labor—was ensured in a constitution that both recognized the legacies
of slavery for citizenship (freed slaves born in Brazil w ere citizens) and allowed
43
slavery to expand. Notwithstanding British abolitionism and its appeal
among members of the British government, the Empire of Brazil secured rec-
ognition of its independence from Portugal only three years a fter Dom Pedro
had pledged to defend it with his life. Brazilian diplomacy—and the promise
of profitable export trades—produced a framework for ending the transatlan-
tic trade that was sufficiently porous to allow rising imports of enslaved Af-
ricans. As slaveholders and political elites responded to slave rebellions with
repression, policing, and efforts to effectively “administer” slaves as laborers,
the fear generated among slave o wners by news from Haiti and by local rebel-
lions in Brazil did not displace violence or greed. Although the legislature later
strengthened the legal framework for the abolition of the trade, the Brazilian
government for decades showed neither the interest nor a capacity to enforce
the ban. No surprise to a British government which sought to protect its own
interests in the Brazilian export economy, neither the slave trade treaty’s rati-
fication nor the end of the years of “tolerance” led to a decline in the number
of Africans brought to Brazil. Indeed, some Brazilian elites began to forge a
proslavery discourse in the legislative assembly and in the press, countering ar-
guments in f avor of even a gradual abolition in a distant future. It is difficult to
exaggerate the tragic dimensions of the consequences: between 1831 and 1850,
Brazil, together with the Spanish colony of Cuba, received 10 percent of the
figure 6.2. Slaves carrying coffee in nineteenth-century Brazil
total number of Africans brought to the New World in the entire 350 years
of the transatlantic trade. In the expanding coffee regions around São Paulo,
Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro planters imported three times the number
of slaves in 1836–1840 as their predecessors had in the centuries before 1835.
Meanwhile, in sugar-producing Pernambuco the annual number of imported
slaves tripled between 1837 and 1840.44 The export economy grew, serving Brit-
ish and North Atlantic markets, financed by British banks. British merchants
and Brazilian planters reaped the rewards.45 The Brazilian expansion of slavery
thus converged with other American experiences examined in this volume;
with Cuba, where slave imports increased, and with the United States, where
southern planters drew a growing local population of slaves westward toward
Louisiana and Texas. Across the hemisphere, links to British industry yielded
American prosperity, profits, and enduring human costs.
Territory and the Predicaments of Sovereignty in the New State

Viewed from the capital in Rio, provincial port cities, and the coffee and
sugar plantations that sustained their wealth by sending slave-made exports to
Britain as it forged a new industrial world, mid-nineteenth-century Brazil ap-
peared a consolidated new country. The economic dynamism and diplomatic
negotiations that enabled the political elite’s commitments to both constitu-
tional monarchy and slavery did not, however, end the fractured nature of de
facto sovereignty in Brazil. Although the continuities that marked indepen
dence grounded elite prosperity in key coastal zones and nearby interior en-
claves of the vast territory claimed by the new empire, the continuities included
persistent historic tensions as well. As noted above, imperial authority (now
based in Rio) was often at odds with provincial elite and popular demands for
autonomy. The empire also encompassed conflicts between elites and a range
of peoples and communities seeking to escape slavery or preserve indigenous
independence. Thus, even as slave-based export prosperity stood in sharp con-
trast to Spanish South America, the challenges of internal integration and local
sovereignty were shared across the continent. Indeed, in Brazil the politically
turbulent decade of the Regency that followed Pedro I’s abdication laid bare
the weak consensus among elites and the popular classes about the institutional
frameworks for governance at the national and regional level, and about the
scope of imperial authority and provincial autonomy. Only in the middle of
the nineteenth c entury, after two decades of provincial rebellion, a decentral-
ization and then recentralization of power in the executive branch, reform of
the judiciary, reforms of the military and the creation of a National Guard, and
the end of the Regency and Dom Pedro II’s assumption of the throne in 1840
did the imperial state consolidate its authority in provincial urban centers and
their hinterlands.
The forging of ideas and practices of nationhood and administrative sover-
eignty across the empire’s larger territory was an even more protracted process.46
The resistance and persistence of quilombos on the outskirts of coastal cities
and plantation zones forced political leaders and planters to recognize their
incapacity to eradicate communities of freedom whose residents often worked
nearby on plantations and in cities for wages. As Yuko Miki has explained, liv-
ing as free people within societies and spaces in which the law defined them as
slaves, quilombolas (maroons) forged an “insurgent geography” of citizenship
that allowed them to control their own labor and maintain family ties.47
For the indigenous, in turn, even as nineteenth-century novelists imagined
their unions with settlers leading to the birth of an amalgamating nation, inde
pendence from Portugal did not bring significant shifts in their relations with
frontier settlers and political elites. Legislators recognized Indians and their
capacity for “civilization” in debates in the constituent assembly of 1823, as had
eighteenth-century royal legislation, but the status of the indigenous was not
addressed in the Constitution of 1824. As before independence, nineteenth-
century policies privileged assimilation and acculturation while marginalizing
Indians from social and political agency as legal dependents. The Pombaline
Directory, dismantled at the end of the eighteenth century, was not replaced
with a new administrative structure for indigenous communities (the mid-
nineteenth-century office of Director-General of Indians was not put into
practice). As Hal Langfur explains, although the declaration of war against
“savages” and cannibals in 1808 centralized the violence that was already a fea-
ture of Indian-Portuguese relations at the local level, by the 1830s the Crown
had given up on the Botocudo war as a means to force territorial incorporation
in the vast hinterland beyond Rio and São Paulo; it did not have the resources
necessary to sustain it. This suggests the emergence of spaces for indigenous in
dependence in the Brazilian backlands parallel to t hose Erick Langer details
for the frontiers of Spanish South America. Yet in many parts of Brazil, indig-
enous prosperity and autonomy were challenged by elite efforts to gain control
over the hinterland. Land legislation abetted the shift, already u nder way in the
eighteenth century, away from efforts to appropriate Indians’ labor to dispos-
sessing them of their land. Indeed, in the “just war” against the Botocudo, the
Crown, while insisting it intended to “civilize” Indians, took the opportunity
to redefine and reinforce its control over frontier lands by taking them as ter
renos devolutos to be demarcated, settled, and despoiled.48 As in the United
States east of the Mississippi, a flourishing slave-based export economy drove
the search for lands westward in Brazil, limiting the chances for indigenous
independence that proved better on the margins of nations with economies
in crisis.
Thus, the new Empire of Brazil inherited from the Portuguese Crown a “con-
tinental” geography defended in the Treaty of Madrid, a fractured sovereignty

over that huge territory, as well as economic, cultural, political, and legal
frameworks for conquest and settlement that would, over the course of the
nineteenth century, diminish but not entirely eradicate indigenous autonomy.
The gap between ideal and real sovereignty sustained the new state’s relation-
ship to what James Holston describes as the “distinctly porous enclosure” of an
“inclusively inegalitarian” national society that s haped the empire and endured
long after its fall.49 Amid these contradictions, the independent empire sus-
tained slave-based export economies—the older sugar plantations and mills in
the Northeast and the new and expanding coffee cultivation in the South—as
British capital and commerce (British abolitionism notwithstanding) facili-
tated profitable ties to the Atlantic economy. If the empire presided over the end
of slavery in 1888, it bequeathed the export economy and its own less decisive
presence in an interior, where diverse peoples continued to negotiate the possibil-
ities and uncertainties of their relative autonomy, to its successor, the “Republic
of the United States of Brazil,” a year later.
Notes
For their many illuminating comments and suggestions, I would like to thank the
participants in the “New Nations in a New World, 1750–1850” conference, George-
town University, 2011, and the subsequent panels at the Latin American Studies
Association Meeting, 2012, especially John Tutino, who read carefully and critically
many drafts.
1 Among the most seminal accounts of Brazil’s transition from colony to empire are
Caio Prado Júnior, Evolução Política do Brasil, Colônia e Império (1933), 18th ed. (São
Paulo: Brasiliense, n.d.) and Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo (1942), 20th ed.
(São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987), and Fernando A. Novais, Portugal e Brasil na Crise
do Antigo Sistema Colonial (1777–1808) (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1979). More recent
scholarship both builds on this work and reconsiders the contingencies of imperial,
continental, national, and international economies and politics to challenge the as-
sumption that the end of the Portuguese empire in America was tantamount to the
creation of the state and the nation, as well as the more recent claim that it was the
state that forged the nation in the nineteenth century. See especially the collabora-
tive research project “A fundação do Estado e da Nação brasileiros, c. 1750/1850” led
by Wilma Peres Costa, Cecilia Helena de Salles Oliveira, and the late István Jancsó,
the results of which are being disseminated in various forms and venues including
monographs, collections of essays, and the journal Almanack Brasiliense, published
online from 2005 to 2010 by the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, Universidade
de São Paulo at http://www.almanack.usp.br/, and most recently at the Universi-
dade Federal de São Paulo as Almanack at http://www.almanack.unifesp.br. For
an overview of the conceptual foundations of the project see Costa and Salles de
Oliveira, preface, in Márcia Berbel, Rafael Marquese, and Tâmis Parron, Escravidão
e Política, Brasil e Cuba, 1790–1850 (São Paulo: Fapesp/Hucitec, 2010). For ex-
tended essays on the historiography of Brazilian independence see István Janscó,
ed., Independência: Historia e Historiografia (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2005), and
Maria Odila Silva Dias, “A interiorização da metrópole” (1972), in A interioriza
ção da metrópole e outros estudos, ed. Silva Dias (São Paulo: Alameda, 2005). For
a discussion of notions of nation, patria, and the people, see István Janscó and
João Paulo G. Pimenta, “Peças de um mosaico (ou apontamentos para o estudo da
emergência da identidade nacional brasileira),” in Viagem Incompleta: A experiencia
brasileira (1500–2000), in Formação: Histórias, ed. Carlos Guilherme Mota, 2nd ed.
(São Paulo: senac, 2000).
2 C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (1969) (Manchester: Car-
canet, 1991); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500–1700, a Po
litical and Economic History (London: Longman, 1993); Jorge M. Pedreira, “Costs
and Financial Trends in the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1822,” in Portuguese Oceanic
Expansion, 1400–1800, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 62.
3 Pedreira, “Costs and Financial Trends,” 64–66.
4 Pedreira, “Costs and Financial Trends”; José Luís Cardoso, “Leitura e interpre-
tação do Tratado de Methuen: Balanço histórico e historiográfico,” in O Tratado
de Methuen (1703): Diplomacia, guerra, política e economia, ed. José Luís Cardoso
(Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2003).
5 John Tutino, chapter 1 in this volume.
6 On Minas Gerais see J. R. Russell-Wood, “The Gold Cycle, c. 1690–1750,” in
Colonial Brazil, ed. Leslie Bethell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Homens de negócio: A interiorização da metrópole e do comér
cio das Minas setecentistas (São Paulo: Huctitec, 1999), 149–150; Laura de Mello e
Souza, Desclassificados do Ouro: A pobreza mineira no século XVIII (Rio de Janeiro:
Edições Graal, 1982); Adriana Romeiro, Paulistas e emboabas no coração das Minas:
Idéias, práticas e imaginário político no século XVIII (Belo Horizonte: Editora
ufmg, 2008); Robert Allan White, “Fiscal Policy and Royal Sovereignty in Minas
Gerais: The Capitation Tax of 1735,” The Americas 34:2 (October 1977), 207–229;
Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society, 1695–1750
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 188–203.
7 Pedreira, “Costs and Financial Trends,” 68.
8 Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Economy of the Portuguese Empire,” in Bethencourt and
Curto, Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 38.
9 Maria de Jesus dos Martires Lopes, Tradition and Modernity in Eighteenth-Century
Goa (1750–1800) (Lisbon: cham/Manohar, 2006); Schwartz, “Economy of the
Portuguese Empire,” 34.
10 Luís Ferrand de Almeida, Alexandre de Gusmão, o Brasil e o Tratado de Madrid
(1735–1750) (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 1990); Íris Kantor, “Usos
diplomáticos da Ilha-Brasil: Polêmicas cartograficas e historiográficas,” Varia His
toria (Belo Horizonte) 23:37 ( January/June 2007), 70–80; Júnia Ferreira Furtado,
Oráculos da Geografia Iluminista: Dom Luís da Cunha e Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon

D’Anville na construção da cartografia do Brasil (Belo Horizonte: Editora ugmg,
2012).
11 Directorio que se deve observar nas Povoações dos Indios do Pará, e Maranhaõ em
quanto Sua Majestade naõ mandar o contrario (Lisbon: Na Officina de Miguel
Rodrigues, 1757).
12 Ângela Domingues, Quando os índios eram vassalos: Colonização e relações de poder
no Norte do Brasil na segunda metade do século XVIII (Lisbon: cncdp, 2000);
Rita Heloísa de Almeida, O Diretório dos índios: Um projeto de “civilização” no
Brasil no século XVIII (Brasília: EditoraUnB, 1997); Hal Langfur, The Forbidden
Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern
Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 60–62.
Pombal, convinced that the Jesuits, who had defined European relations with the
indigenous in the Amazon, were obstacles to effective royal government t here,
led the campaign to expel the order from the empire. See Kenneth Maxwell, “The
Spark: The Amazon and the Suppression of the Jesuits,” in Naked Tropics: Essays on
Empire and Other Rogues (New York: Routledge, 2003).
13 Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 88–89, 114, 118–130.
14 Maxwell, Pombal, 149–153; 162; Pedreira, “From Growth to Collapse: Portugal,
Brazil, and the Breakdown of the Old Colonial System (1760–1830),” Hispanic
American Historical Review 80:4 (2000), 841. See also Novais, Portugal e Bra
sil, 289–294, and Francisco José Calazans Falcon, A Época Pombalina (Política
Econômica e Monarquia Ilustrada) (São Paulo: Ática, 1982).
15 Pedreira, “From Growth to Collapse,” 861–863; João Luís Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens
de grossa aventura: Acumulação e hierarquia na praça mercantile do Rio de Janeiro
(1790–1830) (Rio de Janeiro: Arquito Nacional, 1992).
16 See Tutino, “Introduction,” in this volume.
17 Rodrigo Bentes Monteiro, O rei no espelho: A monarquia portuguesa e a colonização
da América, 1640–1720 (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2002); Nestor Goulart Reis, Evolução
urbana do Brasil, 1500/1720, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Pini, 2000); Paulo César Garcez
Marins, Através da rótula: Sociedade e arquitectura urbana no Brasil, séculos XVII
a XX (São Paulo: Humanitas/fflch/usp, 2001), 71–72; Boxer, Golden Age,
127–130, 135–136, 147–148, 158–161.
18 Rebellion and revolution in other Atlantic empires resonated in the Inconfidência
mineira (Minas Gerais, 1789) and the Revolta dos alfaiates or Conjuração bahiana
(Salvador, 1798), as well as dissident gatherings in Rio in the 1790s.
19 Genaro Vilanova Miranda de Oliveira, “Independent from Independence:
Indigenous Nations and Maroon Societies during the Emergence of the Brazilian
National State,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 17:2 (December
2011), 166–168; Langfur, The Forbidden Lands, 37, 49; chaps. 1 and 2; B. J. Barick-
man, “ ‘Tame Indians,’ ‘Wild Heathens,’ and Settlers in Southern Bahia in the Late
Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” The Americas 51:3 ( January 1995),
325–368; “Quilombo” and “República dos Palmares,” in Clóvis Moura, Dicionário
da escravidão negra no Brasil (São Paulo: edusp, 2004), 335–339, 347–352.
20 Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, “Quadro da Situação Política da Europa . . . ,” (August 16,
1803), in Ângelo Pereira, D. João VI, príncipe e rei, vol. 1 (Lisbon: Emprensa de
Publicidade, 1953), 127–136.
21 Alan Manchester, “The Transfer of the Portuguese Court to Brazil,” in Conflict and
Continuity in Brazilian Society, ed. Henry Keith and S. F. Edwards (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 156–159.
22 “Manifesto de Declaração de Guerra aos Francezes,” May 1, 1808 ([Rio de Janeiro]:
Impressão Régia, [1808]).
23 “Carta Régia,” January 28, 1808; Alan Manchester, British Preëminence in Brazil,
Its Rise and Decline: A Study in European Expansion (1933) (New York: Octagon,
1964), 70–74; Valentim Alexandre, Os sentidos do império: Questão nacional e
questão colonial na crise do antigo regime português (Porto: Edições Afrontamento,
1993), 212; José Luís Cardoso, “A transferência da Corte e a Abertura dos Portos:
Portugal e Brasil entre a ilustração e o liberalismo economico,” in A Abertura dos
Portos, ed. Luís Valente de Oliveira and Rubens Ricupero (São Paulo: senac,
2007), 166–195.
24 Manchester, British Preëminence, 78; Valentim Alexandre, “O nacionalismo vintista
e a questão brasileira: Esboço de análise política,” in O liberalismo na península
ibérica na primeira metade do século XIX, vol. 1, ed. Miriam Halpern Pereira (Lisbon:
Livaria Sá da Costa, 1982), 290–291.
25 Kirsten Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal
Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (New York: Routledge, 2001).
26 See “Decreto,” dated February 18, 1821, published February 22, 1821, in Código
Brasiliense ([Rio de Janeiro: Impressão Régia, 1817–1822]); “Processo da revolta na
praça do commércio,” Documentos para a história da independencia, vol. 1 (Rio de
Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1923) (hereafter dhi), 277–325; Constituição política
da monarquia portuguesa feita pelas Cortes . . . (Lisbon: Impressão Nacional, 1821).
On constitutionalism see Lúcia Maria Bastos Pereira das Neves, Corcundas e
Constitucionais: A cultura política da independência (1820–1822) (Rio de Janeiro:
Revan/Faperj, 2003); Iara Lis Carvalho Souza, Pátria coroada: O Brasil como corpo
político autônomo, 1780–1831 (São Paulo: Editora unesp, 1999), chap. 4; Schultz,
Tropical Versailles, 235–276; Andréa Slemian, Vida Política em Tempo de Crise: Rio
de Janeiro (1808–1824) (São Paulo: hucitec, 2004); Raymundo Faoro, “Folhetos
da independência,” in O debate político no processo da independência, ed. Raymundo
Faoro (Rio de Janeiro: Conselho Federal de Cultura, 1973).
27 Constituição política da monarquia portuguesa feita pelas Cortes.
28 António D’Oliva de Souza Sequeira, Projeto para o establecimento politico do Reino
Unido de Portugal, Brasil e Algarves . . . (reprint) (Rio de Janeiro: n.p., 1821), 3;
Faoro, Debate político; Schultz, Tropical Versailles, 247–265.
29 On the Portuguese Cortes and Brazilian representation t here see M. E. Gomes de
Carvalho, Os Deputados Brasileiros nas Cortes de Lisboa (Brasília: Senado Federal/
Editora da Universidade de Brasília, 1979); and Márcia Regina Berbel, A nação
como artefato: Deputados Brasileiros nas Cortes Portugueses (1821–1822) (São Paulo:
Editor Hucitec/Fapesp, 1999).

30 Richard Graham, Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salva
dor, Brazil, 1780–1860 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 140–155.
31 Neill Macaulay, Dom Pedro: The Struggle for Liberty in Brazil and Portugal,
1798–1834 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), 120–121; Isabel Lustosa,
D. Pedro I: Um herói sem nenhum caráter (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
2006), 138–141.
32 “Representação do Senado da Camara do Rio de Janeiro, pedindo a convoca-
ção de uma Assembléa Geral das Provincias do Brasil,” in dhi, 378–383; José
Honório Rodrigues, A Assembléia Constituinte de 1823 (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1974),
291–299.
33 As Isabel Lustosa shows, the concern with the Cortes’s quest to “recolonize” Brazil
cannot be separated from a transformation in print culture in Brazilian cities in
1821 and 1822. See Lustosa, Insultos Impressos: A guerra dos jornalistas na inde
pendência, 1821–1823 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000).
34 Rodrigues, Assembléia Constituinte, 29, 30–34; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 145–147;
Roderick Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798–1852 (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 1988), 65–96; Andréa Slemian and João Paulo G. Pimenta,
O “nascimento politico” do Brasil: As origens do estado e da nação (1808–1825) (Rio de
Janeiro: dp and A Editora, 2003).
35 Graham, Feeding the City, 151–155; Barman, Brazil, 97–129; Macaulay, Dom Pedro,
146, 154–158; Francisco C. Falcon and Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos, “O processo de
independência no Rio de Janeiro,” in 1822: Dimensões, ed. Carlos Guilherme Mota
(São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1972), 328; Rodrigues, Assembléia Constituinte,
44, 64, 66–67, 198–248, 305; Lustosa, Insultos, 395–407; Gladys Sabina Ribeiro,
A liberdade em construção: Identidade nacional e conflitos antilusitanos no primeiro
reinado (Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará / faperj, 2002), 80–87.
36 Evaldo Cabral de Mello, A outra independência: O federalismo pernambucano de
1817 a 1824 (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2004).
37 Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso,
1988), 406.
38 José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, “Representação a Assembléia Geral e Consti-
tuinte e Legislativa do Império do Brasil sobre a escravatura,” in José Bonifácio de
Andrada e Silva, ed. Jorge Caldeira (São Paulo: Editora 24, 2002), 200–217; Ana
Rosa Cloclet da Silva, Construção da nação e escravidão no pensamento de José Bonifácio,
1783–1823 (Campinas, SP: Editora da unicamp, 1999); Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar
Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, 1550–1835 (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1985); Wilberforce cited in Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of
the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 31. See also Jaime Rodrigues,
O infame comércio: Propostas e experiências no final do tráfico de Africanos para o
Brasil (1800–1850) (Campinas, SP: Editora da unicamp/cecult, 2000), 82–92.
39 Bethell, Abolition, 49, 60–61.
40 Bethell, Abolition, 62–63; Rodrigues, O infame comércio, 101–107; Berbel, Mar-
quese, and Parron, Escravidão e política, 185–200.
41 Macaulay, Dom Pedro, chap. 7; Lustosa, D. Pedro I, 278–281, 293–301; Ribeiro’s
Liberdade em construção provides an examination of the political culture of Dom
Pedro’s reign with a focus on the question of national identity and anti-Portuguese
discourses. On the Bank of Brazil see José Luís Cardoso, “Novos elementos para
a história do Banco do Brasil (1808–1829): Crónica de um fracasso anunciado,”
Revista Brasileira de Historia (São Paulo) 30:59 (2010), 167–192.
42 Carvalho Souza, Pátria coroada, 17.
43 Hebe Maria Mattos, Escravidão e cidadania no Brasil monárquico (Rio de Janeiro:
Jorge Zahar Editor, 2000).
44 Bethell, Abolition, chaps. 3 and 4; Berbel, Marquese, and Parron, Escravidão e
política, 220, 232–233, 348–349.
45 Berbel, Marquese, and Parron, Escravidão e política, 91–93; Rafael de Bivar Mar-
quese, Administração e escravidão: Ideáis sobre a gestão da agricultura esclavista
brasileira, preface by Antonio Penalves Rocha (São Paulo: Editora Hucitec/Fapesp,
1999).
46 The bibliography on politics and political culture in the nineteenth-century empire
after 1830 is vast. Among the most seminal works is Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos, O
tempo saquarema (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1987). Along with Barman, Brazil, more
recent work on the local and imperial politics of state formation includes Judy
Bieber, Power, Patronage, and Political Violence: State Building on a Brazilian Fron
tier, 1822–1889 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Matthias Röhrig As-
sunção, “Elite Politics and Popular Rebellion in the Construction of Post-colonial
Order: The Case of Maranhão, Brazil (1820–41),” Journal of Latin American
Studies 31:1 (February 1999), 1–38; Maria de Fátima Silva Gouvêa, O império das
provincias: Rio de Janeiro, 1822–1889 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2008),
and Jeffrey Needell, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery
in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2006); Francivaldo Alves Nunes, “A Amazônia e a formação do Estado Imperial no
Brasil: Unidade do território e expansão de domínio,” Almanack (unifesp), no.
3 (2012), 54–55. A recent examination of the interplay and tensions between local,
regional, national, and Atlantic politics and economies is Graham, Feeding the City.
47 Yuko Miki, “Fleeing into Slavery: The Insurgent Geographies of Brazilian
Quilombolas (Maroons), 1880–1881,” The Americas 68:4 (April 2012), 495–528;
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, “O outro lado da Independência: Quilombolas, negros
e pardos em Pernambuco (Brazil), 1817–23,” Luso-Brazilian Review 43:1 (2006),
1–30.
48 Kirsten Schultz, “La independencia de Brasil, la ciudadanía y el problema de la
esclavitud: A Assembléia Constituente de 1823,” in Revolución, independencia y
lasnuevasnaciones de América, ed. Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (Madrid: Mapfre/Tavera,
2005), 442–443; “Constituição de 1824,” Political Database for the Americas, Cen-
ter for Latin American Studies, Georgetown University: http://pdba.georgetown
.edu/Constitutions/Brazil/brazi11824.html; accessed May 14, 2015; Hal Langfur,
“Cannibalism and the Body Politic: Independent Indians in the Era of Brazilian
Independence” (manuscript); Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, “Política indigenista

no século XIX,” in História dos Índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha
(São Paulo: Companhia das Letras/Fapesp/Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, 1992);
Fernanda Sposito, “Liberdade para os índios no Império do Brasil: A revogação das
guerras justas em 1831,” Almanack (unifesp), no. 1 (2011): 52–65; James Holston,
Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Prince
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 73. For nineteenth-century law pertain-
ing to the indigenous see Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, ed., Legislação indigenista
no século XIX: Uma compilação (1808–1889) (São Paulo: Edusp, 1992).
9 Holston, Insurgent Citizenship, 64, 80; Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State:
4
Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2007), especially chap. 4. On the protracted history of defining Indians as
social and political dependents see Holston, Insurgent Citizenship, 70–76; Alcida
Rita Ramos, “The Special (or Specious?) Status of Brazilian Indians,” Citizenship
Studies 7:4 (2003), 401–420. On Indians and the Brazilian state in the twentieth
century see Seth Garfield, Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy,
Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988 (Durham, NC: Duke
part iii
spanish american
inversions
7
Becoming Mexico
The Conflictive Search for a North American Nation
Alfredo Ávila and John Tutino
During the eighteenth century, New Spain was the most economically dynamic
region of the Americas. Its silver drove global commerce. The Spanish mon-
archy, however uncertain at home, ruled New Spain with skill—promoting
silver production and expanding trades, keeping the peace through limited
participations and judicial mediations, negotiating to contain the few political
and popular challenges that came before 1800. Then, beginning in 1808, the
breakdown of sovereignty in the Spanish empire led to constitutional debates,
political wars, and popular insurgencies that culminated in Mexican indepen
dence in 1821. A vibrant political culture shaped contested national and provin-
cial politics; a brief flirtation with monarchy in 1821 gave way to a decentralizing
federal republic by the Constitution of 1824, followed by a turn to greater cen-
tral power in 1835—a trajectory not unlike that of the United States, which
began in confederation and then turned to stronger central powers in the Con-
stitution of 1787.
Yet just as the nation began, it faced the fall of silver and a rapidly changing
world economy. Constitutional creativity could not generate profit or state rev-
enues or calm political conflict. The search for a new economy proved slow and
uncertain. Instability continued into the 1840s, when the United States turned
to war to take the northern half of Mexico’s territory. Both North American
nations faced deep political and social conflicts into the 1860s. When they
ended, the United States emerged a continental power set to compete for global
hegemony; Mexico still searched for political stability, economic possibili-
ties, shared prosperity—and a national culture that might integrate historic
diversities.1
New Spain: Silver Economies and Social Stability to 1810

Visiting New Spain as the nineteenth c entury began, Alexander von Humboldt
wrote his four-volume Political Essay, detailing economic dynamism and the im-
portance of silver to global and Atlantic trades—and lamenting the deep inequi-
ties that sustained them.2 By the time the work became widely available, Mexico
was becoming a nation. L ater analysts have suspected that Humboldt was wrong
about “Mexico’s legendary wealth.” He was not. New Spain was as rich and as
important to the world as he portrayed it—when he visited, before 1810.
New Spain began in the early sixteenth century with the conquest of the
Mexica (Aztecs) and the rapid subordination of the other states of Mesoamer-
ica. A devastating depopulation driven by smallpox and other Old World dis-
eases enabled the conquest and continued long after, reaching 90 percent by the
1620s. In the middle of the sixteenth century, however, destructions began to
mix with opportunities—mostly for Euro-Americans—stimulated by a newly
integrating world economy. Silver production had begun at Taxco in the 1530s
and at Pachuca in the 1550s, both near Mexico City in the heart of Mesoamerica.
Zacatecas and Guanajuato r ose as mining centers to the north, in the lands of
the mobile and warring Chichimecas. Their resistance delayed development.
Later their defeat in the 1590s opened the way for the deeply commercial society
of Spanish North America.
Responding to Chinese demand, New Spain developed two silver societies—
one grounded in landed indigenous republics in Spanish Mesoamerica, the
other founded in the Bajío and driving north with commercial dynamism to
create Spanish North America. Together, the silver economies of New Spain
stimulated global trades for centuries.3
234 — Alfredo Ávila and John Tutino
BRITISH
CANADA
Boston
New York
San Francisco S PA NIS H

LO U IS IA NA St. Louis U.S.
Los Angeles Santa Fé

Fe N
San Diego Charleston
ATLANTIC
INTENDANCY
OCEAN
OF New Orleans
SONORA
San Antonio
INTENDANCY SPAINISH
INTENDANCY
OF
OF FLORIDA
DURANGO
SAN LUIS POTOSÍ
N E W S PA I N GULF OF MEXICO
Havana
Durango INT. OF
ZACATECAS
INT. OF Zacatecas
INT. OF
GUADALAJARA Guanajuato GUANAJUATO
Guadalajara INT. OF
VERACRUZ
Mexico City Veracruz
INT. OF
YUCATÁN
INT. OF INT. OF
PA C I F I C MICHOACÁN INT. OAXACA
OCEAN OF
MEXICO INT. OF
PUEBLA Guatemala
0 300 600 mi
0 500 1000 km
Map 7.1. New Spain in North America, ca. 1790
There were coercions and exploitations in the reconstruction of Mesoamer-

ica, but the opportunity of silver, the scarcity of the native population, and the
rights to land and self-rule granted to new native republics led to negotiations
of inequities that kept the silver economy strong and indigenous communities
essential. The republics sustained local families and markets and became sites of
vibrant indigenous adaptations of Catholicism focused on Christ, the Virgin,
and diverse saints.4 By the early 1600s, silver boomed, the native population hit
bottom, republics consolidated, and colonial courts mediated conflicts, stabi-
lizing inequities across Spanish Mesoamerica.5 In regions reaching south across
Becoming Mexico — 235
Oaxaca, Yucatán, and Chiapas, and into Guatemala, few mines developed and
the stimulus of silver was weak. There, the consolidation of indigenous repub-
lics kept communities strong and limited Spanish exploitations.6 The defining
characteristic of Spanish Mesoamerica was the grafting of a commercial econ-
omy on a foundation of landed communities reconstituted as native republics.
The richest silver mines and most dynamic commercial economy in New
Spain developed north of the states and cultivating communities of Mesoamer-
ica. About two hundred kilometers northwest of Mexico City, the fertile Bajío
basin was a frontier contested by Mesoamerican states and mobile Chichime-
cas around 1500. Soon a fter the conquest, Otomí communities drove north from
Mesoamerica to settle Querétaro. But the great push came after the discovery
of silver at Zacatecas in the 1540s and Guanajuato in the 1550s. Europeans, Af-
rican slaves, and diverse Mesoamericans flooded north. Spaniards and Meso-
americans fought as allies against state-free Chichimecas—who also faced the
destructions of Old World plagues. The opening of the north to silver mining,
stock grazing, and irrigated cultivation in vast regions with few landed repub-
lics forged a distinctly commercial colonial society around 1600.7
In many ways, the eighteenth century was the century of New Spain. Popula-
tion tripled, silver production quadrupled, trade with Europe and Asia soared,
and settlement drove north into California. New Spain’s treasury funded Spain’s
regime across the northern Americ as—including Cuba and Louisiana. From
1700 to the 1750s, strong demand and high prices in China stimulated silver in
New Spain; the Bourbon regime solidified in Spain and pressed l ittle reform in
the Americas. Silver production in New Spain rose from 4 million pesos yearly
around 1700 to nearly 13 million pesos in the 1750s.8 A drop below 12 million
pesos annually from 1760 to 1765, linked to falling Chinese demand, coincided
with Spain’s role in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). The peace brought demand
for new revenues and military recruitment—assertions similar to the demands
for revenues and new powers that set off the conflicts that led to the U.S. in
dependence a decade later. In New Spain, tax hikes and recruitment provoked
risings by irate mine workers and o thers in and near silver centers at Guanajuato,
Real del Monte, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosí in 1766 and 1767. Yet an al-
liance of officials and local entrepreneurs mobilized to end resistance, resume
mining, and turn the regime to promoting silver production.
After 1770, Spain’s rulers stimulated silver with tax breaks and cheap mer-
cury. All of Europe’s Atlantic powers aimed to gain as much silver as they
could—in trade if possible, by war if necessary. New Spain’s production rose
from about 12 million pesos yearly in the late 1760s to hold near 23 million pesos
from 1791 to 1810. Production held strong amid wars, trade disruptions, and
revolutions. A key to that strength was a regime that stimulated production
while keeping social order—at little cost relative to the revenues it gained in
New Spain. Indigenous republics funded local rule and religious life with com-
munity lands; Spanish city councilmen purchased seats and gained little pay;
local landlord-commanders funded militias; new city patrols w ere small and
paid little. There were almost no professional military forces in the colony
before the 1750s; when armed forces expanded later, militias funded by local
elites still prevailed.9
Generating soaring silver for trade and state coffers, Bourbon New Spain
maintained an inexpensive regime, weak in coercive force, dependent on judi-
cial mediations. The dearth of coercive power left officials to negotiate rule and
legitimacy with their subjects, usually in court. The revenues of silver, alcabalas
on trade, the tribute paid by natives and mulattos, and the Tobacco Monopoly
built in the 1760s, funded administration in New Spain, missions and presidios
on the frontier, and subsidies for Cuba and Louisiana—with ample surpluses
for Madrid.10
Mexico City, the largest city in the Americas around 1800, grew to over
130,000 people as the center of government and trade, religion and education
for both Spanish Mesoamerica and Spanish North America. Near the capi-
tal, the mines at Taxco flourished into the 1750s; Real de Monte boomed in
the 1760s and 1770s—all surrounded and sustained by landed republics and
commercial estates. As population grew, the people of the republics faced land
shortages; to compensate they sent expanding gangs of men and boys to gain
wages at nearby estates—which supplied mines and city markets. Estate opera-
tors profited; villagers survived—and the courts continued to mediate.11 During
the crisis of the 1760s, there was l ittle violent conflict in the central highlands.
Only at Real del Monte, where mine workers faced wage cuts, did they rise in
a revolt that was quickly suppressed—and mediated to resume silver flows.12
Local disputes and riots proliferated during the decades a fter 1770—but most
were still resolved in the courts. The economy grew and social stability held
around Mexico City to 1810.
In southern Mesoamerica, the stimulus of silver remained weak in the eigh
teenth century. Growing populations created limited pressures on still ample
community lands; small cities and limited demand kept estates small. Conflict
rose—perhaps heightened by the lack of commercial opportunity, leaving frus-
trated entrepreneurs to press on entrenched communities. Again, the courts
mediated. In Oaxaca’s mountains, Mixtec villagers raised cochineal—a bril-
liant red dye made by drying and crushing insects that grew on local cactus—
for international markets. As Europe increased cloth production, demand for
cochineal rose. Made by women in Mixtec households, it was marketed by
district magistrates who doubled as merchants. Tensions between growers and
traders rose as profits favored magistrate-merchants. Conflicts increased but
were still resolved in the courts. Social stability held through the eighteenth
c entury.13
Spanish North America was different.14 Silver production soared at Zacatecas
and in far northern Chihuahua before 1750, at Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí,
and Catorce a fter 1770. As population and production grew, commercial culti-
vation expanded across the Bajío. Cloth production boomed at Querétaro and
San Miguel el Grande. Grazing shifted northward, as did the search for new
mines. Conflict and trade with independent natives, now often Apaches, drove
northward, too, along with missions to draw them to lives of laboring Chris-
tian dependence. Population, commercial ways, and trade rose everywhere.
North of the Bajío, that combination brought opportunity for entrepreneurs
and chances for diverse settlers—who held together in the face of conflicts
with independent natives.
In contrast, in the Bajío the mix of demographic and economic growth be-
came socially polarizing after 1770. Mining soared to new heights at Guana-
juato, the leading producer of silver in New Spain and the world from 1770
to 1810.15 After containing the risings of 1767, mine owners continued to press
down on workers’ earnings, aiming to end the ore shares that had made them
partners in production and profit. The regime offered tax breaks and subsi-
dized mercury to mine operators and expanded city patrols and militias to
solidify social controls. State power backed by coercion was a new focus—a
turn away from judicial mediation. Meanwhile, reformers in Madrid favored
Spanish cloth exports, aiming to draw silver to Europe, threatening Bajío tex-
tile shops. The result was not decline in the Bajío, but a shift from large shops
to family weaving ruled by merchant financiers who pressed falling earnings on
struggling households.
Across the rural Bajío, estates continued to expand irrigation and commer-
cial cropping. When a mix of early frost and severe drought brought unprece
dented dearth, famine, and death in 1785 and 1786, estates profited from fam-
ine prices, took fields back from tenants, and forced worker salaries down. The
years from 1790 to 1810 brought deepening pressures on the lives of Bajío mine
workers, cloth makers, and rural producers.16 Social exploitation was com-
pounded by escalating cultural conflicts as promoters of a new “enlightened”
religion maligned popular practices as superstitions. Still, production boomed
and stability held—until Napoleon broke the Spanish empire in 1808, followed
by two years of political debates as drought again ravaged the Bajío.
Politics in New Spain
The history of New Spain often appears without politics, which seems to be a
creation of independence in Mexico. If politics requires competitions to select
leaders for large jurisdictions, t here was no politics in New Spain before 1808.
But if politics involves participation in shaping and influencing the institutions
of governance and justice that orient everyday life, then politics flourished
throughout New Spain. Across Spanish Mesoamerica, politics was pivotal to
the powerful in key cities and towns—and to the native majority in thousands
of indigenous republics. In Spanish North America, city and town politics
was a regular concern of the powerful—but with few indigenous republics, the
majority found few avenues of participation before 1810.
There were three overlapping levels of politics in New Spain: the politics of
indigenous republics; the politics of Spanish city councils; and the politics of
imperial administration. They were integrated by a judicial structure that fo-
cused on the mediation of disputes at every level. A mix of segmented politics
and judicial mediation was pivotal to the stabilization of New Spain during
the decades of economic dynamism and social polarization that peaked around
1800. They must be understood to analyze the diverse regional and social par-
ticipations in the political conflicts and popular risings that led to indepen
dence. And they must be understood to analyze the political conflicts and social
instabilities that persisted long after 1821—when national and regional politics
flourished, while judicial mediations waned.17
The politics of the indigenous republics of New Spain are often studied,
but rarely as politics. Established in the second half of the sixteenth century,
they integrated head towns and outlying villages, all ruled by governors and
councilmen elected annually by (and among) minorities of notables designated
principales. The republics held land to fund local government and religious fes-
tivals, to provide modest commercial holdings to notables, and give subsistence
plots to the majority. Republics oversaw local religious life and local justice—
and regularly petitioned the General Indigenous Court in Mexico City when
problems within or between republics, or with Spanish officials, merchants, or
estates, could not be resolved locally.18
With such important roles, there was a lively and often contested politi
cal life in the native republics. Factions contested power, building coalitions
within the republics and allies without; one group might court the local priest,
another turn to a trader or the manager of a nearby estate. The indigenous re-
publics of Spanish Mesoamerica—county-sized jurisdictions—lived active
political lives in the eighteenth century. Officeholding favored leading fami-
lies; participation in elections included only principales. Still, contested politics
often led to coalitions that mobilized much of the local populace around key
local questions. Such local political actions, by contrast, were scarce in Spanish
North America, where there were few republics. The rural majority lived as
commercial dependents of landed estates and faced rising pressures in the eigh
teenth century—without republican politics and with limited access to the
judicial mediations those politics facilitated.19
A less participatory politics focused on the Spanish councils that ruled the
cities that centered the commercial economies of New Spain. Men of old
wealth held most seats permanently; from the 1770s many included rotating
“honorary” councilmen elected by established members—bringing in men
of new wealth often claimed in mining and trade and invested in commercial
estates. Councilmen also elected annually the local magistrates who oversaw
urban justice. Such councils oversaw public affairs in Mexico City; at Queré-
taro, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and other centers in the North; in Puebla, Oaxaca,
Mérida, and other towns in Mesoamerican regions stretching east and south.
They org anized city markets and public works; they oversaw education and
religious celebrations; they mobilized relief in times of dearth and disease; they
orchestrated the militias and urban patrols that expanded a fter 1765. Spanish
city councils sent agents to represent them before officials in Mexico City, Se-
ville, and Madrid, petitioning in judicial processes to negotiate local needs.
Formal council politics were internal, limiting political participations. Still,
councils had to maintain political bases; they could be challenged in court
by disgruntled citizens—and by republics that organized native populations
in Mexico City and Querétaro. Across New Spain, Spanish cities and towns
lived vibrant politics that were less participatory that those of the indigenous
republics.20
The highest level of politics in New Spain focused on imperial power and
the silver economy—the viceroy, the High Court, treasury officials, intendants,
and others. While formal power concentrated in Madrid, imperial prosperity
depended on the Americas—especially New Spain’s silver. The regime under-
stood that balance of power. It recognized merchant chambers and mining
boards that provided a voice and a measure of self-governance to the entrepre-
neurs who kept the silver flowing. Recent analysts call it a stakeholder regime, in
which key entrepreneurs played sanctioned roles in planning and governance—
to the mutual benefit of entrepreneurs and the regime.21 New studies also show
vibrant conflicts and emerging political networks in the late eighteenth century,
forming a new public opinion in New Spain.22
The politics of imperial power in New Spain extended beyond sanctioned
institutions and stakeholder participation. Leading financiers and mining mag-
nates, merchants and landlords forged ties with key regime leaders. In some
cases, they w
ere linked by business affairs. In addition, top colonial officials, in-
cluding many sent by the Bourbons to assert Spanish power over colonial sub-
jects, found marriage ties and rich inheritances in the families of New Spain’s
leading entrepreneurs. Treasury officials, High Court judges, and viceroys built
such links. In New Spain and in Spain they became advocates for the powerful
few who ruled the silver economy of New Spain.23
From 1790 to 1808, while the silver economy boomed and war brought
rising demands for regime revenues, mining soared, the regime claimed rising
revenues, and entrepreneurs in mining and global trades profited. Middling
entrepreneurs and the Church lenders that funded them faced financial stress.
Textile producers lived hard times when imports flowed freely, then boom
times when war blocked trade and local production soared. Indigenous re-
publics in Mesoamerica used established rights and access to courts to blunt
impositions and retain autonomies. In the far north, the same years brought
uncertain opportunities to those ready to risk trade and war with indepen
dent natives.
The Bajío, pivotal to economic growth after 1770, mixed mining boom,
textile uncertainties, tobacco growth, and expanding cultivation in times of po-
larization. While entrepreneurs negotiated policies that promoted commercial
profits and regime revenues, the people lacked institutions of political partici-
pation and social negotiation. The rich profited, or at least adapted, in times
of opportunity and challenge; the populace faced deepening difficulties. Mine
workers saw ore shares cut while wages fell—driven down in part by the refin-
eries’ recruitment of women to sort ores for low pay. Large textile workshops
closed and family producers faced falling earnings between 1770 and 1793;
then wartime blockades mixed with respites of peace to bring alternating years
of boom and bust. The rural majority faced rising rents, evictions, and falling
wages.24
The producing majority in the Bajío lacked the political rights and judicial
access to negotiate rising impositions and deteriorating lives. A few tried, g oing
to court to claim lands, councils, and religious rights as indigenous republics.
They understood the value of such rights in fending off entrepreneurial demands
and regime claims. Most failed. When the Bourbon regime fell to Napoleon in
1808, setting off a war for independence in Spain and debates about sovereignty
across the Americas, in New Spain nearly every group—Spanish city councils
and indigenous republics, merchant chambers, royal officials, and High Court
judges—negotiated unimagined challenges through established political chan-
nels. The populace of the Bajío faced deepening difficulties without indigenous
republics and with limited access to the courts. When a provincial priest backed
by a few militia officers called them to arms in 1810, they rose in the tens of
thousands to challenge a regime and economy that had prejudiced their lives
for decades.
From Imperial Crisis to Provincial Insurgency, 1808–1811

The conflicts that led to Mexican independence in 1821 did not begin in New
Spain. During the eighteenth century, Great Britain and France, Spain and
Portugal engaged in wars that aimed to increase trade and revenues in American
possessions. After the global war of 1757 to 1763, all expected colonial subjects
to pay the costs of imperial contests. All enacted reforms to increase revenues
and make collection more efficient. In the face of urban resistance among mine
workers and o thers in Guanajuato and nearby, New Spain’s entrepreneurs and
Bourbon rulers came together to crush the resistance and reenergize the silver
economy—leading to the boom of 1770–1810.
New Spain sustained soaring silver production, booming trade, rising agri-
cultural production, and growing regime revenues past 1800. But drawn into
escalating wars in the 1790s, Spain saw its naval power collapse a fter 1800.
Spanish traders struggled to maintain commercial ties with American domains
while war between Britain and Napoleonic France pressed the Spanish monar-
chy, which faced military and financial exhaustion even as New Spain’s econ-
omy carried on despite fiscal demands.
Carlos IV, through his “favorite” minister, Manuel Godoy, entered a difficult
alliance with Napoleon. Dependent on French military power, the Spanish
Crown submitted to e very demand. In 1803, Madrid signed a Treaty of Sub-
sidy with France, agreeing to pay 6 million livres (or about 1.5 million pesos)
monthly; the imagined total of 18 million pesos yearly would deliver to Napo-
leon the equivalent of 75 percent of all New Spain’s silver. Godoy committed
American revenues directly to foreign creditors. Rising demands led to discon-
tent in Spain and New Spain, resentments heightened by knowledge that the
revenues were flowing to bankers sustaining imperial rivals. Leading aristocrats
and politicians began to see in Fernando, prince of Asturias, an alternative to
the dangerous dependence on Napoleon built by Carlos and Godoy. The idea
that Godoy aimed to sell the kingdom to France found widening acceptance.25
In 1804, the king decreed the Consolidation of Royal Bonds, demanding
that pious foundations across Spain’s Americ as sell income properties, call in
loans, and deliver the proceeds in royal coffers. Many feared that the program
would damage colonial production. Convents, cathedral chapters, and other
Church institutions had long served as sources of credit. They had to call in
loans and, if the creditor could not pay, auction property. Th ose who chal-
lenged the decree—Querétaro corregidor Miguel Domínguez, Michoacán
canon Manuel Abad y Queipo, and Mexico City councilman Francisco Primo
de Verdad—faced the ire of Viceroy José de Iturrigaray. In a negotiated imple-
mentation, rich entrepreneurs paid little, convent-banks in Mexico City and
elsewhere lost most, and capital became scarce for middling landowners who
depended on ecclesiastical mortgages to develop estates.26 The greatest impact
of the Consolidation was the discontent it provoked. Collectors, including Vice-
roy Iturrigaray, gained fees and were easily seen as profiteering from war and
the Consolidation.27
In 1807, Spain signed a treaty allowing French armies to cross Spanish terri-
tory to occupy Portugal. France took Lisbon, but the monarchy escaped with
British help to Brazil, making Rio de Janeiro the capital of the Portuguese
empire and a British dependency. Napoleon turned his armies on Spain in
the spring of 1808. Having lost the wealth of Saint Domingue to the Haitian
Revolution, Napoleon aimed to take Portugal and Brazil; when that failed, he
turned on his Spanish ally in pursuit of American silver.
As French armies entered Spain, the discovery of a plot against Godoy link-
ing powerful aristocrats and Fernando offered clear evidence of Napoleon’s
involvement in Spain’s affairs. When Godoy tried to follow the Portuguese ex-
ample and take Carlos and the monarchy to America, riots at Aranjuez blocked
the plan. Carlos IV was forced to abdicate, his son proclaimed king as Fernando
VII. Soon, however, Napoleon drew both Carlos and Fernando to Bayonne;
father and son abdicated to their “beloved friend and ally” Napoleon, who de-
livered the Spanish throne to his brother, José Bonaparte.
The Napoleonic intervention—armed and dynastic—set off an unprece
dented crisis. The collaboration of high authorities with the French led others
across Spain to form juntas to organize resistance and preserve Bourbon rights.
The Bayonne renunciations created a constitutional crisis. Many rejected the
abdication, presuming that Carlos IV was forced—and that he had no legal
right to abdicate. Many more recognized Fernando, whose name—even in
captivity—symbolized opposition to Napoleon. In Spain and the Americas,
many refused to recognize either Carlos IV or José I.
Across a suddenly beheaded empire, juntas claimed control of the monar-
chy’s powers, arguing that they were conserving Fernando’s domains until he
reclaimed the throne. As the Mexico City Council stated, the monarchy held
the kingdom in trust; no king could legally alienate his domains. Nor could the
kingdom ever be without a king; there was always a successor, based on the laws
figure 7.1. Vicente Guerrero
of succession. As a result, as Francisco Primo de Verdad insisted, the viceroy
could obey neither José Bonaparte nor any junta claiming to govern in Spain.
The latter could rule only their home territories. Across New Spain city coun-
cils and indigenous republics promised to fight any delivery of the kingdom to
the French.28
The absence of a legitimate king in Spain left enormous potential power
in the hands of the viceroy in Mexico City. To ensure that Iturrigaray did not
rule arbitrarily, key leaders—including High Court Judge Jacobo de Villaur-
rutia and most Mexico City councilmen—proposed a junta parallel to those in
Spain. It would represent the interests of New Spain in times of crisis. Nearly
all other High Court judges, Church leaders, and top regime officials argued
otherwise: the viceroy should rule only in concert with the established High
Court, ensuring the power of Spain in New Spain. The two factions faced off
in meetings in Mexico City in August and September 1808. After they failed to
reach a resolution, a group of merchants, high officials, and military mobilized
the merchants’ militia to arrest the promoters of a junta and the viceroy. In the
wake of the first coup in Mexican history, the conspirators named a weak vice-
roy; recognized the Seville Junta, which claimed to rule in Spain; and promised
support for the war against Napoleon.
In Spain, as Roberto Breña shows in chapter 2, the crisis of 1808 triggered
a political revolution that led to the proclamation of a liberal constitution in
1812. The Cortes de Cádiz declared the sovereignty of a nation that included
all imperial dominions. In New Spain, elections came in the summer of 1810.
Deputies from New Spain took important roles in the Cortes’ debates. Miguel
Ramos Arizpe, from Coahuila, led the Cortes to establish Provincial Depu-
tations, regional boards charged with promoting the common welfare. José
Miguel Guridi y Alcocer, born in Tlaxcala, argued that Spanish America
should have representation equal to Spain. But Spain’s deputies held a strong
majority and blocked that key American demand. A leading Spanish liberal,
Agustín Arguelles, stated directly that because Americans outnumbered Iberi-
ans, they could not have proportional representation.
After two years of unprecedented political uncertainties and debates, in
September 1810 Francisco Xavier Venegas arrived in New Spain as viceroy, sent
by the Regency that called the Cortes to write a constitution for a transatlantic
Spanish nation. Simultaneously, militia officers Ignacio Allende and Mariano
Abasolo, the priest Miguel Hidalgo, and Josefa Ortiz, wife of Querétaro’s Corregi-
dor Domínguez, were denounced for joining other Bajío notables in meetings
to promote provincial rights and limit subordination to France or Spain. Learn-
ing of the denunciations, Hidalgo called to his parishioners on the morning of
September 16, in an event tradition re-created as “El Grito de Dolores.” Hi-
dalgo’s call to defend the kingdom from French imposition and “be done with
oppression” raised thousands of men. In weeks, the Bajío, the pivot of the silver
economy, was in flames—literally and politically. Wherever the few troops and
vast populace following Hidalgo and Allende marched, European Spaniards,
reviled as gachupines, lost power and faced imprisonment and sometimes death.
American Spaniards took over. In a few months, rebel governments ruled Gua-
najuato, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Guadalajara, and Valladolid (now Morelia)
and other key towns. The rising found its strength in the Bajío. From San Luis
Potosí, Félix Calleja—soon to lead the counterinsurgency—reported that the
offer of self-government attracted many American Spaniards, and some from
Spain too.29
In Valladolid, Hidalgo set up a government of American Spaniards, order-
ing reforms including the end of tributes to improve the lives of indigenous
communities, people of African descent, and other subject groups. L ater in
Guadalajara, Hidalgo reaffirmed and extended his reforms. He sought sup-
port among the populace and found backing among elites whose enlightened
views recognized the need for reform. But political violence against immigrant
Spaniards (mostly officials and merchants) and mass assaults on urban stores
and estate granaries, created apprehension. The occupation and the sacking of
the mining city of Guanajuato provoked fear. Manuel Abad y Queipo, once
Hidalgo’s close friend, condemned and excommunicated the insurgent priest.
Many city dwellers welcomed the strong measures taken by Viceroy Venegas
against rebels—who found most support among rural people who had lived
decades of declining earnings, evictions, deepening insecurities, and two years
of drought and famine just ending.
In January 1811 outside Guadalajara, Hidalgo, Allende, and insurgent forces
faced defeat by provincial militias, mostly Americans. Insurgent leaders fled
north, where most were soon arrested. Hidalgo, Allende, and others were ex-
ecuted. Calleja began a campaign of repression. In Aguascalientes, he called
for locally recruited and financed defense forces in every town and city. He
limited the viceregal army to defending the mining center of Guanajuato and
pursuing leading political rebels. In the long run, local forces helped cities and
towns defend their own interests—which might change over time. Outside
the Bajío, where the rising began and many rebels returned home to carry on
guerrilla resistance, 1811 saw quick pacification even as Ignacio Rayón formed a
Junta Americana in isolated uplands around Zitácuaro and José María Morelos
turned to armed political resistance in Pacific coastal lowlands.30

Transatlantic Liberalism, Monarchical Restoration, Enduring
Insurgencies, and the Fall of Silver, 1812–1820
The Cortes carried on in Cádiz, aiming to hold Spain and its Americ as to-
gether and to give communities new opportunities to promote and defend
their interests—within legal institutions. In 1812 it promulgated a constitution
promising liberal rights.31 Its first articles stated that sovereignty belonged to
the Spanish nation, including all inhabitants of Spain, Spanish America, the
Philippines in Asia, and a few possessions in North Africa. The nation was defined
as a totality of p eople subject to the same laws and with the same rights. Gov-
ernment included three branches: the Cortes, the king, and a Supreme Judicial
Tribunal. All descendants of Spaniards and indigenous Americans w ere citi-
zens; people of African descent w ere excluded—and discounted in determin-
ing representation (a concession to Spanish Cubans committed to slavery). The
constitution called for one deputy for e very seventy thousand p eople (excluding
castas of African origin).
The creation of Provincial Deputations and Constitutional City Councils
elected by citizens satisfied demands for self-rule in many cities and towns.
Freedom of the press allowed the emergence of a new journalism in New
Spain, notably El pensador mexicano (The Mexican Thinker), published by José
Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, and El Juguetillo (The Little Jester), published
by Carlos María de Bustamente. They and o thers promoted participation and
the exercise of rights, especially voting. Late 1812 and early 1813 brought the
first popular elections in New Spain. All adult men, excluding castas of African
origins and a few others (criminals, friars, etc.), were called to elect councilmen.
Voting was in levels, first in parishes, which sent electors to join city or town
elections. It is impossible to know how many voted, yet the turnout surprised
the authorities. Many of African ancestry voted; after centuries of mixing, lines
were hard to see. In Mexico City, the results worried authorities. The major-
ity of men elected w ere Americans favoring self-rule. Some sympathized with,
even assisted, insurgents in the provinces. Viceregal officials suspended the
elections and freedom of the press.32
A focus on counterinsurgency conditioned the implementation of the con-
stitution. The liberal insistence that all citizens contribute to the treasury, thus
to the costs of counterinsurgency, pleased the viceroy and his commanders. The
High Court, pivotal to maintaining the link between Spain and New Spain in
the coup of 1808, continued as a council of government—despite its prohibi-
tion in the constitution. The founding of a Provincial Deputation in Mexico
City was delayed to avoid limiting the viceroy’s political and military powers.
While the Cádiz Constitution was written in Spain and implemented in
New Spain, insurgencies, political and popular, proliferated across New Spain.
During 1811, the pacification led by Calleja claimed major victories. Loyal au-
thorities reclaimed most mining centers, cities, and towns. But the popular
resistance that had fueled the first mass insurgency carried on to threaten power
and production. It persisted south of Guadalajara, where Hidalgo had made his
last political stand. It continued north of Mexico City in the Mezquital, a dry
basin where Otomí villagers threatened commercial estates and the mines at
Real de Monte. And most damaging to the silver economy, the original rebels
from the Bajío, tens of thousands strong, returned home in January 1811 to take
control of the fertile basin that sustained Guanajuato and its mines.
Calleja took his troops to occupy Guanajuato—knowing the importance of
reviving mining t here. For a year, he tried to coordinate a campaign to pacify
the Bajío—and failed. Insurgent families ruled the countryside, claiming estate
lands and livestock, producing for sustenance, and supplying local markets
as they found useful. Most Bajío towns were islands of loyalists surrounded by
an insurgent countryside. Mining held below 50 percent of the level of 1810.
While popular insurgents ruled the Bajío countryside and Calleja remained
surrounded in Guanajuato, political rebels organized the Junta Nacional
Americana at Zitácuaro—in rugged uplands between Mexico City and the
Bajío, protected by the insurgency there. When Calleja realized at the end of
1811 that he could not alter the stalemate in the Bajío, he moved to dislodge the
junta. It was too late: popular insurgents ruled the Bajío, and the silver econ-
omy remained besieged.33 From 1812 on, most Bajío cities held in loyalist con-
trol; Guanajuato struggled to resume silver production. But cities surrounded
by rebel communities faced unprecedented threats and costs: sustenance
came from insurgent cultivators; shipping silver to Mexico City required costly
convoys—and payment to insurgent patrols. A limited resumption of mining
paid for both insurgency and counterinsurgency, yet neither mining nor the
commercial economy approached their previous dynamism in the Bajío after
1810.
The regime had to implement constitutional innovations that aimed to
strengthen loyalty to Spain by granting new participations in New Spain—
while fighting popular insurgencies that undermined the commercial economy
in the Bajío and elsewhere, and while resisting political rebels who found new
strength. The well-known political insurgents such as José María Morelos nei-
ther mobilized nor led the popular movements. They developed in distinct re-
gions, Morelos based in the Pacific lowlands, popular insurgency grounded in
the Bajío. Still, they were mutually reinforcing, making the regime fight two
very different foes simultaneously. Political insurgents like Morelos fought for
political autonomies that led toward national independence; popular insur-
gents in the Bajío, the Mezquital, and elsewhere sought autonomies of produc-
tion and culture that would limit the power of any state.34
Some political rebels like Francisco Osorno, who ruled the Apan plains
and the Puebla sierra into 1816, built alliances with insurgent communities.
He imposed taxes on local merchants and estates, creating authorities that op-
erated as insurgent states.35 More typical, the Villagrán family led political
insurgency in the uplands of Huichapan, dealing irregularly with the Otomí
communities that persisted in insurgency across the Mezquital from 1811 to
1815—threatening the mines at Real del Monte. They might ally briefly in skir-
mishes with common foes; most of the time they took mutual advantage of
loyalist forces’ difficulties facing both simultaneously.36 Meanwhile, Guadalupe
Victoria built power in the highlands of Veracruz, near the Gulf Coast, sur-
rounded by resistant Totonac villages in the northern Huasteca and rebellious
Africans and mulattos, slave and f ree, to the south.37 Victoria, too, depended
on popular insurgents more than he led them.
In Pacific lowlands from southern Michoacán, past Acapulco, and into
Oaxaca José María Morelos coordinated resistance that recruited key landlords
seeking local rule, indigenous communities seeking greater autonomy, and di-
verse mulattos (including muleteer Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s second presi-
dent, in 1828). Morelos led a mobile guerrilla army that at times held the mines
at Taxco, the sugar basin around Cuernavaca south of Mexico City, and the city
of Oaxaca—but never threatened Mexico City.38
Through 1812 and into 1813, diverse and disconnected insurgent groups, po
litical and popular, held a line that began in the mountains of Veracruz and
passed through the Puebla sierra, across the Apan plains and the Mexquital
into the Huichapan uplands. The line of resistance broke at Querétaro—a key
to regime survival—but held the core of the Bajío and the nearby uplands,
surrounding the Guanajuato mines and extending toward Guadalajara. Mean-
while, Morelos and his allies held strong in Pacific hills and lowlands. Officials
and loyalists ruled Mexico City and most cities, working to implement the
Cádiz Constitution there and in indigenous republics across Mesoamerica. In-
surgent power in the Bajío and other zones cut transports links with the North
and threatened routes to Atlantic and Pacific ports. The future of New Spain
was uncertain at best.
Loyalism and liberalism engaged each other and political and popular in-
surgents in complex conflicts and negotiations. Early in 1812, Calleja besieged
Morelos and his army at Cuautla, southeast of Mexico City. Calleja’s victory
ensured that no insurgency would again approach Mexico City; Morelos’s es-
cape with most of his forces south to Oaxaca guaranteed that insurgency would
survive to challenge regional rulers and economic integration.39 In Oaxaca,
Morelos began the insurgents’ most ambitious political project. Carlos María
de Bustamente, a lawyer and journalist who had organized elections in Mexico
City in November 1812, only to see victories overturned and face persecution
by loyalist officials, energized the work. He concluded that monarchical rule
was by nature authoritarian and would never respect liberal laws. His leader-
ship gave Morelos’s political project its salient characteristic: it would be con-
stitutional but, unlike Cádiz, would reject the monarchy.
During 1813, while Morelos besieged Acapulco (cutting trade ties with Asia),
his movement held elections where it could. Amid war, only Oaxaca and Tec-
pan (southern zones of the Intendancy of Mexico) elected deputies. Other
delegates were substitutes serving regions u nder loyalist rule. On September 13
a Congress opened in Chilpancingo. Morelos offered key principles in his cel-
ebrated Sentimientos de la nación: American independence; the abolition of
slavery and racial distinctions; self-government; and protection of Catholic
religion. The Congress published a Declaration of Independence.40
Morelos’s political advance, however, came with military collapse. Troops
arriving from Spain reinforced viceregal armies. Calleja was named viceroy
and began new campaigns against the rebels. In 1814 the Treaty of Valençay re-
turned the Spanish throne to Fernando VII, who abolished of the Cádiz Con-
stitution and dissolved the Cortes—turning against those who fought hardest
for his return. In New Spain, Calleja dissolved liberal institutions. Provincial
Deputations and constitutional city and town councils disappeared, yet pre-
vious ways did not fully return. War brought profound changes—not easily
reversed. Calleja kept some Cádiz innovations—notably the constitution’s tax
provisions. Absolutism returned to focus the fight against insurgency.
The political insurgents around Morelos offered an alternative to absolutism.
At Apatzingán in October 1814, a Congress promulgated a Constitutional De-
cree for the Liberation of Mexican America (América mexicana). It prescribed
a separation of powers in three branches, recognized the rights of citizens, and
protected Catholic worship. The decree offered the people of New Spain a con-
stitutional alternative to the return of Fernando and the abolition of the Cádiz
Constitution—in part the inspiration of the new Mexican charter. But mount-
ing defeats left the Apatzingán Constitution to have force but briefly in towns
of the tierra caliente—the south of the Intendancies of Michoacán and Mexico.
The capture and execution of Morelos late in 1815 all but ended insurgent con-
stitutional government.
Popular insurgencies persisted, notably in the Bajío. This was a common
sequence: the Villagrans faced defeat in the summer of 1813; Otomí insurgents
held the Mezquital into 1815. With the defeat of Morelos in 1815, political in-
surgency survived only in isolated retreats, notably with Vicente Guerrero in
the south and Guadalupe Victoria in Gulf uplands. Yet loyalists only pacified
popular insurgents in the Bajío between 1818 and 1820. From 1811 to 1815, the
dilemma of loyalist forces, first liberal and then absolutist, was how to contain
the popular insurgencies in the Bajío and elsewhere that prejudiced produc-
tion and regime revenues while also fighting the political threat of Morelos and
his allies in southern strongholds. Both insurgencies, political and popular, en-
dured longer thanks to the presence of the other. Almost everywhere, popular
insurgencies proved stronger—or at least lasted longer.41
The persistence of popular insurgency across the Bajío for five years a fter the
defeat of political insurgency meant that while authorities might try to restore
pre-1808 ways, they could not return the silver economy to pre-1810 dynamism.
Mining carried on at Guanajuato, but capital proved scarce and supplies expen-
sive. Operators dug ore without investing in infrastructure and drainage. They
took limited silver and lesser profits, paying taxes that funded counterinsur-
gency and exactions that sustained insurgents. Disaster came in 1820, just as the
surrounding countryside seemed pacified: the Valenciana mines flooded. The
Guanajuato council reported that the city, New Spain, and the world would
be forever changed.42
With the collapse of mining, rural pacification could not return the Bajío
to its long-profitable ways. Peace came between 1818 and 1820, as commanders
saw that the only way to reestablish property rights was to allow families that
had taken lands as insurgents to retain their ranchos, enabling them to con-
tinue f amily production on the promise of small rents (paid irregularly). The
summer of 1820 brought the end of popular insurgency, the collapse of silver
mining, and a turn to family production across the Bajío. The regime’s triumph
was also a victory for popular communities. Ten years of popular insurgency
made revival of the Bajío silver economy impossible.
Six years’ experience with the debates and experiments of Cádiz liberalism
made the return of Bourbon absolutism problematic. Ten years of war brought
other irreversible changes. The number of men at arms increased radically; com-
pared to late colonial times there was a sudden militarization of society. Even
with Bourbon efforts to build military power, standing troops w ere few in 1810.
Most forces remained militias, funded and led by provincial elites. Some had
joined in insurgency, led by Allende in 1810; many more mobilized in counter-
insurgency, called out by Calleja to defend the regime. Ten years of war created
armed forces everywhere. Troops began to arrive from Spain in 1812. Militias
were at arms so long they became standing forces. Estates fearing popular
insurgents paid local defense troops. Native republics, on losing municipal
rights in the return of absolutism in 1814, kept local militias for “patriotic
defense.”43
From 1815 to 1820, as pacification progressed slowly, New Spain did not
become less military. Troops pressed remaining insurgents to take amnesties,
which often included the right to keep arms as patriotic militias. Militias and
amnestied insurgents often linked—to rebel again, then claim another am-
nesty. Guerrillas, insurgents, and bandits mixed to keep New Spain a violent
place. When Viceroy Juan de Apodaca reported to the authorities in Spain
that peace reigned in 1820, he was lying. Conflicts continued and regional
commanders took advantage to amass more troops and more power. José de la
Cruz, captain general at Guadalajara, led forces that challenged the viceroy.
Joaquín Arredondo ruled the Northeast with autonomy, like many com-
manders in the North, where years of conflict in the Bajío had cut ties with
Mexico City.
Revived Spanish Liberalism and the Experiment

in Mexican Monarchy, 1820–1823
Most insurgency, political and popular, ended by 1820; deep economic, so-
cial, and political challenges remained when news arrived from Spain of a re-
turn to liberal rule. Spanish military forces refused to sail to face Bolívar in the
Andes unless Fernando reinstated the Cádiz Charter. Fernando, knowing his
rule rested on military power, acquiesced and called a new Cortes. Reactions
differed in New Spain. Many military leaders feared that new constitutional
authorities would prosecute excesses committed during the wars. Meanwhile,
constitutional councils revived in many cities and towns; Puebla and Valladolid
demanded Provincial Deputations. Renewed press freedom allowed expressions
of support for the constitution—while others argued that true rights required
a break with Spain.
In 1821, a group of American deputies presented the Cortes a proposal to
create three kingdoms in America, all recognizing Fernando, each with its own
Cortes—thus its own laws. Inevitably, the Iberian majority rejected the plan.
Before leaving for Spain, many of New Spain’s representatives knew that po
litical and military leaders w ere planning to call the king or a member of his
family to become emperor of Mexico. Agustín de Iturbide, a former loyalist
commander in the Bajío, led the effort; he recruited high churchmen and lead-
ing entrepreneurs in the capital and gained adherence by Vicente Guerrero,
still in the field and committed to independence in his southern stronghold.
In February 1821, the Plan of Iguala declared Mexico independent, offering
the throne to Fernando VII, promising a constitution appropriate to Mexico, and
offering citizenship to all men, including t hose of African origin—addressing a
key demand pressed by Guerrero, whose African roots left him no rights u nder
the 1812 charter. Iturbide’s Plan also defended Catholic institutions and religion.
The anticlerical turn of Spanish liberalism in 1820, absent in 1812, drew many in
New Spain to independence.
Through spring and into the summer of 1821, Iturbide and Guerrero led
an alliance of former loyalists and insurgents seeking support for a reformed
monarchical-constitutional Mexico. Victory came with the adherence of key
commanders and city councils in the Bajío and nearby: Guanajuato, Guadala-
jara, San Luis Potosí—and, pivotally, Querétaro in early July. The city that had
anchored counterinsurgency for a decade joined the Iguala movement, unit-
ing the entire Bajío—or at least its urban elites—in support of independence
for the first time.44 The rural majority, entrenched on family ranchos and ex-
hausted by a decade of conflict, stood aside. Iturbide and the Iguala movement
took power by linking military commanders and urban councils. Th ere w ere
45
few real battles; cities and armies joined in a new route to power.
Facing rising opposition, Viceroy Apodaca ended freedom of the press in
Mexico City. On July 5, as Querétaro joined the opposition, the Mexico City
garrison deposed the viceroy. Spanish commanders found his defense of the
regime timid. They offered a replacement, but neither the Mexico City council
nor the Provincial Deputation recognized him. As in 1808, leaders of fragile
legality fell, replaced by others without legitimacy. Juan O’Donoju, sent from
Spain to pacify New Spain, chose to deal with Iturbide. In August, O’Donoju
accepted the Plan de Iguala and Mexican independence.46
Soon after, the Army of the Three Guarantees—religion, independence,
and union—entered Mexico City. Iturbide named a provisional junta, which
named a Regency and Iturbide its president. On September 28, 1821, the junta
proclaimed an Act of Independence of the Mexican empire. It would rule from
Panama to California. Soon news arrived that Fernando has refused the Mexican
throne and the Spanish Cortes did not recognize Mexican independence, de-
claring it a rebellious province. Iturbide took power, a less than fully legitimate
emperor.
Thirteen years of unprecedented conflict—political, military, ideological,
social, and cultural—made the kingdom of New Spain independent. Noth-
ing else was resolved in 1821. The economy faced collapse. Iturbide proposed
a constitutional monarchy, and for a time ruled as emperor. Others sought a
republic—and still others pursued provincial autonomies. Spain resisted the
loss of the kingdom that had sustained its power in the world. How would a
young United States and an industrializing Britain react? Mexico’s challenges
had only begun. Conflicts of nation making persisted through the 1860s. In
part they resulted from the nature of independence: insurgents suddenly al-
lied with counterinsurgents to break with Spain; in 1821 they agreed on that
and little else. In part too, long political debates resulted from the creative po
litical experiences of 1808 to 1821: monarchists faced republicans; defenders
of imperial traditions engaged liberal innovations, all complicated by tensions
between central powers grounded in the historic capital of Mexico City, pro-
vincial interests focused on intendancies becoming states, and cities and towns
with councils committed to traditions of urban sovereignty.47
All those potential fault lines w
ere hardened by the new universalism of the
age of nations. The imperial monarchies of the early modern era recognized di-
verse subjects with diverse laws, rights, and privileges—and multiple ways of jus-
tice to resolve disputes. New nations sought a new universalism, at least within
their borders. Rights grounded in popular sovereignty must apply to all p eople.
Such visions grounded Spanish liberalism; its legacies shaped Mexican state
making in powerful ways. To liberals, the corporate rights to land, self-rule, and
separate justice that defined indigenous republics were “privileges” that had to
end. Yet in many communities, liberal promises of universal rights seemed as-
saults on the right to be an indigenous republic.48
The new militarization of state and society added further challenges. U nder
the monarchy before 1808, coercive powers were limited; disputes w ere settled
at the highest levels by stakeholder negotiations, across the wider society by
judicial mediation. Wars for and against independence created militaries. After
1821 troops were everywhere and political disputes often led to mobilizations
of force. Military power gave a new edge to the debates of nation making. And
military power was expensive. Governments at every level—national, provin-
cial, and local—faced new costs. Armed men who forged and then contested
new state powers were difficult to deny when they demanded pay. The costs of
government were much higher in the new nation.
Yet the means to pay those costs were limited—and also contested. The trib-
utes long collected from the indigenous and mulatto majority w ere abolished
amid political wars and popular risings before 1815. The collapse of silver min-
ing radically cut regime revenues and the stimulus to commercial life. Internal
collections shrank, as did international trade and revenues. Fundamental po
litical, ideological, and cultural divisions mixed in a context of militarization,
economic collapse, and sparse revenues. Mexican nation making must be seen
in that context.
As emperor, Iturbide faced rising difficulties. Powerful economic actors and
churchmen backed him; popular neighborhoods in Mexico City hailed his
coronation.49 But asserting independence and taking a throne proved easier
than building a regime. Debates over how to elect a Congress and relations be-
tween Congress and the executive led to grave conflicts. No judicial power was
built, no fiscal system created, no constitution written. Eleven years of war and
revolution had fragmented society. Many refused to pay taxes. Others paid,
but revenues never reached Mexico City as provincial authorities kept funds.
Iturbide could not meet the demands of both the military and provincial powers.
In October 1822, facing stalemate, he dissolved Congress. In December, Antonio
López de Santa Anna, commander at the key port of Veracruz, rebelled with a
group of republican conspirators.50
At first the rising found l ittle support. But the imperial army lacked the arms
and ammunition to retake Veracruz. When Antonio Echavarrí, the general sent
to defeat Santa Anna, saw he was about to lose command, he pronounced in
favor of a new Congress and peace with the rebels on February 1, 1823, at Casa
Mata, near Veracruz. Iturbide’s rivals in the army joined the movement; José
Morán, commander at Puebla, proclaimed himself head of a liberating army.
In March, Iturbide reinstated Congress and fled the country, leaving the mon-
archy in disarray.51 Politics, for centuries focused on seeking influence within
established monarchical institutions, was now an unbridled competition over
who should govern and how.
In the summer of 1823, life in the lands drawn into the Mexican empire
was difficult, the future uncertain. Mining struggled to revive; entrepreneurs
lacked funds to invest. During years of conflict, immigrant merchants returned
to Spain, taking what capital they had. Without the stimulus of silver, interna-
tional trade languished; without capital to revive mines, struggling operators
looked for foreign investors. Commercial agriculture also struggled, leaving
urban food supplies uncertain. Bajío tenants with lands taken in insurgency and
Mesoamerican villagers who pushed back liberal attempts to privatize their lands
continued to cultivate. They fed families and communities first, marketing only
limited surpluses. Estates remained, but few w ere profitable; rural social relations
shifted to f avor-producing families.52
The dimensions of the Mexican republic remained uncertain. Population
concentrated in the center and south. Mexico City held perhaps 150,000 people.
About half of the nation’s 6 million people lived in communities with Meso-
american roots and long ago made into indigenous republics in regions from
the heartland around Mexico City south to Yucatán. Coastal lowlands w ere
little populated, mixing people of Spanish, indigenous, and African ances-
try. The Bajío remained densely settled with mixed peoples; commercial
dynamism had given way to family production. Population held sparse to the
north. The largest city there, Zacatecas, had 30,000 residents. Durango, Chi-
huahua, Saltillo, and Monterrey were small towns. On the Pacific, San Blas and
Mazatlán were ports with few residents; on the Gulf, Tampico and Matamoros
were small but growing, as Veracruz no longer monopolized Atlantic trade.
With the fall of silver, economic dynamism waned in northern regions.
The frontiers became isolated: El Paso and Santa Fe lost trades with regions
south—and looked t oward the United States via the Santa Fe trail. The resi-
dents of San Antonio, Texas, began to see newcomers from the U.S. South who
came to grow cotton with slave laborers. In California, missions congregated
small numbers of natives while rancheros grazed growing herds. Most important,
independent Comanche used long adaptations to Spanish power and trade to
build armed forces and assert power between New Mexico, Texas, and the Mis-
sissippi. Th
ere were many contenders and uncertainties in new struggles to
shape North America.
Founding a Federal Republic, Searching

for a New Economy, 1823–1830
Most of the provinces aimed to maintain a Mexican u nion. They had all come
out of New Spain, remembered its economic dynamism, shared important cus-
toms and institutions—old and new—and feared reconquest by Spain. They
also worked to keep autonomies gained in years of civil war and shaped by lib-
eral institutions. With Iturbide gone, few recognized the Imperial Congress
or the executive power it named. In that context, negotiations led by Lucas
Alamán proved pivotal. The educated son of a Guanajuato mining entrepre-
neur, Alamán convinced the provinces to recognize the government in Mexico
City. As secretary of internal and international relations, he brokered deals
with leading politicians in provincial capitals and other cities; he sent troops to
Puebla and Jalisco when negotiations failed. He kept Chiapas within Mexico
when Guatemala led Central America into a separate federation.53
Alamán was also central to writing the Founding Act of the Mexican Fed-
eration. A new national Congress met in November 1823 and approved the act
early in 1824. In key debates, some deputies proposed a loose federation parallel
to the early United States under the Articles of Confederation. Others sought a
unified national state, looking to French and Spanish traditions. The final proj
ect came from Miguel Ramos Arizpe: a federation akin to the United States as
remade in the Constitution of 1787—but with articles on religion, municipal
rights, voting, and more derived from the Cádiz Charter of 1812.54
The constitution founding Mexico as a Federal Republic was signed in 1824.
It declared that sovereignty derived from the people, but first settled in the
states being created in provinces extending from Yucatán, through the core of
New Spain, to northern regions. Asserting that sovereignty belonged to the
people, and to the states they created, paralleled developments in the United
States. That assertion, however, was neither an imposition nor an imitation in
Mexico.55 The provinces created by Bourbon Intendancies and the Cádiz Con-
stitution’s Provincial Deputations prepared the way for state sovereignty. The
1824 Constitution made a considered choice to lodge sovereignty in the people
and to constitute it first in regional states. The federal government would serve—
and hopefully balance—popular and provincial sovereignties.
The founders of the republic rejected the alternative of lodging sovereignty
in a unitary abstraction called the nation—a legacy of the French revolution
adopted by Spanish liberals in 1812. They also rejected the Hispanic tradition
of the sovereignty of the pueblos—towns and cities with councils. The 1824
Constitution chose popular sovereignty and provincial priority over municipal
rights and national sovereignty, the latter a route to more centralized national
power. Yet both traditions remained vibrant in Mexico. When central rule
returned in the 1830s, it built on urban bases. Throughout Mexico’s national
history the pueblos have never been passive. Hispanic towns and indigenous
villages have pressed their interests and negotiated demands with political par-
ties, government officials, military powers, and other political actors.56
In the Federal Republic, national legislative powers divided into two
chambers: one of deputies representing the p eople, another of senators rep-
resenting the states. The president was elected by the state congresses—in turn
chosen by the people of the states. Each state wrote a constitution, defining citi-
zens and their rights, including who could vote and hold office—always lim-
ited to men. Property qualifications w ere few; tiered elections derived from the
Cádiz Constitution allowed all adult men to vote locally for electors; the lat-
ter repeatedly chose propertied, educated, and politically experienced men for
office. The Federal Republic remained Catholic, endorsing a culture shared
by all.
In October 1824, the state congresses voted Guadalupe Victoria Mexico’s
first president. Nicolás Bravo, a landed insurgent who had joined Morelos,
backed Guerrero, and then Iturbide, came in second to become vice president.
Both had strong insurgent credentials, though Bravo was suspected of centralist
leanings. Victoria named a cabinet of diverse tendencies, leaving no group sat-
isfied. The new regime faced many challenges.
External threats seemed everywhere. Spain refused to accept the loss of its
richest colony and threatened to send troops. The United States and the other
new nations of the Americas had recognized Mexican independence under the
Iturbide’s empire. More important powers remained aloof. Neither Pope Leo
XII nor his successors accepted Mexican sovereignty before Fernando VII died
in 1833. That was not only a cultural challenge to a deeply Catholic country; it
blocked the naming of bishops and other Church officials, limiting the Church
in a most Catholic nation. France and other monarchical allies of Spain also
refused recognition.57
That left Great Britain pivotal. Britain had known the importance of New
Spain’s silver since the eighteenth century. As allies of Spain’s liberals in the
fight against Napoleon, British merchants and ships took direct roles in that
trade in 1808. Britain emerged from the Napoleonic wars militarily triumphant,
dominant in Atlantic trade, and with a rising industrial economy driving
toward global hegemony. In 1824, Mexico needed British recognition, capital,
and trade.
Meanwhile, the new republic faced economic collapse. The treasury seemed
always empty, while bureaucrats and troops demanded pay. The constitution
left direct taxes to the states; revenues from silver and commerce (should they
revive) belonged to the states, as would any property or head taxes (which
might replace colonial tributes). Only tariffs on international trade and rev-
enues from the Federal District, including Mexico City, funded the national
regime. The states negotiated annual contributions to the national treasury, but
while the economy struggled, contributions w ere low and inconsistently paid.
Making matters worse, powerful interests that had loaned vast sums to the co-
lonial treasury before 1821 forced national officials to recognize their claims as
the price of accepting the new regime.58
Into that vortex came the British government, bankers, and investors. Victo-
ria’s national government needed cash and recognition. British officials sought
open access and low tariffs for British textiles. But low tariffs would limit the
only revenue that funded national power—and a flood of cheap textiles threat-
ened Mexican cloth makers, mostly artisans. The British solution: recognition,
low tariffs, and loans from British banks to fund national power. Britain would
get open markets and control of Mexican national purse strings. Victoria ac-
cepted. British loans made him the only president to complete a term during
Mexico’s early decades; the debts that resulted plagued national leaders for half
a century. Mexican cloth makers faced losses that fueled discontent.
Economic struggles continued. However distributed, revenues depended
on trade, internal and international, all historically stimulated by silver. The
decade of insurgency had undermined the silver economy in the Bajío and lim-
ited it elsewhere. The dearth of silver and the commerce it stimulated cut the
sources of capital that had financed New Spain’s economy. Again, the solution
appeared to come from Britain. Coal mines t here had perfected steam pumps
that might rapidly drain flooded mines. But bringing new technology to the
Mexican highlands increased capital costs—and Mexicans had no capital. Led
by Lucas Alamán, mine operators like the Condes de Regla at Real del Monte,
the Condes de Valenciana at Guanajuato, and others at Zacatecas and else-
where negotiated joint ventures with British capitalists. British funds, technol-
ogy, and workers came to Mexico—and for the first time, returns on capital
flowed out of Mexico to London and elsewhere. Nothing announced the trans-
formation of the mining economy between 1808 and 1824 more clearly than
the turn to foreign financing.
Still, the mines were slow to revive—revealing the enormity of the task and
the difficulty of importing capital and technology. Zacatecas, least pummeled
by insurgency and civil war, revived in the late 1820s; Guanajuato most dev-
astated by insurgency, did not flourish until the 1840s; Real del Monte’s revival
was even slower. When mines did revive, their revenues filled state treasuries: first
at Zacatecas, later in Guanajuato. The national regime never found revenues to
sustain its costs, including those of the military, nor to pay its debts to British and
other bondholders. For decades a fter 1824, bankers made short-term loans at exor-
bitant rates; famous agiotistas both funded and plagued the national regime.59
While the national government and the silver economy struggled, some
states found prosperity. Along the Gulf Veracruz gained from commerce; its
rich lands raised food, cotton, and tobacco. Yucatán profited from trade with
Havana as Cuba’s sugar and slave economy filled markets opened by Haitian
revolutionaries. Puebla saw steady cultivation, but cloth makers suffered from
British competition. The State of Mexico, surrounding Mexico City and reach-
ing far north and south, might be the richest of all—with mines at Real del
Monte and Taxco, rich fields in the Valleys of Mexico and Toluca, sugar around
Cuernavaca, and coastal lowlands around Acapulco. But mines struggled to re-
vive, and estate operators saw profits plummet; they blamed villagers who con-
trolled too much land and asked too much to harvest crops.60 Michoacán and
Jalisco prospered—but not as much as Zacatecas with its recuperating silver
mines. Guanajuato and Querétaro were slow to regain prosperity. Local lead-
ers lamented that tenants prospered more than landowners—and that w omen
showed too much independence.61
Some states found political stability; others lived years of turbulence. With-
out political parties, groups seeking power organized in diverse ways. The army
became a political force—defending its right to separate justice while claiming
power to resolve others’ disputes. In the 1820s, many political actors organized
in Masonic lodges. Leading members of government in 1823 and 1824 joined
Scottish Rite lodges founded by republicans who had opposed the empire.
Iturbide’s partisans met in other lodges, such as the Black Eagle later headed
by President Guadalupe Victoria. It affiliated with the York Rite, backed by
Joel Poinsett, first U.S. minister in Mexico. The Yorkinos promoted popular
mobilizations and gained influence in local elections. They accused their foes
of centralism and inflamed a campaign against remaining Spanish immigrants.
In 1826, Yorkinos won congressional elections; several gained ministries in Vic-
toria’s cabinet, notably Manuel Gómez Pedraza as secretary of war. They found
power in many state governments. Their triumphs led to radical demands, in-
cluding the expulsion of Spanish immigrants (all legally Mexicans). By 1827,
Yorkinos were dominant and divided. As the 1828 elections approached, one
faction, the Impartials, pressed the rights and interests of the states (including
Coahuila’s Miguel Ramos Arispe and Zacatecas’s Francisco García) and backed
Manuel Gómez Pedraza for president. Radical Yorkinos led by State of Mexico
governor Lorenzo de Zavala backed popular ex-insurgent Vicente Guerrero.62
In 1828, popular elections for a new national Congress favored radical Yor-
kinos, but the vote for president came from existing state congresses. As a re-
sult, Gómez Pedraza came first, Guerrero second, and General Anastasio
Bustamente third—backed by a few enemies of Zavala. The split radical vote
denied Guerrero, the popular choice, the presidency. Before final results w ere
known, Santa Anna rose in arms against a Veracruz state Congress that voted
for Gómez Pedraza, arguing that the p eople favored Guerrero. In Mexico City,
Zavala promoted a protest that turned into a riot that destroyed the Parían
market—where the rich bought Asian and European wares in front of the Na-
tional Palace. President Victoria could not resist the pressure: he named Guer-
rero secretary of war. Gómez Pedraza renounced his claim to office and fled
to Jalisco. The new Congress named Guerrero president and Bustamente vice
president.63
Near the end of 1828, several states that backed Gómez Pedraza built a
coalition against Guerrero, insisting he had been imposed from the center.
Guanajuato and o thers called militias to arms—but lower officers and troops
sympathized with Guerrero and refused to move against him. The strength
of the new regime lay in its popular bases and it addressed their concerns. It
expelled immigrant Spaniards, often merchants and easy scapegoats for eco-
nomic dislocations and urban poverty. Guerrero prohibited imports of cloth
and other goods to preserve markets for national producers, mostly artisans.
The cut in trade hit already paltry national revenues, worsening underlying re-
gime difficulties.
Guerrero faced challenges governing. His secretary of the treasury, Lorenzo
de Zavala, tried to collect direct taxes, but they were resisted by provinces as
unconstitutional. Without funds, Guerrero turned to the agiotistas, gaining
small revenues for large obligations. Meanwhile, the nation faced a Spanish
invasion. An expedition landed at Tampico on the northern Gulf Coast. Santa
Anna mobilized forces in Veracruz, as did Manuel de Mier y Terán in Tamau-
lipas; they defeated the invaders on September 11, 1829. Mexicans lived a brief
but intense moment of patriotic fervor; independence seemed assured.
The situation soon deteriorated. In December, an army camped in Xalapa
to guard against Spanish incursions demanded a return to constitutional
rule. Vice president Bustamente led a coalition opposing Guerrero for having
claimed extraordinary powers to suspend freedom of expression, collect direct
taxes, and impose forced contributions on sovereign states. The ex-insurgent
and arguably Mexico’s most popular early president fled home to the rugged
south of Mexico State. Bustamente assumed the presidency in early 1830 and
named Lucas Alamán secretary of internal and international relations.64 Again
Congress exceeded its faculties: it declared Bustamente’s Plan of Jalapa just,
recognized his rule—and made Guerrero ineligible.
New Beginnings, Escalating Conflicts,

and Texas Sucession in the 1830s
In the 1820s, political Mexicans debated central power versus provincial rights
in a context of economic collapse. In the 1830s, they forged new coalitions and
visions that came to be labeled conservative and liberal, aiming in different
ways to find economic revival and political consolidation. The decade shaped
Mexico’s future: conservative and liberal visions contended for national pri-
macy past midcentury while the secession of Texas led to a war in the 1840s
that saw an expansive United States take Mexico’s vast northern territories.
Though Bustamente sat as president, Lucas Alamán ruled from 1830 to 1832.
He promised social order and a full national treasury, yet pursued divisive po
litical policies. He sent the military against Guerrero; after months on the run
the popular strongman who fought for independence and became president
was captured, charged, summarily tried, and executed. Alamán also perse-
cuted Yorkino partisans, especially those who won the 1828 state congressional
elections. Many saw their state sovereignty attacked. Even state governments
that backed Bustamente strengthened militaries to resist centralization. Bus-
tamente’s secretary of war tried to strengthen the army, reducing the power
of the civic militias that served state governors. The attempt provoked more
discontent.
In economic affairs, Alamán reversed Guerrero’s policies. The new minister
opened ports to cloth and other imports, charging tariffs to fund the govern-
ment and a bank to finance imports of machinery for Mexican factories. The
Banco de Avío, the world’s first national development bank, aimed to back en-
trepreneurs committed to industrial production.65 It revealed Alamán’s vision
of a new Mexican economy. In the 1820s he promoted British investment to
revive silver mining. In the 1830s he used tariffs to facilitate industrial develop-
ment in Mexico—to limit British imports. Alamán hoped to balance revived
silver mines and new industries. By the mid-1830s factories operated in Puebla,
around Mexico City, and at Querétaro. They made industrial cottons, competed
with imports, and employed growing numbers of workers—threatening the
household cloth makers that Guerrero had aimed to protect. Nothing proved
easy or unifying—but Alamán had a vision of a new Mexico.
Alamán’s policies alienated merchants, including many importers at Veracruz.
Their ire reinforced opposition among t hose committed to state autonomy and
resisted impositions from the center. In 1832, Santa Anna led a coalition of mer-
chants and popular groups at Veracruz in another rising to topple a national
government he accused of taking power illegally, promoting centralism, and rul-
ing outside the constitution.
At first, Santa Anna’s movement gained little response. Other states were
working to return to the legal ways broken in 1828. New presidential elections
were due in 1832, and Manuel de Mier y Terán seemed an ideal candidate to
leaders of important states like Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Jalisco. But Mier
y Terán committed suicide, leaving federalists without a leader. Fearful that
Alamán would become president, frustrated states joined Santa Anna in rebel-
lion—on condition that that Gómez Pedraza return to complete the term he
won in 1828. It was an ingenious plan to reclaim a broken legal order. Busta-
mente saw the force arrayed against him and resigned.
In April 1833, elections in the state congresses chose Santa Anna as president
and Valentín Gómez Farías as vice president, both strong federalists. For the
first time in Mexico, radical liberals led by Gómez Farías took aim at the eco-
nomic power and cultural role of the Church.66 Since independence in 1821,
state governments had sought the patronato, the right granted by the papacy
to Spanish kings to name bishops and other high clerics. The Vatican insisted
that such rights did not extend to the nation or the states. Denied power over
the Church, states desperate for revenue eyed ecclesiastical wealth. The states
of Mexico, Michoacán, Jalisco, and Veracruz began to sell Church properties.
Some radicals, inspired by eighteenth-century Spanish reformers, argued that
Church lands should be distributed among small farmers to promote produc-
tion and popular welfare. Often proposed, redistributions rarely happened.
Conflict between liberals seeking revenues and churchmen defending clerical
rights and properties escalated. Most liberals w ere Catholics; most churchmen
accepted the nation and civil authorities—but resisted state intervention in
Church affairs.67
The dispute was not entirely about wealth and power. Church institutions
monopolized education in New Spain. José María Luis Mora, a liberal cleric
from Guanajuato, offered a plan for higher education focused on citizenship,
not religion. Governments would set programs of study based on the needs of
the republic. Oaxaca, Zacatecas, and the State of Mexico founded Institutes
of Arts and Sciences to educate new generations of liberals. Churchmen saw
wealth, power, and control of education attacked; they mobilized in opposi-
tion, insisting that liberals were attacking religion.68
Santa Anna left governing to his vice president; to implement reforms,
Gómez Farías was backed by a liberal national Congress elected in 1833 and by
powerful federalist interests. Still, reform provoked opposition. The vice presi-
dent dissolved the Mexico City Council, replacing it with one favorable to his
plans; he prohibited publications critical of his program; he passed laws remov-
ing political enemies. Many faced punishment without trials, fair or otherwise.
Opposition intensified.
When Gómez Farías and his congressional backers ended mandatory tithes
and state enforcement of clerical vows, the Church protested but acquiesced.
When the government gave states the right to name priests to vacant parishes,
the Church would not obey, and Gómez Farías suspended the law. Then in
1834 Congress decreed that bishops who did not accept state powers faced exile.
As divisions escalated, Generals Gabriel Durán and Mariano Arista led part
of the army in rebellion; Santa Anna defeated them—yet proved ambivalent
toward the policies of a government he led as president. He backed liberal mea
sures, but insisted that solving revenue difficulties came first. He balked when
Congress began to reform the military.69
Meanwhile, challenges mounted on Mexico’s northeastern frontier. Settle-
ment in Texas focused on San Antonio and grazing estates all around. Missions
extended farther out, aiming to subordinate native p eoples. Independence and
the collapse of the silver economy ended the markets for Texas livestock and
other economic ties with regions south. A Comanche empire asserted power
north and west. Meanwhile, the United States emerged from the War of 1812
with independence confirmed and control of the Mississippi basin. The 1820
Missouri Compromise settled the question of the expansion of slavery. The
United States was poised for growth: industry flourished in the Northeast; cot-
ton and slavery drove west across the South; expansion across the Mississippi
basin raised crops that fed eastern cities, southern plantations, and expanding
trade.70
Texas became the vortex where struggles to shape a Mexico facing economic
collapse met rising Comanche power, and the expanding United States. Waves
of settlers from the United States and Europe entered Texas, most committed
to expanding cotton and slavery on rich coastal plains. The politics of Texas set-
tlement began in 1819 when Spanish authorities announced that people from
Florida and Louisiana, Spanish domains before they joined the United States,
were welcome in Texas. Iturbide’s empire confirmed the rights of the settlers
and promoted the arrival of more. The Constitution of 1824 made colonization
a question for the states. Texas merged with Coahuila in one extensive frontier
state—a concession to the power of Miguel Ramos Arizpe. Coahuiltejano gov-
ernors ratified immigrant rights and granted new concessions to entrepreneurs
who sought land in Texas to settle colonists. Soon, newcomers outnumbered
tejanos in Texas.
The question of slavery brought rising challenges. The Constitution of
Coahuila and Texas declared all persons born in the state free—allowing new
settlers to keep the slaves they brought with them, but face a generational tran-
sition to free labor. In 1829, Mexican national authorities abolished slavery, but
permitted its persistence in Texas while prohibiting imports. The end of slave
labor would accelerate. In 1830, Alamán decreed national power over immi-
gration and colonization, and prohibited foreign settlement near the borders
of their country of origin. The rights of U.S. migrants to s ettle and maintain
slavery in Texas were challenged again. They began to discuss secession and an-
nexation to the United States.
Texans met in assemblies calling for the separation of Texas from Coahuila.
English-speaking settlers, the powerful among them committed to cotton and
slavery, would be a majority in the new state. In 1833, leading Texas entrepre-
neur and colonizer Stephen Austin trekked to Mexico City seeking separation
from Coahuila, the repeal of the immigration law of 1830, and tax exemptions.
Congress repealed the law, a centralist act unpopular with many federalists,
and extended Texas tax exemptions for three years. But without Mexican au-
thorization, Austin wrote to Texas calling for a state government. Gómez Farías
learned of the letter and arrested Austin, who was held in Mexico City until
1835. The situation was tense as 1833 became 1834.71 Samuel Houston and other
Texas leaders built armies to fight for Texas independence, aiming to l ater join
the United States. The threat alarmed Mexicans. Many saw a need for a more
centralized regime to prevent the fracture of the nation.
In 1834, Santa Anna reclaimed power from Gómez Farías and appointed
a cabinet of moderate federalists. Elections for Congress brought deputies
who opposed their predecessors’ radical measures. The new government began
to search for a political center. While Santa Anna, his cabinet, and the new
Congress agreed on the need to reform the constitution to prevent seces-
sions from breaking the nation, by 1835, several states seemed ready to defend
their autonomies with arms. Many feared that the nation was on the verge of
disintegration—not unimaginable given ongoing fragmentations in Central
America and the Río de la Plata. In Campeche on the Yucatán Peninsula and
at Cuernavaca just south of the capital, armed movements offered to defend
national unity against separatist threats. Santa Anna, long a staunch defender
of federalism as it favored Veracruz, began to see that states’ rights might lead
to disunion. He decided to fortify national power by reducing state militias.
Resistance came quickly, notably in silver-rich Zacatecas. Santa Anna sent the
national army against the Zacatecas militia—and faced acquiescence rather
than resistance. Mining wealth might fund provincial power; it also reduced
incentives to disruptive violence.
Authorities in Coahuila and Texas opposed the limits on state militias,
while local conflict set the governor against the state commander. Texas colo-
nists saw opportunity and refused to recognize e ither the state or the national
regime—though Austin convinced them not to declare independence. He knew
a declaration would end Mexican federalists’ support for Texas. But when
Santa Anna organized an expedition to end the rebellion, Texans saw no rea-
son for restraint. In March 1836 they met in convention to declare the Republic
of Texas. David Burnet was its first president; Lorenzo de Zavala—the Mexi-
can federalist pivotal to Guerrero’s rule in the late 1820s—was vice president.
Santa Anna claimed an (in)famous victory at the Alamo in San Antonio, but
Houston’s troops, mostly recruits from the United States, defeated him at San
Jacinto. Captured, Santa Anna recognized Texas.72
Defeat in Texas— though Mexican authorities did not recognize its
secession—intersected with rising discontent across Mexico. The press became
alarmed. In 1833, cholera had ravaged cities and rural regions from Veracruz,
through Puebla, and Mexico City and the surrounding State of Mexico—the
national heartland. The epidemic brought death to thousands and rising food
prices to the living; cholera blocked communications, closed mills, paralyzed
trade, and cut tax revenues.73 Meanwhile, cloth imports and new industries
spread discontent among artisans. Dispersed powers had no cure. Attacks on
the Church and the loss of Texas convinced many that liberal federalism had
failed.
Congress began work on a new constitution. In 1836 it promulgated Siete
Leyes Constitucionales—Seven Constitutional Laws—ending the Federal
Republic and creating central rule. Sovereignty no longer focused on states or
belonged to the people. Rather, it derived from the nation, to be exercised by
central authorities. The shift fused Spanish tradition and Cádiz liberalism. The
name Siete Leyes evoked the medieval Siete Partidas; politics became a rela-
tionship between central powers and city councils. The center and the cities
displaced the states and the people.74 National authorities named provincial
administrators to replace elected governors. The Leyes raised the population
required to keep municipal councils, denying self-rule to many towns and most
former indigenous republics. To vote, citizens faced income requirements for
the first time. Departments that replaced the states did elect juntas (reminis-
cent of Provincial Deputations)—but power came from the capital. The found
ers of the new polity feared congresses, national and provincial. They aimed
to strengthen national power, yet divided it between the president and a new
Supremo Poder Conservador—creating fractures at the top.75
Constitutional change could not alter entrenched ways; national officials
struggled to rule distant provinces and outlying communities. Cities and towns
kept autonomies. It proved difficult to limit political participation. The Siete
Leyes set income limits on voting and higher levels to old office; implementa-
tion was uneven. Departments, like the states they replaced, resisted national
claims on revenues. Unable to end financial shortfalls, Anastasio Bustamente,
now president under centralism, raised import taxes and turned once more to
the agiotistas, again trading short-term funds for mounting debts.76
The War for North America and the Struggle for Mexico
Mexico faced serious problems in the 1840s. Political life seemed a disaster. In
1840 a revolt led by General José Urrea and Valentín Gómez Farías called for a
return to federalism, but forces backing Bustamente prevailed. Fears of persistent
instability and escalating violence led to new coalitions and old propositions.
Some concluded that Mexicans could not govern themselves with republican
institutions because colonial customs and traditions prevailed. In August 1840
José María Gutiérrez Estrada proposed a return to constitutional monarchy.
Military leaders argued that only military rule could save the nation, yet the
military failed to impose order—and often provoked disorder. When Nico-
lás Bravo followed Bustamente as president u nder the new centralizing char-
ter, congressional voting favored the Federalists.77 U nder changing constitu-
tions, elections documented deepening fragmentation of political visions and
interests. There was never enough revenue to fund governments, national or
provincial—or to pay militaries that w ere always discontented and ready to
back the next political project. Ironically, in the same years the economy fi
nally began to strengthen.78 Mining had revived at Zacatecas in the 1830s; it
came back at Guanajuato in the 1840s. Meanwhile, a national textile industry
took hold. Mechanized factories concentrated growing numbers of workers at
Puebla and around Mexico City; the Hercules mill flourished in the canyon
east of Querétaro.
Reviving silver mines began to generate employment, profit, and revenue,
and stimulated trade that created more. Yet textile industrialization, British or
Mexican, threatened artisan families—and the income of women who spun
thread in struggling households. Villagers, tenants, and rancheros still ruled
most rural production, limiting profits among landlords who longed for colo-
nial agrarian capitalism. Still, as the 1840s began, economic revival was under
ere rising.79
way and calls for political balance w
Texas remained a headache. Politicians and military commanders saw a
rebel province; none had the power or resources to force reincorporation. A
greater problem was that Texas leaders claimed the Río Grande as its southern
and western boundary; they dreamed of sovereignty including northern Tam-
aulipas and half of New Mexico, even as the Comanche ruled west of Austin.
No Mexican president could accept such claims. The land between the Río
Grande and the Nueces, the historic border between Tamaulipas and Texas,
became the focus of discord and excuse for war.80
From the moment of secession in 1836, Texans sought u nion with the
United States. They failed because they would be a slave state, disrupting the
Missouri Compromise. In 1845, views in Washington were changing. James
Polk won the presidency with southern and expansionist backing, while the
Texas Republic faced fiscal crisis and rising debts. The U.S. Congress approved
annexation knowing that Mexico would see it as an act of war. The press in both
nations excited war fever. Mexican president José Joaquín de Herrera knew he
could not win a war against the United States—yet he could not state that
publicly. He might have accepted an independent Texas defined by historic
boundaries, but not with the new claims. Polk sent John Slidell to Mexico to buy
San Francisco and northern California. The acquisition would bring gold, rich
lands, Pacific ports, and a way to rebalance slave and free states in an expanded
Union. Herrera refused to meet Slidell. The Mexican press inflamed tensions,
accusing Herrera of preparing to cave to U.S. pressure.81
In December, General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, charged to lead an army
to defend the North, instead toppled the government. Lucas Alamán backed
him, as did other conservatives, arguing that monarchy was the only way to
keep Mexico from falling to the United States. Alamán also knew that Mexico
could not win a war against the United States—and that no government could
survive without promising to reclaim Texas.82 Polk was ready take Texas—and
more. He sent General Zachary Taylor to the banks of the Río Grande. The
United States had invaded Mexico.
Hostilities began. Mexico, a quarter century past independence, had nei-
ther a strong national regime nor a viable economy; it lacked a military ready
for international war; it had no navy; and it had neither the unity nor the re-
sources to mobilize for war. By contrast, the United States, seventy-five years a
nation, had forged a regime grounded in a burgeoning economy combining
southern cotton, northern industry, and westward expansion; it had profes-
sional armed forces trained at West Point and Annapolis; its resources for war
were beyond any Mexico could muster. Mexican leaders knew all this, as did
men in Washington—who saw the chance to take a continent before Mexico
might reach a consolidation that allowed resistance.
As war began, Mexican divisions persisted. State leaders often looked to
local interests, promising to defend their states while providing few troops or
funds to defend the border, ports, or the capital. As the U.S. navy blocked Mex-
ican ports, Yucatán declared neutrality to prevent an invasion; merchants in
Culiacán, Sinaloa, took advantage of U.S. occupation to profit. There was real-
ism in such decisions, but little national patriotism.83 Some indigenous groups,
rarely committed to a national project that threatened their lands and autono-
mies as often as it offered rights and inclusion, took the war as a time to rise for
local and regional independence—among Zapotecs at the Isthmus of Tehu-
antepec; among the diverse people of the Sierra Gorda (north of Querétaro);
and famously among the Maya of Yucatán, who rose in what Mexicans called a
Caste War. Movements for indigenous independence caused fear among Mexi-
can elites.84
Taylor’s army crossed the Río Grande to take Mexico’s northern cities.
Small U.S. forces took New Mexico and California. Winfield Scott landed at
Veracruz and quickly left disease-ridden lowlands to march to the capital.
Facing multiple invading forces that were well armed and well provisioned,
Mexican politicians and generals concluded that only Santa Anna could raise
a defense. He did what he could in impossible circumstances, slowing the drive
of Taylor’s forces from the north. But in August 1847, Scott’s army was poised
outside Mexico City. National Guard forces, cadets of the Colegio Militar,
some regular troops, and common citizens joined resistance at Churubusco,
Molino del Rey, and Chapultepec. Nothing stopped U.S. troops. National
leaders left the capital to keep government alive in Querétaro. For two days
in September the working people of Mexico City rose to hurl stones at U.S.
soldiers, defending their city even if their leaders and army could not defend
the nation and its capital.85
In Querétaro, a new president, Manuel de la Peña, assembled a cabinet
and Congress. Radical federalists argued to continue the war—an irony as the
states whose interests they defended contributed so few men and resources.
The government entered peace negotiations early in 1848. It recognized Texas
as a state of the United States. It accepted the loss of New Mexico (including
Arizona) and California in exchange for an indemnity of 15 million pesos. The
treaty signed at Guadalupe led to long challenges. Many Mexicans remained
north of the border. By treaty, the United States committed to defend their
rights as citizens and landholders, rights repeatedly abrogated in practice. By
treaty, too, the United States accepted the duty to protect the border, a com-
mitment also rarely kept.
After the War That Decided Everything

The war of 1846 to 1848 set the f uture course of Mexico, the United States, and
North America. Important issues took decades and many lives to resolve: the
roles of central powers, liberal policies, and indigenous communities in Mex-
ico; the questions of slavery, its expansion, and national unity in the United
States. Still, by 1850 it was clear that Mexico would be a nation without a
North to settle and develop, and that the United States would be a continental
power driving across a new West. In the new world of industrial capitalism, the
United States took hemispheric hegemony as Mexico faced limited develop-
ment. We can only ask what Mexico might have become with the lands from
Texas through California, and what the United States would be without them.
Both nations needed two decades after the war to set national politics and
find ways forward. In the United States, new territories reopened the question
of slavery’s expansion, driving divisions that led to Civil War—the deadliest of
all conflicts of nation making in the Americ as. The 1865 Union victory ended
slavery, setting the expanded nation on course to industrialization and expan-
sion, sustained by mines and lands once Mexican.86
San Francisco
U.S. St. Louis

Los Angeles Santa Fé
San Diego
New Orleans
San Antonio
Chihuahua
Monterey GULF OF
N
N E W S PA I N MEXICO
Zacatecas
Guadalajara Guanajuato
Veracruz
PACIFIC Mexico City
OCEAN
Oaxaca
0 100 200 300 400 500 mi Guatemala
0 200 400 600 800 km
Map 7.2. Mexico in North America, ca. 1855
Mexico struggled through postwar years of national doubt. A moderate re-

gime gave way to centralist conservatism uniting Alamán and Santa Anna and
hinting of monarchism. A revived liberal movement took power in 1855 and
began a radical transformation. Reformers ended the separate jurisdictions of
the Church and the military—and privatized the lands of Church institutions
and indigenous communities. A Church-backed reaction (most communities
stood aside) brought the Reform War of 1858 to 1860. Liberal victory came with
soaring debts, facilitating conservatives’ recruitment of a European interven-
tion, French occupation, and the imposed monarchy of Maximilian in 1864—a
short-lived regime that proved more liberal than many Mexican liberals. The
1867 restoration of the republic under the long-resistant Benito Juárez brought
a welcome to U.S. capital, a turn to privatizing community lands, a new round
of regional revolts, and in time the consolidation of a politically authoritarian,
economically liberal regime under Porfirio Díaz—who had fought French oc-
cupation but welcomed a new Mexico rebuilt as an economic dependency of
the United States.87
Notes
1 John Tutino, “Capit alist Foundations: Spanish North America, Mexico, and the
United States,” in Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States, ed.
Tutino (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).
2 Alexander von Humboldt, Ensayo político sobre el reino de Nueva España (Mexico
City: Porrúa, 1966).
3 Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity
through the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13:2 (2002),
391–427.
4 John Tutino, “Haciendas y comunidades en el Valle de México: El crecimiento
commercial y la persistencia de los pueblos a la sombra del capital colonial, 1500–
1800,” in Historia general del Estado de México, ed. María Teresa Jarquín Ortega
(Zinacatepec: El Colegio Mexiquense, 2011).
5 See Brian Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
6 On the South, the place to begin is Karen Caplan, Indigenous Citizens: Local Lib
eralism in Early National Oaxaca and Yucatán (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009).
7 Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North
America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), part 1.
8 This section’s discussion of the eighteenth-century silver economy synthesizes
Tutino, Making a New World, part 2.
irginia Guedea, “La organización militar,” in El gobierno
9 On local militias, see V
provincial en la Nueva España 1570–1787, ed. Woodrow Borah (Mexico City:
unam, 1985), 125–148; for the army, Christon I. Archer, The Army in Bourbon
Mexico, 1760–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977).
10 See Carlos Marichal, La bancarrota del virreinato: Nueva España y las finanzas del
imperio español, 1780–1810 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999).
11 Tutino, “Haciendas y comunidades.”
12 Doris Ladd, The Making of a Strike: Mexican Silver Workers Struggles in Real del
Monte, 1766–1785 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).
13 See Rodolfo Pastor, Campesinos y reformas: La mixteca, 1700–1856 (Mexico City:
El Colegio de México, 1987); Brian R. Hamnett, Politics and Trade in Southern
Mexico 1750–1821 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1871); and Jeremy
Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento
and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821 (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
14 Again, this section’s discussion of the North and the Bajío synthesizes Tutino,
Making a New World.
15 Felipe Castro Gutiérrez, Nueva ley y nuevo rey: Reformas borbónicas y rebeliones
populares en Nueva España (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1996) and Tutino,
Making a New World, chap. 4.
16 Real wages fell across New Spain in the late eighteenth c entury. See Amílcar
Chaullú and Aurora Gómez Galvariato, “Mexico’s Real Wages in the Age of Diver-
gence, 1780–1930,” Revista de historia económica 33:1 (2015), 83–122.
17 José Miranda, Las ideas y las instituciones políticas mexicanas: Primera parte
1521–1820 (Mexico City: unam, 1978).
18 For the regions near Mexico City, see Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish
Rule (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), and James Lockhart, The
Nahuas after the Conquest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). For
regions south, see Pastor, Campesinos y reformas, and Caplan, Indigenous Citizens.
On judicial mediations, see Owensby, Empire of Law, on the early period and
William Taylor’s classic Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican
Villages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979) on the eighteenth
century.
19 See John Tutino, “Provincial Spaniards, Haciendas, and Indian Towns,” in Provinces
of Early Mexico, ed. Ida Altman and James Lockhart (Los Angeles: ucla Latin
American Center, 1976), 177–194, and Claudia Guarisco, Los indios del valle de
México y la construcción de una nueva sociabilidad política, 1777–1835 (Zinacatepec:
El Colegio Mexiquense, 2003).
20 This reflects Tutino, Making a New World. On Spanish council politics, see Beatriz
Rojas, Las instituciones de gobierno y la élite local: Aguascalientes del siglo XVII hasta
la independencia (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1998); Gabriel Torres Puga,
“La ciudad novohispana: Ensayo sobre su vida política, 1521–1800,” in Historia
política de la Ciudad de México desde su fundación hasta el año 2000, ed. Ariel
Rodríguez Kuri (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2012), 143–158; and Esteban
Sánchez de Tagle, Del gobierno y su tutela: La reforma a las haciendas locales del
siglo XVIII y el cabildo de México (Mexico City: inah, 2014).
21 Alejandra Irigoin and Regina Grafe, “Bargaining for Absolutism: A Spanish Path
to Nation-State and Empire Building,” Hispanic American Historical Review
88:2 (2008), 173–209; Iván Escamilla González, Los intereses mal entendidos: El
Consulado de Comerciantes de México y la monarquía española, 1700–1739 (Mexico
City: unam, 2011).
22 Gabriel Torres Puga, Opinión pública y censura en Nueva España: Indicios de un
silencio imposible, 1767–1794 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2010).
23 See Tutino, Making a New World, chap. 5.
24 Again, this discussion of social pressures in the Bajío synthesizes Tutino, Making a
New World, part 2.
25 Emilio La Parra, Manuel Godoy: La aventura del poder (Madrid: Taurus, 2002).

26 See Gisela von Wobeser, Dominación colonial: La consolidación de vales reales,
1804–1812 (Mexico City: unam, 2003).
27 Tomás Antonio Rodríguez Campomanes to Duque de Medinaceli Santisteban,
San Juan Bautista Xiquipulco, Mexico, January 2, 1808, and T. A. Rodriguez Cam-
pomanes to Fernando, Prince of Asturias, January 2, 1808, in Archivo Histórico
Nacional, Spain, Estado, vol. 57, documents 46–47. See also Guillermina del Valle
Pavón, Finanzas piadosas y redes de negocios: Los mercaderes de la ciiudad de México
ante de la Crisis de Nueva España, 1804–1808 (Mexico City: Instituto Mora, 2012).
28 A. Ávila, “Nueva España, 1808–1809,” in En el umbral de las revoluciones hispánicas:
El bienio 1808–1810, ed. Roberto Breña (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2010),
129–148.
29 The rise and fall of Hidalgo’s insurgency is outlined in John Tutino, From Insurrection
to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); on Querétaro loyalty, see John Tutino,
“Querétaro y los orígenes de la nación mexicana: Las políticas étnicas de soberanía,
contrainsurgencia, y independencia,” in México a la luz de sus revoluciones, ed. Laura
Rojas and Susan Deeds (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2014), 17–64. On
Hidalgo, see Carlos Herrejón Peredo, Hidalgo, maestro, párroco, insurgente (Mexico
City: Clío, 2011).
30 A. Ávila, J. A. Serrano, and Juan Ortiz Escamilla, Actores y escenarios de la Inde
pendencia. Guerra, pensamiento e instituciones 1808–1825, ed. Enrique Florescano
(Mexico City: fce, 2010), 115–203.
31 On the Cádiz project, see Roberto Breña, El primer liberalismo español y los procesos
de emancipación de América, 1808–1824 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México,
2008).
32 The politics of the era are synthesized in A. Ávila, En nombre de la nación (Mexico
City: Taurus, 2002). See also Jaime Rodriguez, We Are Now the True Spaniards:
Sovereignty, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico,
1808–1824 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
33 John Tutino, “De Hidalgo a Apatzingán: Insurgencia popular y proyectos politicos
en la Neuva España revolucionaria 1811–1814,” in La insurgencia Mexicana y la
Constitución de Apatzingán, 1808–1824, ed. Ana Carolina Ibarra (Mexico City:
unam, 2014), 49–78; and John Tutino, “The Revolution in Mexican Indepen
dence: Insurgency and the Renegotiation of Property, Production, and Patriarchy
in the Bajío, 1800–1855,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78:3 (1998), 367–418.
34 John Tutino, “Soberanía quebrada, insurgencias populares y la independencia de
México: La guerra de independencias, 1808–1821,” Historia Mexicana 59:1 (2009),
11–75.
35 See Virginia Guedea, La insurgencia en el Departamento del Norte: Los Llanos de
Apan y la Sierra de Puebla, 1810–1816 (Mexico City: unam, 1996).
36 On the Villagráns and other regional rebels, the key work is Eric Van Young, The
Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Struggle for Mexican Inde
pendence, 1810–1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); on Otomí
insurgency, see John Tutino, “Buscando independencias populares: Conflicto social
y insurgencia agrariań en el Mexquital mexicano, 1800–1815,” in Las guerras de
independencia en la Ameríca española, ed. Marta Terán and José Antonio Serrano
Ortega (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2002), 295–321.
37 On the Huasteca, see Michael Ducey, A Nation of Villages: Riot and Rebellion in
the Mexican Huasteca, 1750–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004);
on Veracruz, see Juan Ortiz Escamilla, El teatro de la guerra: Veracruz, 1750–1825
(Valencia: Universitat Jaume I, 2008).
38 The classic work is Ernesto Lemoine, Morelos y la revolución de 1810 (Mexico City:
unam, 1979); see also Peter Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of
Mexico’s National State: Guerrero, 1800–1857 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1996), and In the Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca,
1750–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
39 Brian Hamnett, Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750–1824 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 150–177.
40 Ávila, En nombre de la nación, chapter 4.
41 See Tutino, “The Revolution in Mexican Independence.”
42 See María Eugenia Romero Sotelo, Minería guerra: La economía de Nueva España,
1810–1821 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1887).
43 On the military, the key study is Juan Ortiz Escamilla, Guerra y gobierno: Los
pueblos y la independencia de México, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: El Colegio de México,
2014); on communities and patriotic militias, see Guarisco, Los indios del valle de
México.
4
4 This is detailed in Tutino, “Querétaro y los orígenes de la nación.”
45 The Iguala movement is synthesized in Ávila, En nombre de la nación, and Tutino,
“Soberanía quebrada.”
46 The best analysis of 1820–1821, the military, and independence is Rodrigo Moreno
Gutiérrez, “Las fuerzas armadas en el proceso de consumación de independencia:
Nueva España, 1820–1821” (PhD diss., unam, Mexico City, 2014).
47 Timothy Anna, Forging Mexico 1821–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1998).
48 John Tutino, “National State, Liberal Utopia, and Indigenous Communities,”
paper presented at the Colegio de México, October 2009.
49 On Iturbide’s popular base, see Torcuato S. Di Tella, National Popular Politics in
Early Independent Mexico, 1820–1847 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1996), 105–132, and Richard Warren, Vagrants and Citizens: Politics and
the Masses in Mexico City from Colony to Republic (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly
Resources, 2001).
50 A. Ávila, Para la libertad: Los republicanos en tiempos del imperio 1821–1823
(Mexico City: unam, 2004).
51 Lucas Alamán, in his Historia de Méjico, 709–713, assumes that the Acta de Casa
Mata originated in the Masonic lodges; our view derives from Ávila, Para la liber
tad, 257.
52 See John Tutino, “Hacienda Social Relations in Mexico: The Chalco Region in the
Era of Independence,” Hispanic American Historical Review 55:3 (1975), 496–528;

From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico; and “The Revolution in Mexican
Independence.”
53 Alamán is usually seen as conservative, centralist and monarchist; as a federalist,
see A. Ávila, “La Constitución de la República Federal,” in México: Un siglo de
historia constitucional (1808–1917): Estudios y perspectivas, ed. Cecilia Noriega and
Alicia Salmerón (Mexico City: Poder Judicial de la Federación/Instituto Mora,
2009), 43–61. On Chiapas annexation, see Mario Vázquez Olivera, “Chiapas,
entre Centroamérica y México, 1821–1826,” in El establecimiento del federalismo en
México, ed. Josefina Zoraida Vázquez (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2003),
582–608.
54 Ávila, En nombre de la nación, 262–280.
55 See Nettie Lee Benson, The Provincial Deputation in Mexico: Harbinger of Provin
cial Autonomy, Independence, and Federalism (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1992).
56 A. Ávila, “Liberalismos decimonónicos: De la historia de las ideas a la historia
cultural e intellectual,” in Ensayos sobre la nueva historia política de América Latina,
siglo XIX, ed. Guillermo Palacios (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, n.d.). On
popular liberalism, see Jesús Hernández Jaimes, “Actores indios y Estado nacional:
Las rebeliones indígenas en el sur de México 1842–1846,” Estudios de Historia
Moderna y Contemporánea de México 26 ( July–December 2003), 5–44.
57 Josefina Z. Vázquez, “El reconocimiento y tratados comerciales: Cartas de identi-
dad de un nuevo estado,” in Tratados de México: Soberanía y territorio 1821–1910,
ed. J. Z. Vázquez and M. del R. González (Mexico City: Secretaría de Relaciones
Exteriores, 2000), 19–107.
58 Jesús Hernández Jaimes, La formación de la Hacienda pública mexicana y las tensio
nes centro-periferia, 1821–1835 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2013).
59 Barbara Tenenbaum, México en la época do los agiotistas, 1821–1857 (Mexico City:
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990).
60 Tutino, “Hacienda Social Relations.” For studies of the states, see J. Z. Vázquez,
El establecimiento del federalismo en México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México,
2003).
61 Tutino, “The Revolution in Mexican Independence.”
62 M. E. Vázquez Semadeni, La formación de una cultura política republicana: El
debate público sobre la masonería, México, 1821–1830 (Mexico City: unam/El
Colegio de Michoacán, 2010); Di Tella, National Popular Politics.
63 See Ávila, “La presidencia de Vicente Guerrero,” in Gobernantes mexicanos, ed. Will
Fowler (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008), 75–96.
64 Catherine Andrews, Entre la espada y la constitución. El general Anastasio Busta
mante, 1780–1853 (Ciudad Victoria: Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas, 2008).
65 Robert Potash, El Banco de Avío en México: El fomento de la industria, 1821–1857
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economíca, 1959), and Walter Berneker, De agi
otistas a empresarios: En torno a la temprana industrialización mexicana, siglo XIX
(Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1992).
66 Josefina Z. Vázquez, “La primera presidencia de Antonio López de Santa Anna,”
in Fowler, Gobernantes mexicanos, 97–117; Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).
67 Brian Connaughton, Entre la voz de Dios y el llamado de la patria: Religión,
identidad y ciudadanía en México, siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2010).
68 Mora, “Revista política,” in Obras sueltas (Paris: Librería de Rosa, 1837), 1, clxxxii–
ccxxxv. On reforms, see Charles Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora
1821–1853 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).
9
6 Vázquez, “La primera presidencia.”
70 See Andreas Reichstein, Rise of Lone Star: The Making of Texas (College Station:
Texas A&M University Press, 1989).
71 Vázquez, “La primera presidencia,” and J. Z. Vázquez, Décadas de inestabilidad y
amenazas México, 1821–1848 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2010).
72 See Randolph Campbell, An Empire for Slavery (Baton Rouge: lsu Press, 1989),
and Paul Lack, The Texas Revolutionary Experience (College Station: Texas a&m
73 Hernández Jaimes, La formación de la Hacienda pública.
74 Reynaldo Sordo Cedeño, El congreso en la primera república centralista (Mexico
City: El Colegio de México, 1993).
75 David Pantoja Morán, El Supremo poder conservador: El diseño institucional en las
primeras constituciones mexicanas (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2005).
76 See Michael Costeloe, The Central Republic in Mexico: Hombres de bien in the Age
of Santa Anna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
7 7 Cecilia Noriega Elío, El Constituyente de 1842 (Mexico City: unam, 1986).
78 See Araceli Ibarra Bellón, El comercio y el poder en México, 1821–1864 (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998).
79 See Mariano Otero, Ensayo sobre el verdadero estado de la cuestión social y política
que se agita en la Republica mexicana (Mexico City: Ignacio Cumplido, 1842).
80 On navigation of the Río Grande: David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the
Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
81 David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon and the Mexican War
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).
82 Miguel Soto, La conspiración monárquica en México, 1845–1846 (Mexico City:
eosa, 1988).
83 On provincial politics in times of war, see Laura Herrera Serna, ed., México en
guerra (1846–1848) (Mexico City: Conaculta, 1997), and J. Z. Vázquez, ed., México
al tiempo de su guerra con Estados Unidos, 1846–1848 (Mexico City: fce, 1997); on
indigenous insurgencies, Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico.
8 4 On indigenous independence, see chapter 10 by Erick Langer.
85 Luis Fernando Granados, Sueñan las piedras: Alzamiento ocurrido en la ciudad de
México, 14, 15, 16 de Septiembre de 1847 (Mexico City: Era, 2003).
86 That the U.S. Civil War came out of the war with Mexico has been recognized
at least since John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum
Republic, vol. 1, Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1995); Adam Rothman’s chapter 3 in this volume reflects the
scholarly consensus.
87 The 1850s turn to liberalism in Mexico begs for a new synthesis. The best work in
English is Richard Sinkin, The Mexican Reform, 1855–1876 (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1976). Erika Pani, Para mexicanizar el Segundo imperio (Mexico City:
Colegio de México, 2001), provides an essential rethinking of Maximilian’s empire.
For contrasting studies of the later consolidation, see François-Xavier Guerra,
Del antiguo regimen a la revolución, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1988), and John Hart, Empire and Revolution (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002).
8
The Republic of Guatemala

Stitching Together a New Country
Jordana Dym
In October 1825, London’s New Monthly Magazine commented that Guate-

mala, like America’s other newly independent countries, “fixed the attention of
the sixteenth century, [and] deserves no less to occupy the undivided consid-
eration of the nineteenth” with “a distinct place in the geography of modern
America, and [to] claim forcibly the attention of the commercial world.”1 But
the article described not today’s country, but all of Central America, a newly
declared republic that claimed the territory stretching from Chiapas to Costa
Rica, which had been part of the Spanish Kingdom of Guatemala. Thus the
magazine fixed its attention on colonial “Guatemala,” not the single federal
state that bore the name in 1825. The confusion had many c auses, not least a
tradition of conflating the history of Guatemala City with that of the kingdom,
familiar to English audiences from the 1823 translation of Domingo Juarros’s
history (1808–1821), but dating back at least to the seventeenth-century Recor
dación Florida of Francisco Antonio Fuentes y Guzmán.2
While the state of Guatemala struggled to teach foreigners to associate its
name with its territory, internally the challenge was to stitch many and di-
verse local identities and ambitions into a single “Guatemalan” framework.
The principle of uti possedetis allowed independent Spanish American states
to establish countries based on colonial territories,3 but d idn’t guide new gov-
ernments’ internal redistricting. Between separatist movements in the western
highlands and rebellions in the eastern lowlands from the 1820s into the 1840s,
getting the seven departments of the new state to identify as “Guatemalan” was
as large a challenge to the new country as getting foreign powers to distinguish
Guatemala from the other states of the Central American federation.
Encouraging foreigners to scale down their understanding and citizens to
scale up their identity to include the newly assembled state meant teaching
both groups to put aside political, economic, and demographic understandings
inherited from the eighteenth-century Bourbon monarchy’s reformist policies
and the early nineteenth-century constitutional monarchy’s revolutionary in-
novations, neither of which had created a polity that looked like independent
Guatemala. Considering Guatemala as an innovation or invention of inde
pendence goes against the grain of much Guatemalan historiography; other
wise nuanced scholarship anachronistically takes “Guatemala” as an entity back
into the colonial period or as an unquestioned result of independence and pes-
simistically follows the u nion’s failure, not the state’s complex endurance.4 The
distinctive shape of the twentieth-century country frequently accompanies
studies of the nineteenth century, although contemporary maps show a more
amorphous and less determined territory more closely related to its contingent
and emergent reality.5
Yet the story of the birth and consolidation of this country is not unique.
As Alfredo Ávila, John Tutino, and Roberto Breña argue in this volume, Gua-
temala’s divided origins, built partly on Mesoamerican and partly on Spanish
structures, compare with that of New Spain (Mexico). The crisis of the Spanish
monarch (1808–1814) offered opportunity as well as disruption. Chambers’s
study of how postindependence Peru and Bolivia “traced and retraced” former
Inca territories offers another parallel. The dissolution of Gran Columbia into
Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia produced states that also acquired full sov-
ereignty after emerging from a larger polity.
In essence, fledgling Guatemala experienced similar challenges to Spanish
American countries that remained united: cycles of reform and resistance;
The Republic of Guatemala — 279

dissension among elites divided by region, f amily, and ideas about the rhythm
and depth of innovation needed; the actions and interests of popular classes
inclined to resist changes perceived as economically destructive or politically
alien and unwelcome; the implanting of republican and constitutional systems
of government interspersed with periods of less representative rule; and the
influence of European and North American commercial interests. Considering
the origins, birth, and eventual stabilization of Guatemala as a polity, this essay
describes two processes: first, how districts without central ties and individuals
with initial loyalties to only a locality, class, or ethnic community learned to
accept a place within a Guatemalan republic; second, the emergence by 1851 of
a viable country that still faced tensions between government and society. The
story of Guatemala is thus a story of the emergence of an independent country
out of a larger federation that merits comparison with similar “survivor” states
from the former Gran Colombia and across Spanish America.
Isthmian Origins (1542–1821)

The territories and peoples that formed the state of Guatemala in 1825 owed
much to pre-European Maya civilizations, the initial organization of the Span-
ish empire, and the reorganization of the state-society relationship during the
eighteenth-century Bourbon monarchy. Spanish Central America, known as
the Kingdom, Audiencia (territorial court), or Captaincy General of Guate-
mala, was established by the Hapsburg monarchy in 1542, administratively
uniting communities and territories conquered by half a dozen Spanish adel
antados and their diverse native allies between t oday’s Chiapas (Mexico) and
Costa Rica.6 Hernán Cortés’s deputy Pedro de Alvarado defeated the Quiché
and Kaqchiquel kingdoms of highland Guatemala as well as the Pipil regions of
what is now El Salvador; the Montejo f amily similarly conquered the p eoples
of today’s Honduras and Yucatán Peninsula, while Pedrarias Dávila’s forces
took much of today’s Nicaragua and Costa Rica. So the broad strokes of
Guatemala’s core territory and Central America’s regional organization and
capitals, including approximate ethnic and political divides, date to the early
sixteenth century. So, too, does the emergence of Alvarado’s capital, the mul-
tiply relocated Guatemala City—in its present location since 1773—as the
political, commercial, religious, fiscal, educational, and judicial capital.
Independent Guatemala’s demography also owes much to the colonial pe-
riod. What would later be “Guatemalan” highland districts were originally set-
tled by Mayan peoples who retained their culture and languages while granted
lands and limited self-rule as indigenous republics during centuries of Span-
280 — Jordana Dym
ish rule. On the cusp of independence, Juarros catalogued languages including
Kiche, Kakchiquel, Mam, Pocomam, Nahuatl, and Zutuhil, still spoken today.7
Late eighteenth-century censuses suggested the provinces in today’s Guatemala
were about half Maya, 10 percent European, and 40 percent “mixed race” (la-
dino, mulatto, mestizo) with European, American, and/or African ancestry.
Geographically, the Maya lived predominantly in the western highlands, in
mountains, the most densely populated part of the isthmus. What would be-
come the coffee piedmont, the southern (Pacific) coast, and the Oriente high-
lands were both more “ladino” and less densely populated.8 In addition to the
estimated half a million people living under Spanish rule, independent indig-
enous communities like the Lacandones or Itzá lived in the Petén area border-
ing New Spain (Mexico). 9
Guatemala’s colonial communities did not form a single political entity but
half a dozen territorial jurisdictions that operated as three distinct economic
regions. The central valley and highlands (altiplano) combined agriculture and
artisan textile and other productions, supplying urban centers.10 In 1819, Anti-
gua and Amatitlán in the central valley received Crown authorization to pro-
duce grana, a red dye extracted from crushing an insect that fed on the nopal
cactus; it became the country’s principal export in the 1840s.11 Significant
highland produce went north to trade in southern Mexico. The more sparsely
settled Oriente (its principal populations: Santa Rosa, Quaquiniquilapa, and
Mataquesquintla), was connected by the Royal Road that led to Salvadoran in-
digo zones and Honduran and Nicaraguan c attle ranches. Along the road, the
mostly mulatto p eople of the Oriente provided pasturage for c attle heading to
Guatemala City and worked as mule-drivers.12 The eighteenth-century mili-
tary district of Petén, now frequented by tourists visiting Mayan ruins, was a
sparsely inhabited zone where the first archaeological finds—“perfectly spheri-
cal” stones—were just coming to government attention.13
Economically, each district was tied to Guatemala City, the principal com-
mercial center and the region’s link to Europe through Atlantic ports, via legal
trade with Spain and illicit trade with G reat Britain. But producers and con-
sumers also bypassed the capital for regional trade in Central America’s largely
self-sufficient internal market that cushioned residents from the worst blows
of the declining world market for indigo. Internal trade fueled efforts made
to retain Central American political as well as economic unity.14 Guatemala
City businessmen developed financial investments (and often family ties) to
San Salvador, which produced indigo, the region’s principal export crop;15 to
Chiapas, Honduras, and Costa Rica (which raised tobacco); to Tegucigalpa
and Chiquimula (where limited silver was mined); and to Comayagua and
Nicaragua (where cattle grazed and mules were raised). Internal trade and
business ties, though important, did not prove strong enough to draw distinct
economies into a single state system a fter independence.
In the eighteenth century, a wave of Spanish immigration (especially
Basques, including the Aycinena family) and Enlightenment-oriented royal
officials did not appreciably change the area’s overall demography; it did help
revitalize elite commercial ties to the metropolis and revive intellectual inquiry
and the foundation of important institutions, including a merchants’ chamber
and a lawyers’ guild.16 Along with university professors and alumni (Guate-
mala’s San Carlos graduated over thirteen hundred from 1775 to 1821), they
were deeply involved with Bourbon officials in creating a short-lived Sociedad
Económica de Amantes del País devoted to improving the kingdom’s politi
cal economy, and the Gazeta de Guatemala (1797–1816), a newspaper that was
based in Guatemala City but imagined a Central American public that it would
inform and instruct. Indigenous p eoples—one of whose g reat ancient centers at
Palenque (Chiapas) was just being explored—were encouraged to join modern
society by adopting Spanish clothes and language; all “learned” men were invited
to be useful, regardless of “birth or class.”17
Guatemala City retained its centrality as an intellectual hub. However, Car-
los III’s (r. 1759–1788) reforms encouraging increased accountability to Spain
diluted the capital’s authority within the kingdom and f uture state. Fiscal re-
forms (1760s) established royal coffers in the provinces and increased sales
taxes,18 while territorial reforms (1784 and 1786) consolidated over a dozen dis-
tricts into four intendancies—Comayagua (Honduras), León (Nicaragua), Ci-
udad Real (Chiapas), and San Salvador (El Salvador). 19 Notably, the area that
became the state of Guatemala remained fragmented as a patchwork of small
districts reporting directly to the kingdom’s capital rather than a consolidated
administration.20 In efforts to reduce the extension, both literal and indirect, of
Guatemala City and its cabildo over “its” valley, the Crown essentially halved
the original jurisdiction when relocating the capital to the Valle de la Ermita in
1773 after a devastating earthquake.21 Thus, on the cusp of imperial crisis, priest
and chronicler Domingo Juarros’s 1808 history identified ten “provinces” in
the f uture state of Guatemala, grouped into southern (Pacific), “central” (land-
bound), and northern (Atlantic) regions.22 The formal political consolidation
experienced in the rest of the isthmus did not occur in “Guatemala.”
Ironically, fragmentation deepened even as government authority strength-
ened. Bourbon policy promoted reviving or establishing city councils to im-
prove imperial communication and control, creating political representation
and institutions that supported creole, indigenous, and ladino communities
282 — Jordana Dym
GULF OF MEXICO
CARIBBEAN
KIN SEA
GD BEL IZ E
OM Rio Lago Petén Itzá
OF Usa
GU ma
AT ci
11 N
nt
EM
a
AL
PACIFIC OCEAN
A
M E X I CO
10 Rio Dulce
1 Coban
12
a
gu
M ota
R io
9
2 HO ND UR AS
Quetzaltenango Chiquimula
6
7 Guatemala City
3
Antigua
4
Escuintla
PA C I F I C 5
OCEAN 8
0 30 60 mi
EL SALVAD O R
0 50 100 km
1 Provincia de Totonicapán 7 Corregimiento de Amatitanes y Sacatepéquez

2 Corregimiento de Quetzaltenango 8 Alcaldia Mayor de Sonsonate
3 Alcaldia Mayor de Sololá 9 Corregimiento de Chiquimula y Acasaguastlan
4 Alcaldia Mayor de Suchitépequez 10 Alcaldia Mayor de Verapáz
5 Alcaldia Mayor de Escuintla y Guazacapan 11 Castillo de Petén
6 Corregimiento de Chimaltenango 12 Castillo de Omoa
Present-day border of Guatemala
Map 8.1. Districts of the Kingdom of Guatemala that became

part of the state of Guatemala
in distinct locales. Creole—American Spanish—“provincianos” in the west-
ern highlands organized politically around two different towns that became
a counterweight to Guatemala City: Antigua (Sacatepéquez), the earthquake-
destroyed capital that reestablished its municipal government and political
voice in 1799,23 and Quezaltenango, an important center of agricultural prod-
ucts where creole and peninsular migrants established their own cabildo and
power center in addition to the existing native cabildo in 1805. Th ese two ca-
bildos immediately protected the interests of powerful families from the influ-
ence of t hose based in Guatemala City, helping royal agents to govern the re-
gion.24 Others, too, had a say in the new system. The new jurisdictions created
to reduce Guatemala City’s reach incorporated Petapa, Amatitan, and Escuinta
as villas “with a separate government” for their Spanish and mulatto residents.
Indigenous communities, too, felt the heavier hand of government through
new settlements including Chamiquín (Verapaz).25
Arguably, the Bourbon emphasis on expanded municipal government did
the most to create a region and identity in the Oriente. Th ere, primarily ladino
or mestizo communities lacked a cabildo de españoles or pueblo de indios until
Bourbon royal officials set up municipal governments to increase tax revenue and
promote militia recruitment while bringing “political and social (civil) life for
their inhabitants to live in peace and justice” in Christian society and rule. New
urban centers were established in Iztapa, a Pacific Coast port, and Santa Rosa,
in the Oriente’s Valle de Jumay in the military district of Verapaz.26 The new
communities, which in the short term increased secular authority, often played
important roles in postindependence revolts and negotiations with state capi-
tals as, not coincidentally, the town institutions founded to serve imperial in-
terests often rallied residents for their own purposes.
On the Cusp of Independence

Despite its intellectual vibrancy, by the turn of the nineteenth c entury the
core area of Guatemala struggled economically, in large part due to external
constraints. The aggressive Bourbon drive to raise revenue eventually prevailed:
declines in Indian tribute w ere offset by increased sales tax and state mono
poly revenues, but those, in turn, were offset by the costs of defending Spanish
interests.27 Between the tax policy, the consolidación of Church debt in 1804
and later donativos sent to support Spain’s war against Bonaparte, Central Ame
rica expatriated much of its specie and reached independence running a gov-
ernment deficit that was regularly filled by subsidies from New Spain’s boom-
ing silver economy.28 Britain’s blockades in the late eighteenth c entury kept
284 — Jordana Dym
indigo waiting in ports, prompting trading families to make connections with
Anglo-Americans. Some even engaged in the illicit trade in silks and velvets that
they hypocritically decried as harmful to government and their own interests,
sponsoring trading trips to Philadelphia, Belize, Kingston, and Havana. Postin
dependence claims of Guatemala’s being “unknown” in the Atlantic world w ere
implausible.29
Nor did the period described as the “Cádiz experiment” (1810–1814; 1820–
1823) set the stage for a future Guatemalan state. Although they were economically
promiscuous, politically Guatemala City’s elite strongly supported Spain’s war
against Bonaparte and the Cádiz constitutional monarchy, preferring autonomy
in the empire over full independence. Guatemala City alcalde Antonio Juarros
organized an elaborate series of public events in late 1808 to support Fernando
VII, legitimizing the government through claims of Kiche and Kaqchiquel
monarchies as predecessors to the Hapsburg and Spanish monarchies.30 Yet,
like earlier “Guatemala City” histories, the report of the ceremony emphasized
city and isthmus, not city and valley. This wider identity was matched in the ca-
bildo’s actions: Juarros and other city councilors helped Captain General José
de Bustamante negotiate a peaceful end to a radical movement in El Salvador
in 1811 and offered only moral support to rebels from Granada (Nicaragua)
who reached the capital in chains after Bustamante squelched their movement
for autonomy later that year.
Peninsular decisions that sought to foster loyalty by providing a role for
overseas provinces in imperial interim governments also discouraged Central
American and future Guatemalan unity by authorizing election of representa-
tives to many kinds of “province” between 1809 and 1821. These ranged from
one delegate to an early Junta Central to fifteen deputies to a later Cortes.31
Yet the moment also hinted at connections that would underpin the later state
consolidation: Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango consulted together in 1809
and 1810 to select representatives to interim Spanish government posts.32 Both
cities accepted the possibility of a “Guatemalan” territorial unit larger than
each jurisdiction alone, although without recognition of a proto-Guatemalan
state they operated as members of a community of cities within a Spanish im-
perial framework.33 Quetzaltenango’s subsequent instructions to its deputy
in 1814 showed the limits of alliance, proposing a separate bishopric and inten-
dancy as well as seeking to lower royal monopolies (estancos) and increase judicial
autonomy.34
The Cortes’s adoption and promulgation of the Constitución de la Monar-
quía Española in 1812, implemented in the Kingdom of Guatemala, introduced
modern representative government to residents. Through indirect elections
figure 8.1. Pledging loyalty to Fernando VII: The Kingdom of Guatemala, 1809. José
Casildo España, “Las provincias del reino de Guatemala ofreciendo SLlS corazones al
holocaust.” In [Domingo Juarros], Guatemala por Fernando VII (Guatemala, 1809).
Private collection. This engraving, one of several illustrations in a pamphlet celebrating
the Kingdom of Guatemala’s loyalty to Spain during the imperial crisis unleashed by
Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808, represents the territories many provinces, each
with a distinct identity, professing loyalty to Spain.
of members of the constitutionally mandated ayuntamientos constitucionales,

two diputaciones provinciales (Provincial Deputations), and Cortes deputies,
Central America’s residents learned the mechanisms of democratic gover-
nance; they began to experience the rights and duties of citizenship that would
continue after independence.35 Still, political innovation did not consolidate
a “Guatemalan” territory or identity within the captaincy general. The Cortes
created two deputations for the kingdom, one each for Guatemala and Nica-
ragua, in an effort to mitigate regional tensions.36 The Cortes’s Guatemalan
diputación included seven districts in what are now Chiapas (Mexico), Hon-
duras, and El Salvador as well as Guatemala.
Where the shape or outline of f uture Guatemala did become evident was in
the districts sending the kingdom’s deputies to ordinary Cortes sessions a fter
286 — Jordana Dym
1812. The constitutional system introduced proportional representation by
population. As a result, five of the kingdom’s twelve deputies (one per seventy
thousand inhabitants) represented districts that l ater joined the state of Guate-
mala.37 Perhaps not surprisingly, the preponderance of “Guatemalan” deputies
did not contribute to greater internal connections. Rather, elections fostered
localist creole and ladino “dreams” for more autonomy within the system; the
instructions issued to parish priest José Cleto Montiel, the diputado of Totoni-
capán and Quetzaltenango, repeated in 1821 recommendations for the separate
institutions that the Quezaltenango ayuntamiento had proposed in 1814.38 In
short, we can see a strong “Guatemalan” representation at the same time as a
notable regionalism that would later influence independence from Spain, both
mixed with “liberal” demands for better education and “conservative” interest
in a stronger ecclesiastic presence.
One constitutional change with important postindependence ramifications
for Guatemala and the other federal states had to do with incorporating new
communities as partners and citizens in the body politic. The constitutional
period offered the indigenous pueblos and castas the opportunity to partici-
pate in the government and to elect representatives with the full support of
local and imperial officials—although some, like Quezaltenango’s Spanish city
council, argued that since the indigenous were equal under the law, they should
also be g ently stimulated to be more productive.39 José Mariano Méndez in
1821 was only repeating points made by Central American delegates since 1810
when he defended the region’s mulattos’ right to vote, arguing that it was dif-
ficult to verify whether they were in fact African in origin.40 Beyond taking an
active role in the region’s indirect elections, the K’iche communities of Totoni-
capán rose up in 1820 to insist on implementation of constitutional provisions,
successfully getting decrees abolishing tribute payments enforced.41
Since the new system also abolished protective institutions like separate ca-
bildos for Spaniards and indigenous residents, the changes also revealed fissures.
The corregidor at Quetzaltenango unsuccessfully sought to reserve a third of
the seats in a now combined city council for indigenous residents—a majority
of the jurisdiction’s people. Was the refusal a lack compassion or flexibility
among local Creoles or an attempt to facilitate indigenous exclusion in the
representative system?42 In 1820, the Quezaltenango cabildo sent the ladino
militia to help put down an indigenous uprising at Totonicapán, outside its
official jurisdiction.43 This example puts the spotlight on the highland capital’s
ambition to be a provincial and not just district capital, and on the militari-
zation of disputes between ladino Quetzaltenango leadership and indigenous
Totonicapán, a tendency that would resonate and amplify a fter independence
from Spain, when Totonicapán sometimes sought support from Guatemala
City against its neighbor.
Essentially, in the decade leading to independence, ideas of political com-
munity and popular sovereignty offered optimism of a new contract between
government and society, one based on participation and negotiation rather than
imperial rule. Guatemala’s leaders adapted the inclusionary and individual po
litical and individual citizenship of Cádiz and extended it in practice to all resi-
dents of European, indigenous, and African ancestry—ending separate rights
for indigenous republics, rights liberals often saw as privileges. The period saw
expanded municipal governments and provincial organization, which increased
an institutional base for local and regional agendas. However, the Cádiz experi-
ment, which aimed to bind the Americas to Spain, did not forge provincial
structures that could help mold identities at a Guatermalan “state” level.
In the jurisdictions closest to Guatemala City, the highlands and Oriente
drifted further apart, both in demography and economic interest, with no po
litical structure in place to bind them to each other or to Guatemala City. Los
Altos continued to look north to Mexican trade; the Oriente looked south to
the cattle business with Honduras and Nicaragua, while shuttling indigo to
Atlantic ports. Guatemala City’s role as arbiter and central tax authority was
insufficient to build community or consensus in a system that had a limited
economic integration and no institutional base. So in August–December 1821,
that is, at the moment of independence, there was no unitary “Guatemalan”
polity, ethnic, economic, or geographic. Any new state would be formed out of
many and diverse districts, a composite organization with much to accomplish.
The Fissures of Independence

The formation of a single Guatemalan state incorporating the three distinct
regions did not happen in the period of Central America’s initial independence
from 1821 to 1823. As they chose separation from Spain in the fall of 1821, Cen-
tral America’s territories opted (not without difficulties) to unite first with the
nascent and short-lived Mexican empire of Agustín Iturbide, a process called
“conditional” independence by historian Mario Rodríguez.44 Guatemala City
leaders tried and failed to control a process that began with the decision of the
town of Comitán, in the intendancy of Chiapas, to join Mexico. Despite an act
of provisional independence issued in Guatemala City on September 15, 1821,
offering full citizenship to those of African origin and inviting a meeting of
district representatives elected u nder Cádiz rules to a Central American Con-
gress to determine the isthmus’ political future, constitutional city councils and
288 — Jordana Dym
provincial deputations issued their own acts, and many sought separate integra-
tion with Mexico.
Among the districts choosing independence from Spain and also Guatemala
City, Quetzaltenango stood out, since it would later joined the Guatemalan state.
In late 1821, the town’s cabildo, aided by other officials in Los Altos, as historian
Arturo Taracena writes, “succeeded little by little in centralizing discontent of
Sololá, Suchitepéquez, and Huehuetenango toward the city of Guatemala.”45 A
similar divisive dynamic emerged in the territories that would soon form Hon-
duras and Nicaragua. Sparring cities sought e ither to control or split provinces.
Totonicapán again opposed Quetzaltenango’s ambition “to make itself capital
and elevate itself to the Rank of intendancy,”46 skeptical that Quetzaltenango’s
creoles and ladinos would respect Totonicapán’s K’iche majority.47 Thus, two
cities, Quezaltenango and Guatemala, offered themselves to Iturbide as sepa-
rate provincial or regional powers in the area that is now Guatemala. In the end,
the Mexican government supported neither and, in 1822, divided the districts
of the former captaincy general into three military commands with capitals in
Chiapas, Guatemala, and León (Nicaragua). Keeping Guatemala City as a re-
gional capital, Iturbide essentially repeated the north/south divide established
in Cádiz while carving off Chiapas, the only Central American province that
republican Mexico kept when Iturbide’s empire dissolved in 1823.
Concerned with advancing political fragmentation, Central America’s prov-
inces (minus Chiapas) separated from Mexico in 1823, elected representatives
to a National Constituent Assembly (anc) and put animosity aside to form
the federal Republic of Central America. Although the federation’s fifteen-year
life was plagued by conflict, decisions taken at the anc had long-term effects
not only on the forms of government in the isthmus, but on the shape and size
of the states that emerged as republics by the 1840s.
Not surprisingly, one contentious topic addressed by the anc’s almost three
dozen representatives was how many and which states would or should com-
prise the new u nion.48 Guatemala City leaders wanted to continue as capital
city of a powerful and large Guatemalan state including nearby valleys as well
as cacao-producing Soconusco, the sugar and indigo region of Sonsonate, and
intensively cultivated and textile-producing Quezaltenango. By contrast, dep-
uties from several districts expressed reservations about the consequences of
forming a strong Guatemalan state that included around a third of the isthmian
population. Guatemalans won out when several delegates from the highlands
(Altenses) with strong ties to the capital city supported their goal, rather
than formation of a separate Los Altos with its capital in Quetzaltenango.49
In April 1824, the anc refused Quezaltenango deputy Cirilo Flores’s request
to postpone Guatemala’s election of a state assembly pending a constitutional
committee meeting, putting Altense dreams on hold.50 On May 11, 1824, the
anc decreed state congresses for Guatemala, San Salvador, Honduras, Nica-
ragua, and Costa Rica, its hand forced by assemblies already convened in El
Salvador and Costa Rica, paving the way for a federation composed of t hese
five states.
Guatemala became the federation’s largest state, incorporating Quezaltenango,
the Central Valley, the Oriente, the Petén, and Verapaz, with a population of
about six hundred thousand, around 60 percent of Central America’s overall
population. This configuration assured the young state’s access to both Atlantic
and Pacific Oceans and markets.51 Why did federal delegates agree to a Gua-
temalan state with more than half the isthmian population? The indigenous
majority of the highlands likely influenced the decision. If Central American
deputies did not agree with the New Monthly Magazine’s correspondent that
the “Indians in the vicinity of Guatemala are as yet in a wild state; they speak
the indigenous language, and clothe themselves like savages,” they were perhaps
aware that Los Altos might be less appealing to the international community as a
viable state when other Central American states’ Indians largely spoke Spanish
and dressed “after the European fashion” and thus seemed “more civilized.”52
The anc’s federal state making thus bundled three regions into a single state,
leaving the Creole powers concentrated in Guatemala City and the ladinos of
the Oriente to engage the Maya majority of the highlands. They would spend
the next quarter century seeking a new political order and negotiating to make
that union work.
Forming the State from Within

Forging enduring Guatemalan unity out of multiple colonial districts became
the work of several generations. In its first year, however, the state of Guatemala
seemed to get off to a relatively strong political and economic start. In Octo-
ber 1825, the Guatemalan constituent assembly a dopted a state constitution. It
enacted decrees identifying territorial divisions and raising the status of sev-
eral towns throughout the territory. Taken together, the founding documents
showed aspirations to create a modern state and build trust among the districts
that combined to form it.
Politically, the constitution established a “republican, popular, and repre-
sentative” government. Guatemala retained Catholicism as the official religion,
but permitted private worship for other sects. A system of indirect elections
(with popular, district, and departmental juntas electorales) adapted from the
290 — Jordana Dym
Cádiz constitution offered a familiar system and increased representation to
one congressman for every 30,000 (rather than 70,000) inhabitants. It pro-
vided town governments for settlements with as few as 200 residents (rather
than Cádiz’s 1,000).53 This emphasis on population as a basis for political repre
sentation gave the highland districts with over 200,000 mostly indigenous
people considerable weight; the more ladino Oriente had 130,000.54 The magna
carta explicitly maintained the possibility of creating a new state from part of
Guatemala’s territory, perhaps to ensure that Los Altos’s aspirations would not
delay adoption. It also welcomed Sonsonate, should the federal government
determine that the district should join Guatemala instead of El Salvador.55 In
seeking unity, the founding texts of the new Guatemala left much unresolved.
Internally, consolidation also proved a challenge. The 1825 state constitu-
tion identified sixteen districts, which it combined into seven departments.56
Over the next fifty years, that consolidation would be undone in pursuits
of local rights: by 1877 Guatemala had twenty-two separate departments.
The initial instinct to create departments equal in size, population, and eco-
nomic importance reflected the three major geographic regions: the Oriente
included Verapaz and Chiquimula, bordering Mexico, Honduras, and El Sal-
vador; the Central Valleys provided the districts of Guatemala/Escuintla
and Sacatepéquez/Chimaltenango; the populous, indigenous western high-
lands gained Quetzaltenango/Soconusco, Totonicapán/Huehuetenango, and
Suchitepéquez/Sololá.
The division sought economic coherence. Sacatepéquez and Chimaltenango
were the breadbaskets of Guatemala City. By uniting Guatemala and Escuintla,
Guatemala City achieved control of indigo-producing coastal regions as that
colonial economic motor entered its last days.57 It also sought political peace,
or at least balance: Totonicapán and Quezaltenango both became capitals, rec-
ognized in promotions to villa and city status, respectively.58 Verapaz took in
Petén—a region subsequent governments considered largely underdeveloped,
underpopulated, and ripe for colonization. Relocation of the new state’s capital
from Antigua, midway between Quezaltenago and Guatemala City, to the lat-
ter in July 1825, however, worried highlands leaders.59 The highland elite’s am-
bitions remained alive. In 1838 and again in 1848, the chiefs of this area would
lead separatist movements seeking their own state.
The founding documents aimed to create a unitary population in a society
of distinct pueblos. On paper, independent Guatemala was optimistic, almost
utopian. The egalitarian propositions of Cádiz and the act of independence
were embedded in both federal and state constitutions, by which, as the New
Monthly Magazine observed, “the Indians have acquired the right of citizenship,
and are placed completely on an equality with the descendants of the Span-
iards.” Where later historians saw hypocrisy or error, many contemporaries
shared Guatemala’s enthusiasm for the social experiment, reporting that “they
[the Indians] cannot, therefore, be otherwise than attached to the new system,
and many of their entire towns are open partizans of the republican govern-
ment.”60 The author believed that Guatemala could create a modern country by
including rather than by separating and subjugating its indigenous inhabitants.
He observed that, “in the first Constituent Assembly of Guatemala, in 1823,
three Indian deputies took their seats, of whom two were ecclesiastics. Besides
which, an Indian was elected Senator, and sat in the assembly of the republic; . . .
nor is it improbable that in the first sittings of the Congress, several Indians w ill
appear as deputies.” Further, while acknowledging that the Indians “lead a life
of great hardship,” he noted that “in the province of Guatemala and t hose of
Quetzaltenango, there are many who possess sheep in abundance. Th ese persons
avail themselves of the wool to weave stuffs of various kinds. . . . The Indians also
manufacture cotton cloth higher in price than the stuffs we have just mentioned,
and of which the Indian w omen make use for dress, as well as the poor classes of
61
people in the cities.” The happy incorporation failed to materialize.
The combination of three distinct economies and geographic regions into
a single state opened diverse economic possibilities. In its first year, Guatemala
appeared poised to establish its importance to the international dye trade; in
1824 the optimistic official newspaper reported an extension of commerce and
the spread of production of grana (cochineal) in Sacatepéquez, Sololá, and
Verapaz.62 In 1825, traveler Dr. Lavagnino reported on both indigo and cochi-
neal as “most known to commerce and most esteemed” in the New Monthly
Magazine and also referred to “many mines of silver in the provinces,” princi-
pally the Chiquimula area in Guatemala as well as Tegucigalpa in Honduras.63
Pursuit of export economies, however, sowed the seeds of later conflict. The
agrarian reform promulgated in Decree 27 (1825) promoted the expropriation
of underutilized private property, giving the government power not only to sell
to individual owners, but also to reserve one-third of both coasts and some of
the interior for colonization. Discontent r ose among small landowners, many
of whom were mulatto or ladino.64
A composite Guatemala, with its capital in Guatemala City but with po
litical and geographic units recognizing existing divisions, seemed poised for
growth. An expanding economy that might draw Creole, foreign, and indig-
enous elites to work with the new government might lead the way. At least tem-
porarily, the altense leadership was committed to participating in the composite
state; Cirilo Flores of Quezaltenango served as vice president to President Juan
292 — Jordana Dym
Barrundia Zepeda, both committed to a “liberal” program of economic devel-
opment and political republicanism. Had this state been a fully independent
country, perhaps this initial collaboration would have had time to mature.
The challenge of being the largest and most diverse state in a federation kept
old conflicts alive—and created new ones.
The Challenges of Federation and Foreigners

Guatemala’s first years as a single entity were complicated by antagonistic
relations between the state and the federal governments. Federal president
Manuel José Arce was politically more moderate (and centralist) than the
first Guatemalan elected chief of state, the federalist Juan Barrundia.65 With
both governments based in Guatemala City, political disputes escalated into
military conflict between 1826 and 1830. In 1826, Arce deposed Barrundia,
and Guatemala’s vice chief, medical doctor Cirilo Flores, tried to govern from
Quetzaltenango. His radical liberal legislation—which abolished the mer-
chants’ chamber, reduced the Church tithe by 50 percent, and permitted the
children of clergymen to inherit Church property—was not welcomed in
highland communities. Although Flores was a local son and had represented
the region in the Mexican Congress of 1822–1823, his political career and life
ended simultaneously in October 1826 when a crowd referred to variously as
a “mob of fanatical Indians,” rabble, and the populacho, and led by women,
followed him into the sanctuary of a church, dragged him from the pulpit,
and killed him.66 Without executive authority, Guatemala’s first government
collapsed.
A dynamic that would repeat itself u ntil the end of federation ensued. Sta-
bility would be established when federal and state governments were in sym-
pathy, but fall apart either due to federal interference, as in 1825, or b ecause of
internal divisions—either between Guatemala City and the regions, or within
the ranks of Guatemala City’s leadership. From 1826 to 1829, Guatemala’s insta-
bility came from within. Federal president Arce convened a new Guatemalan
Congress, and the more conservative Mariano Aycinena was elected as chief of
state.67 His government is largely described as dictatorial and inflexible, al-
though this son of Guatemala’s Basque “aristocracy” succeeded in strengthening
the state against federal pressures.68 Still, a civil war in which liberal governments
in Honduras and El Salvador fought Guatemala’s leaders and federation forces
continued from 1827 to early 1829, when the liberals, led by future federal presi-
dent Francisco Morazán, achieved victory, sending Aycinena into exile in the
United States—leaving a divided elite to face economic ruin.69
Present-day borders of Guatemala
M E X I CO
BELIZE
VERAPAZ
TOTONICAPÁN Y
HUEHUETENANGO Rio Dulce
SACATEPÉQUEZ Y
CHIMALTENANGO HONDURAS
QUETZALTENANGO
CHIQUIMULA
SUCHITEPÉQUEZ
Y SOLOLÁ
PA C I F I C ESCUINTLA Y GUATEMALA
OCEAN
0 30 60 mi E L S A LVA D O R
0 50 100 km
Map 8.2. Audiencia de Guatemala, 1786–1808
In 1829, a “liberal” government took office in Guatemala a fter returning the

capital to Antigua. It was led by vice chief of state José Gregorio Márquez, who
had represented the central district of Chimaltenango in the 1825 constituent
assembly.70 War had reduced the economic bases of the new state, particularly
in the Oriente whose towns and pastures w ere on a road now transited more
71
by soldiers than by c attle. José Cecilio del Valle, in a pessimistic article for the
Sociedad Económica in 1830, reported abundant natural resources and poten-
tial, but failure in “artisanal” development; the country lacked exports due to
the abandonment of grana and indigo; it had failed to follow Havana’s lead and
invest in coffee; and it lacked industry and roads for either interior or exterior
commerce. Aware of competition from textile production from Europe and
294 — Jordana Dym
Asia, he did note that independence brought free trade policies that increased
the number of ships trading in local ports.72
Despite (or perhaps because of ) these difficulties, Guatemala’s principal fami-
lies disdained compromise. Conservatives refused an invitation to participate in
a triumvirate executive that might have offered some balance to the government.
Without them, a more radical legislative assembly abolished all the decrees of
1826–1829 and exiled many Spanish-born residents, including the archbishop
and members of the former government; it assigned “forced loans” to those they
called traitors, abolished religious o rders and confiscated their properties.73
A few years of self-government achieved what independence could not: a hard
break between Spaniard and Creole; several Spanish families were sent into exile.
Six years after its constitution and foundational legislation, the state of
Guatemala received a respite from internal and external pressures. With the
election of Mariano Gálvez as president, a new liberal government pursued
Guatemala’s economic and political promise through transforming legislation.
Under Gálvez the Guatemalan and federation governments cohabitated in Gua-
temala City, until the latter moved to San Salvador in 1834; for a time they
collaborated, and experienced the necessary peace to experiment with state
building. A sign that the new Guatemalan state was getting ready to claim the
world’s attention was Gálvez’s commission of the country’s first history and
map, influenced by José Cecilio del Valle’s recommendations. A former impe-
rial bureaucrat and a long-term thinker, del Valle understood a point later his-
torians would underline: maps and the knowledge they represented were tools
for the government to use internally to exert control and externally to make
political and economic connections abroad.74
Guatemala’s first atlas, published in 1832 by Miguel Rivera Maestre, with one
map of the whole country and a map of each department, 75 complemented a
history of the contemporary period commissioned by Alejandro Marure. The
legislature, for its part, commissioned a compilation of state laws in 1836.76
Gálvez also sent Juan Galindo, Marure, and o thers to inspect and document
pre-Hispanic ruins to help claim and recover Guatemala’s ancient past.77 Map,
history, and legal record—all three texts spoke to a consolidating Guatemala
with a land, a past, and a legal code focused on its current territory, not the
entire isthmus. When Marure’s second edition of Bosquejo histórico de las revo
luciones de Centroamérica was published in 1877, historian Lorenzo Montúfar
emphasized that Gálvez had commissioned it so “his patria could be known in
both worlds.”78 At the level of state government, Guatemala was taking shape.
Still, the frontiers with Mexico and Belize remain vague.

figure 8.2. Mapping a new country: Guatemala, 1832.
Courtesy of the Latin American Library, Tulane University
Part of becoming known was applying what many considered foreign princi
ples in the new state. The Gálvez government embraced the idea of legislating
progress and building a new nation as well as a new state. In his 1836 message
to the Guatemalan Congress, Gálvez emphasized “innovation.” He insisted on
making “everything new, everything republican: nothing of the colonial, mo-
narchical system” b ecause, otherwise, “for Independence, we would have done
nothing more than change the name of things.”79 To deliver this program, his
government undertook to change legal and social culture, and to impose a new
liberal political system that emphasized equality u nder the law as the way to
end distinctions among persons of different race or class, and to provide equal
opportunities. Many laws passed between 1832 and 1836 sought to reduce
Church influence in society: in 1833 the formerly Jesuit University of San Car-
los was converted into a secular Academy of Studies; in 1837, the legislature
enacted civil matrimony, allowing not only nullification but divorce; it abol-
ished payment of Church tithes, ended religious holidays, declared freedom
of conscience (religion), and more.80 To broaden political participation, the
296 — Jordana Dym
Gálvez government extended more autonomy to the municipalities, enabling
the “pueblos [to} administer their business” and use that independence to join
in “the practical applications of the representative and federal system.”81
The most innovative effort was to “modernize” the judicial system by trans-
lating and adapting the Livingston Codes. Gálvez considered a system that
mixed old Spanish laws and o rders with Cádiz-era and federation documents a
disorded mess that contributed to criminal behavior. A committee adapted the
Livingston system (created and then rejected by the Louisiana legislature) to
the Guatemalan context. The assembly approved five codes and a definitional
law between 1834 and 1836 and published “lessons” in the Seminario Guate
malteco and other newspapers in 1837.82 The new jury system proposed a turn
away from long-standing traditions of separate justice for different social and
ethnic groups—and differening bodies such as the Church and the military. The
goal was to create a liberal and modern nation-state by ending the role of single
salaried judges and having p eople on juries take on judicial responsibilities.83 Im-
plementation proved difficult and in practice the results w ere negligible. With
the exception of habeas corpus provisions, in March 1838 the new codes w ere
suspended due to “the sad results of this premature intent and great discontent
in the pueblos.”84 Did the latter prefer traditional ways of separate justice?
Gálvez’s interest in innovation was sometimes offset by practical consider-
ations. When a national law did not exist, legislation indicated that the govern-
ment should rely on Spanish precedent.85 The executive branch relied on jefes de
departamento who played almost the same role as the governors and jefes politicos
of the ancient regime and Cádiz experiment. Nor did Gálvez try to change the
role of municipalities, created under Cádiz, which collected the new taxes, built
and maintained prisons, administered primary schools, and recruited for the
military. The Church did not stop registering births, marriage, and death, even
if the law had removed this responsibility. Further, traditional alcaldes (magis-
trates) continued to serve as local judges, either under the new legal system or,
after elected judges (jueces de primera instancia) were established, de facto when
there were not enough legally trained individuals to hold these offices; a jury
system, again adopted, was rejected by many citizens as well.86
At the socioeconomic level, Gálvez promoted cochineal and indigo produc-
tion; imported the first coffee seeds from Havana; planned roads, ports, and
other public works; designed a new public education system; and dreamed of
prosperity for the new country, which he achieved to a limited extent.87 With
amicable relations between state and federation, there were economic advances.
In his address to Congress in 1837, the chief of state boasted that commerce had
doubled from 1834 to 1836. In this economic climate, it is perhaps not surprising
that there was a measure of reconciliation between t hose who lost the civil war
of 1826–1829 and the liberal government. Notably, in 1834 “the aristocracy” at-
tended the Independence Day celebration (September 15), followed by Gálvez’s
reelection in 1835, symbolically sealing the rapprochement.88
Unfortunately, elite consensus in the capital prompted conflict with large
segments of society in both the Oriente and the highlands. The Gálvez admin-
istration’s promotion of commercial development, in the form of individual
and private company acquisition of what the government defined as public
land, frequently infringed on lands owned by Maya communities and ladino
peasants in central and eastern Guatemala—despite a stated respect for com-
munal lands. Such policies provoked increasing challenges, not only by the
poor but also by men like mulatto landowner Teodoro Mexía of Santa Rosa.89
While an April 17, 1835, legislative order established a commission to hear and
respond to land disputes, little changed before rebellions broke out throughout
the Southeast in 1837.90
In addition, despite aspirations to create more equitable socioeconomic re-
lations based on equality before the law, the state government sometimes aban-
doned theory for repressive practice. In 1835, President Gálvez responded to
news of insecurity and an assault on the road to El Salvador by abolishing mu-
nicipal governments in the Oriente, “substituting in their place local justices.”91
In the pueblos of Santa Rosa Department, including Jalpatagua and Moyuta,
a general discontent centered on what seemed an arbitrary state interest in re-
ducing local governmental autonomy to “organize the social, religious, cultural
and economic life of the communities.”92
In the Oriente, or Montaña, discontent grew in response to policies that
promoted foreign investment and “colonization” (or expropriation of land for
foreigners) in about half the state’s territory—through contracts Gálvez signed
with Belgian and British companies with support from the federal govern-
ment.93 While cochineal production assured Guatemala a “dominant posi-
tion among the Central American states in its trade with England,” former
Bonapartist officers from France, unscrupulous bankers from E ngland, Protes-
tant missionaries and educators from the United States, and Belgian colonists
who found their way into Guatemalan society created tensions within the new
country. Although they w ere only a handful, and some established joint com-
panies with local merchants, foreign residents resisted paying war taxes. Their
tendency to support their own, rather than local, interests and call on their
consuls to bring in warships to defend them made them flashpoints for local
dissatisfaction. 94
298 — Jordana Dym
A cholera morbus epidemic in Verapáz and Chiquimula compounded the
challenges. Recent Protestant settlers were imagined responsible; doctors and
officials trying to contain the outbreak were accused on being “poisoners,” spark-
ing a revolt in June 1837 that transformed into the “war of the Mountain.”95
An uprising begun by rural residents shouting “Long live religion and death
to foreigners!” spread with the support of those whose power had diminished
under liberal influence—namely, merchants and powerful families in Guate-
mala City, some members of the Church hierarchy, as well as landed people
in the Montaña increasingly beleaguered by state policies. Gálvez, who had
repeatedly resisted accepting election to a second term, was forced from office
in February 1838.96 As Ralph Lee Woodward concluded, the force necessary to
implement the liberal programs seemed to contradict the rhetoric of liberty.97
As the state was embattled in the Oriente, Quetzaltenango’s ambitions to form
its own country resurfaced. On February 2, 1838, deputies met in Quetzaltenango
and declared the state of Los Altos. The federal Congress, meeting in El Salva-
dor, authorized the secession, despite its own waning authority. Guatemala’s
Congress accepted the decision.98 Guatemala City’s interest in the highlands
proved insufficient to give leaders an appetite for civil war, or a war that might
pit it against even a weakened federation government.
Quetzaltenango’s ambitions were also, as Arturo Taracena argues, an indig-
enous nightmare. If Los Altos’s ladinos protested liberal reforms, the indige-
nous in some communities preferred the central Guatemalan government. The
Los Altos leadership enticed three towns of Suchitepéquez to join their sixth
state in 1838 by offering department status to their unified districts.99 Other
Indian villages met and opposed the Altense project to create a sixth Central
American state. Throughout February and March, Zutuhil municipalities—
San Pedro, San Juan La Laguna, San Marcos la Laguna, and Santiago Atitlán—
wrote to the Guatemalan government opposing a state they claimed would harm
established commerce between the lake zone and Guatemala City and lead to
double taxation. Kuiché municipality Joyabaj also mistrusted Quetzaltenango’s
reassurances. When Quetzaltenango sought to collect taxes in Santa Catarina
Ixtahuacán (Sololá) and San Sebastián (Retahuleu), the villages held cabildos
abiertos and refused. In short, some highland communities turned to Guate-
mala’s government for support against Quetzaltanango’s ladinos, only to find
that that the state quickly warned Los Altos of complaints from “subjects of an
independent state.” The indigenous municipalities first sought to resolve their
conflict directly with Los Altos authorities, and then with Guatemala’s aid.
Only when both state governments appeared deaf to their complaints did they

join Rafael Carrera and the Oriente’s forces to compel change at the top.100
Once both the highlands and Oriente opposed the central government, the
Gálvez administration fell.
From State to Republic

By late 1838 Guatemala’s survival, whether as a federal state or independent
country, was in doubt. In 1839, president Mariano Rivera Paz called on the pa-
triotism of Guatemala’s constituent assembly to help restore a country whose
“society seemed dissolved,” led to the brink of “misery and disorganization”
by inexperience, “revolutionary furor,” and a fetish for “all that is new and the
desire to destroy all that existed.”101 Yet conservative policies proved equally
divisive. Guatemala required a decade to transition from weak federal state to
viable republic, twice forcibly putting down revolt in the Oriente and rein-
corporating Los Altos (1839). It declared provisional separation from the fed-
eration (1839), defeated federal president Francisco Morazán and his largely
Honduran and Salvadoran forces (1840), and suppressed a new rebellion in the
Oriente (1847).102 Still, Guatemala’s general outlines became clear soon a fter
Gálvez’s government collapsed. Under a government established by an Oriente
rebel, the mestizo or ladino Rafael Carrera, a veneer of normalcy returned, al-
beit with more emphasis on economic than on universal rights. Guatemalan
legislators repealed many “innovations” of the first period—abandoning the
experiment in universal and individual rights, as well as Gálvez’s anticlerical
policy—in search of formulas that contributed to stability. Carrera was an
implacable enemy of the federation after its army had tried to vanquish him.
The leadership of Mariano Rivera Paz (1839–1844), and Carrera (1844–1848;
1851–1865) led to Guatemala’s emergence as an independent republic in 1847
and prevented Central America’s other states from reestablishing the union.
Carrera’s humble origins as an illiterate pig-herder from the Oriente and his
mixed-race ancestry led many nineteenth-century critics to label him a “cel-
ebrated Indian despot” (1857)103 and “dark colored and ill-looking mestizo.”104
His support, according to many contemporaries, came from the priesthood
and “his subordinate instruments, generally Indian or half breeds” 105 or merely
from the Indians, while all other “classes . . . have never ceased to hate and fear
him, and watch for an opportunity to overturn his power.”106 Ralph Lee Wood-
ward Jr., René Reeves, Douglass Sullivan-González, and others have champi-
oned a more nuanced approach to his c areer, which put the first acknowledged
non-European in control of the country and, for some, initiated the rise of the
ladino state.107 S ullivan-González in particular shows that the Church, under
300 — Jordana Dym
figure 8.3. Leading a new country: Rafael Carrera
Antonio Larrazábal and later Antonio García Peláez, was a tentative ally, will-
ing to call for patriotism and unity although not always to put its wealth or
clergy into rebellious communities.108
During what many call the conservative regime (1839–1871), Guatemala’s
leaders failed to pass a new constitution. They governed with “Constitutive
Laws” approved in 1839 by a Constituent Assembly: one each for executive (De-
cree 65) and judicial (Decree 75) power, and (Decree 76): Declaration of the
Rights of the State and its Inhabitants.109 Decree 65 heralded an increasingly
powerful executive, adopting the title of “president” for the supreme executive
authority.110 Decree 76 declared the state “sovereign, free and Independent,”
while still insisting on the sovereignty of the internal pueblos; it reestablished Ca-
tholicism as the official religion and created a separate status for the indigenous,
who supposedly lacked “the ilustración (understanding/education) sufficient to
know and defend their own rights.” The code protected the property of any
“population, corporation or person” and insisted on individual rights, includ-
ing those of making wills and expressing opinions, while it prohibited torture
and illegal detention.111
Other legislation overtly recalled the colonial system. In 1838, the assembly
reestablished the mint and the merchant’s chamber with their separate rights,
or fueros. It then replaced jefes departamentales with corregidores, reestablished
ecclesiastic supervision of education and a dopted a system of residencies (end
of term reviews) for state officials; it reestablished the Church’s fuero.112 Vot-
ing for city councilors was restricted to sitting members, who were required to
choose among former councilors.113 The legislative assembly also revoked the
exile of Archbishop Ramón Casáus y Torres, appointed by King Ferdinand VII,
reopened monastic orders, and resumed collecting Church tithes. Courts, too,
returned to using the Recopilación de Indias in cases that seemed appropriate.114
For those who saw the liberal-republican system as a menace to local au-
tonomy and the culture of indigenous republics, this policy represented not
a retreat from modernity, but an attempt to overcome the government’s clear
weakness and inability to control the country.115 The reversion to political
processes grounded in ways that had ruled for centuries before 1808 resolved
problems inherent in a country with a large rural, illiterate population—long
adapted to earlier Spanish ways. A deputy in Guatemala’s 1839 legislature re-
ported that the town of Comalapa (Chimaltenango) lived “major disorder” in
all aspects of governance from the administration of justice to tax collection,
maintenance of town buildings, including the jail, which “is a lake inside.” Ac-
cording to one Indian alcalde, the disasters stemmed in part from the move
from perpetual to elected alcaldes, who w ere replaced before they began to un-
116
dertake projects. In other towns, lack of literate residents to serve municipal
posts undermined new ways of government. The governor of Verapáz reported
to Congress that only one ladino in the Indian villages of Cahabón and Lan-
quín could read and speak Spanish. Over the ladino’s protests, the governor
named him alcalde and ordered him to communicate government decrees and
orders. The unwilling official reported back that the towns’ municipales (coun-
cilors) w
ere inebriated and spent locally the funds collected for the national
war tax.117 Such reports suggest that many indigenous communities preferred
to live by their own cultures—and keep revenues at home. No wonder earlier
302 — Jordana Dym
administrations’ attempts to press structural changes had proved both ineffec
tive and unpopular. Gálvez’s anticlerical policies had led to reductions in the
number of clergy in rural parishes; with the return of stronger Church-state
relations, priests resumed their function as official and unofficial state agents in
communities long accustomed to their presence, helping to inculcate a Guate-
malan identity as well as religious values in their sermons.118
While socially conservative steps aimed to stabilize the Guatemalan state,
much new law passed between 1838 and 1848 promoted exports and commercial
life, as in the foundation of a national bank.119 The new government continued
to welcome European immigrants, with a little more caution than Gálvez
had shown. Under Carrera and his supporters, German colonists established
farms on what would emerge as the Costa Cuca coffee regions in the western
highlands.120 U nder conservative government, legal compilations—the first by
Alejandro Marure, covering to 1841, and the second by Andrés Fuentes Franco,
reaching to 1856—were published.121 Also, if Guatemala u nder Carrera reestab-
lished religious education and the colonial Universidad de San Carlos, the latter
retained “liberal” professors like Friar José Mariano Herrarte (theology and
law) to promote what historian Blake Pattridge calls “catholic liberalism”—the
parts of liberalism that remained in effect u ntil the Reforma of 1871 reestab-
lished a government that called itself liberal. Pattridge found a dynamic curric-
ulum, with students embarking on professional studies in French and English
languages, surveyors’ training, and programs in medicine and law. The con-
servative government attempted to balance a still precarious political situation
with programs promoting commercial development.
A Conservative Republic
At the end of the period considered here, as Guatemala finally called the
world’s attention to itself as a fully independent republic, a liberal “revolution”
in 1848 came followed by the establishment in 1851 of a conservative republic
that institutionalized presidential government and militarized the state. Both
remained axes of national authority into the twentieth century. It took a per-
sonalist dictatorship that recognized regional and local differences rather than
a democracy that attempted to legistlate homogenizing laws and common
rights to link three regions and distinct interest groups—economic, ethnic,
political—together in a single country.
On March 21, 1847, Rafael Carrera declared Guatemala a republic. He re-
jected the right of the western highlands, Los Altos, to form a separate state. For
the first time, he declared Guatemala “indivisible.”122 In addition, he signaled
his hope that Central America’s other federal states would follow his example.
According to Carrera, the states “despite the reduction suffered in their wealth
and population . . . comprise sufficient elements to constitute themselves into
independent Republics, and in the full capacity of political bodies. Thus they
have existed, in fact, since the Federation dissolved, or better said, since they
shook off the yoke of Spain.”123 Carrera astutely and accurately presented his
decision as consonant with liberal policy, citing a law approved by two legisla-
tures in 1833 that permitted the state of Guatemala “if the federal pact were to
falter” to consider itself as “organized prior to that pact” to form a new social
compact or “constitute itself for itself alone.”124 At the request of José Fran-
cisco Barrundia, a former radical, the Guatemalan constituent assembly rati-
fied Carrera’s decision for independence and absolute sovereignty. On the same
date, Carrera called on Guatemalans to watch over “the Republic that I leave
founded . . . with great elements of power.”125
If Guatemala’s entry into the world as an independent republic began auspi-
ciously, over the next four years the country suffered regional conflicts similar to
those that divided it after the hasty marriage of Los Altos, Oriente, and Gua-
temala City in 1825. Ralph Lee Woodward describes 1848 as a decisive year
and a failed revolution. More comprehensively, Douglass S ullivan-González
sees 1847–1851 as marked by a civil war brought on by Carrera’s inability to ad-
dress the needs of struggling sharecroppers in the Oriente—while dealing with
overtures to British colonization projects, liberal opportunism, and western
highland indigenous communities’ resistance to land challenges pressed by la-
dinos.126 A generation into statehood, Guatemala still lacked a unitary trajec-
tory. Both conservative constitutional rule and liberal governance had proved
ineffective at creating political unity—and no new economy had risen to inte-
grate the imagined nation within or to forge strong ties to an emerging indus-
trial world.
In early 1847, a new rebellion broke out in the Montaña on Carrera’s Palencia
estate. The president dedicated the next year to pacifying the Oriente’s peoples.
He cited laws Gálvez passed against his own revolt to justify application of
military justice to the rebels.127 He agreed to call elections for a new legislative
assembly, a demand by liberals who then won, installed their legislative assem-
bly, and established a government in August 1848, surprising many.128 Carrera
withdrew to Mexico for the next year. Instead of bringing peace, the new liberal
government exacerbated problems.
Its forces proved as incapable as Carrera’s in pacifying the Oriente. In the
western highlands Quetzaltenango leveraged the crisis to again demand sepa-
304 — Jordana Dym
ration and an independent state. Neither rebellion’s leaders accepted amnesty
and invitations to become departmental governors, despite an offer to establish
new ejidos for Oriente communities that had lost their lands. On August 26,
1848, the Quetzaltenango city council pronounced its separation from Guate
mala. It saw the June 15, 1838, federal decree and reintegration in 1840 as the
“effect of force and terror,” thus Los Altos’s reincorporation into Guatemala
was illegal. With Carrera’s temporary fall in 1848, they insisted on having been
“placed anew in the exercise of their Sovereignty and Independence.”129 With
support from leaders from the Montaña, Quetzaltenango formed a governing
junta representing four of six Los Altos districts (Sololá and Suchitepéquez
sent no delegates); an interim government pronounced in favor of the Los
Altos constitution. El Salvador recognized the new state. In Guatemala, a com-
mittee of the legislative assembly studying the case vacillated; it would make no
decision until every Altense municipality expressed its opinion.130 Guatemala’s
interim president, Juan Antonio Martínez, then declared war against the Los
Altos junta, capturing Quetzaltenango on October 25. The separatist movement
withered, and the region was permanently integrated into the Guatemalan
republic.
By late 1848, with the Oriente rebellion led by brothers Serapio and Vicente
Cruz still strong and a fter two changes of executive power, Guatemala’s liberal
assembly named Colonel Mariano Paredes interim president. An apolitical mil-
itary man, Paredes reestablished order, working with moderates while increas-
ing military influence. His ascendancy signaled the end of liberal government
in Guatemala for a quarter c entury. Carrera returned from exile in Mexico and
little by little reinserted himself into public life, helping put down Altense and
Oriente rebellions, and recovering the presidency in 1851. Although Decree 76
continued “in force as fundamental law” u ntil 1871, Carrera’s return brought
important modifications. An October 19 constitutive act created a presiden-
tialist state run by a president who was both “first magistrate” and “govern-
ing authority of the nation.”131 Elected not by the p eople, but by a “general
assembly” composed of members of the legislative chamber, the archbishop,
supreme court, and members of the Council of State, the president was eligible
for four-year renewable terms in office. The fifty-five representatives were not
considered “legislators” because they shared the work of legislating with the
president.132 This charter was revised on January 29, 1855, to name Rafael Car-
rera president for life (presidente vitalicio), a position he retained until his death
in 1865.133 The experiment of a national state built on popular sovereignty was
suspended.

Country of Continuities and Ruptures
The history of Guatemala from 1759 to 1851 is one of rupture and reconcili-
ation. Under Bourbon reforms and Cádiz government, the districts around
Guatemala City participated in the modernization of the relationship between
government and society, accepting greater government authority and experi-
menting with direct and indirect elections and equality before the law. They
did not, however, form a single polity or society. The challenge of independence
was to join territories with distinct populations, economies, and leaderships
into a w hole. Nation formation did not build on enduring political relation-
ships, but re-created them in thirty years of trial and error from 1821 to 1851.
The Republic of Guatemala was very much a new country.
From the establishment of the Guatemalan state in 1825, with its constitution
and representative government, u ntil the fall of Mariano Gálvez’s government in
1838, the Hispanic revolution that was part of the Atlantic revolutions was imple-
mented first to break with ancien régime practices and then to continue the
“Cádiz revolution” in an independent country. With the revolution or rebellion
“of the Montaña” in 1838, the pendulum swung back and conservatives found in
caudillo Rafael Carrera the possibility to break with Gálvez-era “innovation.” A
third revolution in 1848 briefly returned more moderate “innovators” to pro-
mote their system of liberties, individual rights, and representative institutions
until Carrera initiated autocratic government (under constitutional laws) until
1871. If they began with different ideas about how to build a state, Guatemalan
leaders came to accept the need to establish enduring institutions that covered
the three major geographic regions brought together together in 1825.
They participated under Barrundia, Gálvez, and Carrera’s leadership by
seeking to develop agricultural products for export, to improve state infrastruc-
ture, and to offer national and international investors a population that would
work hard and respect the rules. Gálvez and the liberals tried (at least on paper)
to create a nation of equals before the law—a national pueblo. By midcentury,
Carrera and his allies and successors paused that experiment to focus on bind-
ing together regional, ethnic, and economic interests that remained disperate,
despite liberal efforts to legislate unity.
By 1851, Guatemala was a sovereign republic. Although its international
limits required formal recognition by its neighbors, the country’s territory and
existence were largely accepted at home and abroad. Los Altos and Oriente
accepted Guatemala’s authority. The government deployed military, ecclesias-
tic, and civil authorities to promote the state agenda in the countryside. The
population remained largely rural, but cities started to attract new residents.
The first coffee producers were finding an export market. Privatization of
306 — Jordana Dym
indigenous lands had started, pushed in part by the arrival of entrepreneurial
European immigrants, even though grandiose projects for foreign colonization
fizzled. Some indigenous “became” ladinos, a process of cultural assimilation
common in Central America, but substantial Mayan populations retained their
languages, customs, and tendency to cooperate with or defy the state to suit local
interests. The rise of “ladino” power was not yet fully part of the political,
economic, or cultural landscape.
By 1841, national laws were codified—without a constitutional implanta-
tion of national sovereignty and legistlative rights to serve as bulwark against
executive power. The mid-nineteenth-century Guatemalan state was personal-
ist, the price of a fragile unity. Future governments would seek to solve prob
lems by legistlating for “Guatemalan” conditions that remained marked by deep
internal disparities, often forgetting their origins in the three separate political,
economic, and cultural entities stiched together to make a nation.
Notes
1 “Guatemala,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 10 (1825), 578.
2 Francisco Antonio Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Florida (Madrid: L. Navarro,
1882), and Domingo Juarros, Compendio de la historia de la ciudad de Guatemala
(Guatemala: Ignacio Beteta, 1808–1818). English-language readers learned the lesson
in the English translation: Domingo Juarros, A Statistical and Commercial History of
the Kingdom of Guatemala, in Spanish America, trans. John Baily (London: Printed
for J. Hearne by J. F. Dove, 1823).
3 See Steven R. Ratner, “Drawing a Better Line: Uti possidetis and the Borders of New
States,” American Journal of International Law 90:4 (1996), 590–624.
4 National histories emerge in the late nineteenth century, e.g., Rafael Aguirre Cinta,
Lecciones de historia general de Guatemala desde los tiempos primitivos hasta nuestros
días (Guatemala: Tipografía Nacional, 1899); the most complete is Jorge Luján
Muñoz, ed., Historia General de Guatemala, 6 vols., vol. 4: Desde la República
federal hasta 1898, ed. Alberto Herrarte (Guatemala: Asociación de Amigos del País,
1993–1999). For an overview of twentieth-century scholarship, see Jordana Dym, “La
república de Guatemala: La emergencia de un país, 1808–1851,” in De las independen
cias iberoamericanas a los estados nacionales (1810–1850): 200 años de historia, ed. Ivana
Frasquet and Andréa Slemian (Madrid: ahila, Iberoamericana-Vervuet, 2009),
218–220.
5 See for example David McCreery, “Development and the State in Reforma Gua-
temala, 1871–1885,” Ohio University Center Latin American Studies, Latin America
Series 10 (1983), 9.
6 See the excellent essays in Michel R. Oudjik and Laura Matthew, eds., Indian Con
quistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2007).

7 The rest of Central America had lower percentages of indigenous languages. See
Jordana Dym and Christophe Belaubre, introduction to Politics, Economy and
Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759–1821, ed. Dym and Belaubre (Boulder:
University Press of Colorado, 2007), and Juarros, Compendio.
8 The African origin of some of Guatemala’s ladino or mulatto population, largely
free and Hispanicized by the eighteenth century, is a recently recovered history.
See Paul Lokken, “From the ‘Kingdoms of Angola’ to Santiago de Guatemala: The
Portuguese Asientos and Spanish Central America, 1595–1640,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 93:2 (2013), 171–203; and essays by Lokken, “Angolans in Ama
titlán: Sugar, African Migrants, and Gente Ladina in Colonial Guatemala,” and
Catherine Komisaruk, “Becoming Free, Becoming Ladino: Slave Emancipation
and Mestizaje in Colonial Guatemala,” in Blacks and Blackness in Central America
between Race and Place, ed. Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe (Durham, NC:
9 See Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., Central America: A Nation Divided (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 79; Richmond Brown, Juan Fermín de Aycinena
Central American Colonial Entrepreneur, 1729–1796 (Norman: University of Okla-
homa Press, 1997), 16–17. See also W. George Lovell and Christopher H. Lutz,
Demography and Empire: A Guide to the Population History of Spanish Central
America, 1500–1821 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1995).
10 For a seventeenth-century list of products, see Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación
florida.
11 LaVerne M. Dutton, “Cochineal: A Bright Red Animal Dye” (ms in Environmen-
tal Archaeology, Baylor University, 1992), available at http://www.cochineal.info
/; Jeremy Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repar
timiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 185.
12 Juan Carlos Sarazúa Pérez, “Centralización política y centralización territorial en
Guatemala,” Diálogos Revista Electrónica de Historia 8:2 (2007–2008), 18–20. See
also Sylvia Sellers-García, Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), for a study of the colonial mails
that connected the kingdom.
13 Juarros, Compendio, 25.
14 For the kingdom’s products ca. 1800, see the list attributed to Spanish merchant
Juan de Zavala (1753–1800) published in Carlos Meléndez, ed., Textos Funda
mentales de la Independencia Centroamericana (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial
Universitaria Centroamericana, 1971), 66–67.
15 See José Fernández, Pintando el mundo de azul: El auge añilero y el mercado
centroamericano, 1750–1810 (San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos,
Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte, 2003).
16 Richmond F. Brown, Juan Fermín de Aycinena: Central American Colonial Entre
preneur, 1729–1796 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); Gustavo Palma
Murga, “Núcleos de poder local y relaciones familiares en la ciudad de Guatemala a
finales del siglo XVIII,” Mesoamérica 12 (1986): 241–308.
308 — Jordana Dym
17 Jordana Dym, “ ‘Conceiving Central America: Public, Patria and Nation in the
Gazeta de Guatemala (1797–1807),” in Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and
Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830, ed. Gabriel Paquette (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate,
2009), 99–118, 105, 107–108, 111; John Tate Lanning, The Eighteenth-Century
Enlightenment in the University of San Carlos de Guatemala (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
18 See Miles Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 140–145; Miles Wortman, “Bourbon Re-
forms in Central America, 1750–1786,” The Americas 32:2 (1975), 228–230; Jorge H.
González, “State Reform, Popular Resistance, and the Negotiation of Rule in Late
Bourbon Guatemala: The Quetzaltenango Aguardiente Monopoly, 1785–1807,”
in Dym and Belaubre, Politics, Economy and Society in Bourbon Central America,
131–157.
19 See John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
20 For more detail, see Jordana Dym, From Sovereign Villages to National States: City,
State and Federation in Central America, 1759–1839 (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 2006), chap. 2; and Hector H. Samayoa Guevara, Implantación
del Régimen de Intendencias en el Reino de Guatemala (Guatemala: Editorial del
Ministerio de Educación Pública, 1960).
21 Dym, From Sovereign Villages, 42–46.
22 Domingo Juarros, Compendio de la historia del Reino de Guatemala (1500–1800)
(1808–1818; reprint, Guatemala: Editorial Piedra Santa, 1981), 56.
23 Julio César Pinto Soria, Ladinos e indígenas en la nación criolla guatemalteca; de la
colonia al régimen conservador (Guatemala: usac, ceur, 1998).
24 Arturo Taracena Arriola, Invención criolla, sueño ladino, pesadilla indígena: Los
Altos de Guatemala: De región a Estado, 1740–1850 (Antigua, Guatemala: cirma,
1999), 78–79; and Sarazúa Pérez, “Centralización política,” passim; t here is need
for an equally detailed study of the area around Antigua, Guatemala.
26 Archivo General de Indias (agi), Seville, Guatemala 446, Pieza 4, Erección de
Cabildo en el pueblo de ladinos de Jumay (1764), Guatemala; Archivo Histórico
Nacional, Madrid, Consejos 20953, Pieza 74, Reducción a población de los mulatos
de Ystapa (1764), ff. 5, 12.
27 Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 344–345; David A. Brading, “Bourbon Spain and Its
American Empire,” in Colonial Spanish America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 130; Bernabé Fernández Hernández, El Reino
de Guatemala durante el Gobierno de Antonio González Saravia, 1801–1811 (Guate-
mala: Comisión Interuniversitaria Guatemalteca de Conmemoración del Quinto
Centenario del Descubrimiento de América, 1993), 227, 280–283.
28 Wortman, Government and Society, cited in González, “State Reform,” 151.
29 See Gustavo Palma Murga, “Between Fidelity and Pragmatism: Guatemala’s
Commercial Elite Responds to Bourbon Reforms on Trade and Contraband,”
in Dym and Belaubre, Politics, Economy and Society in Bourbon Central America,
103–129, esp. 112, 120. See also Brown, “Profits, Prestige, and Persistence”; Palma

Murga, “Núcleos de poder local”; and Miles Wortman, “Government Revenue and
Economic Trends in Central America, 1787–1819,” Hispanic American Historical
Review 55 (1975), 251–286.
30 Dym, “ ‘Enseñanza en los jeroglíficos y emblemas’: Igualdad y lealtad en Guatemala por
Fernando VII (1810),” Secuencia, Numero Conmemorativo (Mexico) (2008), 75–99.
31 Gazeta de Guatemala 13:131 (March 7, 1810), 273–285. See also Xiomara Avendaño
Rojas, “Procesos Electorales y Clase Política en la Federación de Centroamérica,
1810–1840” (PhD diss., Colegio de México, 1995), 39–42.
32 See Mario Rodríguez, The Cádiz Experiment in Central America, 1808–1826
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), and Dym, From Sovereign Villages,
and Archivo General de Centroamérica (agca) B 496–8454, Ayuntamiento de
Quezaltenango al Ayto. de Guatemala, October 8, 1811.
33 José María Peynado, Instrucciones para la constitución fundamental de la Monar
quía Española y su Gobierno, . . . dadas por el M. I. Ayuntamiento de la M. N. . y L.
Ciudad de Guatemala a su diputado el Sr. Dr. D. Antonio de Larrazábal . . . (Guate-
mala: Editorial del Ministerio de Educación Pública, 1953), articles 68–71; agca
A Legajo 12189, Expediente 15737, July 15, 1811, José María Peynado al cabildo;
agca B Legajo 496, Expediente 8454, Ayuntamiento de Quezaltenango al Ayto.
de Guatemala, October 8, 1811.
34 agi Guatemala 629, Instrucción del ayuntamiento de Quezaltenango, July 9, 1813;
José Cleto Montiel letter, July 1, 1814; Taracena Arriola, Invención criolla, 78–81.
The instructions also asked to improve the education of indigenous and ladino
residents, and to ensure a clergyman in each village.
35 See Jordana Dym, “ ‘Our Pueblos, Fractions with No Central Unity’: Municipal
Sovereignty in Central America, 1808–1821,” Hispanic American Historical Review
86:3 (2006), 431–466.
36 Diario de las discusiones y actas de las Cortes, January 13, 1812 (Cádiz: Imprenta Real,
1813), 260. The 1821 Cortes authorized a diputación for each intendancy.
37 Rodríguez, Cádiz Experiment, 108; Newberry Library, Ayer Ms 1131, Tabla para
facilitar la elección de los diputados de Cortes suplentes y de la provincia de Guate-
mala [1812].
38 agi Guatemala 629, Instrucción del ayuntamiento de Quezaltenango, July 9, 1813;
carta de José Cleto Montiel, July 1, 1814; Taracena Arriola, Invención criolla, 78–81.
39 agi, Guatemala 629, Instrucción, July 9, 1813.
40 agi Indiferente General 1569, 146–1-16, José Mariano Méndez to Secretario del
despacho de la Governación de Ultramar, Madrid, July 4, 1821.
41 See Aaron Pollack, Levantamiento k’iche’ en Totonicapán, 1820: Los lugares de las
políticas subalternas (Guatemala City: Instituto avancso, 2008), and J. Daniel
Contreras R., Una rebelión indígena en el partido de Totonicapán en 1820: El indio y
la independencia (Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 1968).
43 Taracena Arriola, Invención criolla, 83.
44 See Rodríguez, Cádiz Experiment, chap. 6, and Jordana Dym, “Actas de indepen-
dencia: De la Capitanía General de Guatemala a la República Federal de Cen-
310 — Jordana Dym
troamérica,” in Independencias Latinoamericanas: Interpretación 200 años después,
ed. Marco Palacios (Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2009), 339–366.
46 Ayuntamiento of Totonicapán to Iturbide, cited in Taracena Arriola, Invención
criolla, 93.
47 Aaron Pollack, “Crear una región: Luchas sociales en los altos de Guatemala en la
primera parte del siglo XIX,” Scripta Nova revista electrónica de geografía y ciencias
sociales 10:218 (2006), http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/sn/sn-218–36.htm.
48 Taracena Arriola, Invención criolla, 90–91.
50 agca B Legajo 91, Expediente 2462, Cirilo Flores, Proposal, April 1, 1824, ff. 1, 27.
51 Arturo Taracena Arriola, Juan Pablo Pira, and Celia Marcos, Los departamentos y
la construcción del territorio nacional en Guatemala, 1825–2002 (Guatemala: asies,
Fundación Soros Guatemala, 2002), 4; see also Gustavo Palma Murga, ed., La
administración político-territorial en Guatemala: Una aproximación histórica (Gua-
temala: Escuela de Historia, usac, 1993).
52 “Guatemala,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 10 (1825), 590.
53 Guatemala (State), Constitución de Guatemala, 1825, Articles 39, 45, 50–75,
161–162; Decreto 60, October 12, 1825.
54 See José Cecilio del Valle’s statistics in the 1830 Mensual de la Sociedad Económica,
29–52 (see note 71) for the region and department breakdowns. The seventeen
representatives in state and federal congresses from Guatemala reflected regional
populations: seven (41.2 percent), Western Highlands; four (23.5 percent), Oriente;
and six (35 percent), Center.
55 Constitución de Guatemala, 1825, Articles 36, 76.
56 Guatemala’s s ister federal states also used the language of pueblos in early constitu-
tions. For an early analysis, see “Republic of Central America,” North American
Review (January 1828), 136–142; see also Constitution of Guatemala (1825), Preamble,
Articles 2, 162–163.
57 Arturo Taracena, Arriola Juan Pablo Pira, and Celia Marcos, “La construcción
nacional del territorio de Guatemala, 1825–1934,” Revista Historia (Costa Rica), 45
( January–June 2002), 9–33.
58 Asamblea Constituyente del Estado de Guatemala, Decreto 63, October 29, 1825,
Archivo Histórico del Arquidiocesis de Guatemala, C, T1/105. Escuintla was also
promoted.
59 Asamblea Constituyente del Estado de Guatemala, Decreto 49, July 22, 1825.
60 “Guatemala,” 591.
62 Gaceta del Gobierno Supremo de Guatemala 9, May 7, 1824, 66.
64 Michael F. Fry, “Política agraria y reacción campesina en Guatemala: Región de La
Montaña, 1821–1838,” Mesoamérica 9:15 (1988), 37; Ann Jefferson, “The Rebellion
of Mita, Eastern Guatemala in 1837” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, 2000).

65 Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Central America, vol. 3 (1801–1887) (San Fran-
cisco: History Company, 1887), 113. Barrundia had a policy that “did him honor,”
shaming Great Britain to give up claims to Roatán.
66 See Bancroft, History of Central America, 3:88n38.
67 For more on the Aycinena clan, see Brown, “Juan Fermín de Aycinena” and “Dilem-
mas of a Creole Loyalist: José de Aycinena and the Crisis of Central American
Independence, 1808–1824,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 12:3 (2003),
249–273.
68 Ralph Lee Woodward, Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guate
mala, 1821–1871 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 30–31.
69 Fry, “Política agraria y reacción campesina, 37–38.
70 Lorenzo Montúfar, Reseña histórica de Centro-américa (Guatemala: Tip. “El Pro-
greso,” 1878), V.1, 274.
71 Sarazúa Pérez, “Centralización política.”
72 José Cecilio del Valle, “Descripción Geográfica,” Mensual de la Sociedad Económica
de Amigos del Estado de Guatemala 1 (April 1830), 9–24, presents the country;
“Continua la Descripción Geográfica del Estado de Guatemala,” Mensual 2 (May
1830), 27–52, offers departmental information.
73 Woodward, Rafael Carrera, 37–39.
74 José Cecilio del Valle, “Carta Geográfica,” Mensual de la Sociedad Económica de
Amigos del Estado de Guatemala 3 ( June 1830), 59.
75 Miguel Rivera Maestre, Atlas Guatemalteco en ocho cartas formadas y grabadas
en Guatemala (Guatemala: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 1832). This is
the first national map of Guatemala, if we discount the map in British diplomat
George Thompson’s 1828 travel account, which had del Valle’s input. See Jordana
Dym, “Initial Boundaries,” in Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader,
ed. Jordana Dym and Karl Offen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011),
144–147.
76 Alejandro Marure’s Catálogo, published in 1841 after Gálvez fell, was the first of its
kind in the state and region.
77 Taracena Arriola, Invención criolla, 223–224; Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos,
“Archaeology and Nationalism in Guatemala at the Time of Independence,” An
tiquity 72 (1988), 376–386; William J. Griffith, “Juan Galindo, Central American
Chauvinist,” Hispanic American Historical Review 40:1 (1960), 25–52.
78 Alejandro Marure, Bosquejo histórica de las revoluciones de Centroamérica desde 1811
hasta 1834 (Guatemala: El Progreso, 1877), with prologue by Lorenzo Montúfar,
n.p.; Woodward, Rafael Carrera, 44.
79 Cited in Julio César Pinto Soria, Reformismo liberal, régimen municipal, ciudadanía
y conflicto étnico en Guatemala (1821–1840) (Guatemala City: CEUR, 1997), 19n44.
80 Woodward, Rafael Carrera, 52; Jorge Luján Muñoz, Breve historia contemporánea
de Guatemala (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998), 97; see also Miriam
Williford, “Las Luces y la Civilización: The Social Reforms of Mariano Gálvez,” in
Applied Enlightenment: 19th Century Liberalism, 1830–1839 (New Orleans: Middle
America Research Institute, 1969). For university reforms, see Blake Pattridge,
312 — Jordana Dym
Institution Building and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: The
University of San Carlos, Guatemala (New York: P. Lang, 2004).
81 Manuel Pineda de Mont, Recopilación de las leyes de Guatemala, 1:492–494,
Decreto de la Asamblea Legislativa, September 28, 1836, municipal regulations,
preamble, arts. 1 and 2 (Guatemala: Imprenta de la Paz, 1869–1872). See also Dym,
From Sovereign Villages, and Sonia Alda Mejías, La participación indígena en la con
strucción de la República de Guatemala, S. XIX (Madrid: uam Ediciones, 2000).
82 Luján Muñoz, Breve historia, 91. See also Mario Rodríguez, “The Livingston
Codes in the Guatemalan Crisis of 1837–1838,” in Applied Enlightenment: 19th
Century Liberalism, 1830–1839 (New Orleans: Middle America Research Institute,
1955).
83 Luján Muñoz, Breve historia, 92.
84 Alejandro Marure, Efemérides: Hechos notables acaecidos en la República de
Centroamérica desde el año de 1821 hasta el de 1842 . . . (1844, rpt. Guatemala City:
Ministerio de Educación Pública. 1956), 91–92.
85 Luján Muñoz, Breve historia, 97.
86 Dym, From Sovereign Villages, chap. 7. For the impact of indigenous villages, see
Alda Mejías, La participación indígena.
87 Woodward, Rafael Carrera, 44, 382. See René Reeves, Ladinos with Ladinos, Indi
ans with Indians: Land, L abor and Regional Conflict in the Making of Guatemala
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 4–5, for a table showing the rise
of coffee exports starting in the 1850s.
88 Woodward, Rafael Carrera, 47–48.
89 Jefferson, “The Rebellion of Mita,” 1–3.
90 Woodward, Rafael Carrera, 51; Fry, “Política agraria y reacción campesina,”
40–42.
91 Pinto Soria, Reformismo liberal, 14n29.
92 Pinto Soria, Reformismo liberal, 15.
93 William J. Griffith, Empires in the Wilderness; Foreign Colonization and Develop
ment in Guatemala, 1834–1844 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1965).
94 Robert A. Naylor, Influencia británica en el comercio centroamericano durante las
primeras décadas de la Independencia (1821–1851) (Woodstock, VT: Antigua, Gua-
temala: Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies/cirma, 1988), citation from 93–95.
95 Woodward, Rafael Carrera, 52–53; Pinto Soria, Reformismo liberal, 18.
96 Douglass Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics: Religion and Nation
Formation in Guatemala, 1821–1871 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1998), 8, 86.
97 agca B Legajo 214, Expediente 4941, Decreto 43, División Territorial del Es-
tado; Woodward, Rafael Carrera, 53–54.
98 Taracena Arriola et al., “La construction nacional,” 16–17.
100 Taracena Arriola, Invención criolla, 313–314. Taracena Arriola found indigenous
pueblos’ letters in Montúfar, Reseña histórica de Centro-américa, 3:150–154.

101 Mariano Rivera Paz, Memoria que presente a la Asamblea constituyente en su primera
sessión, el Consejro Gefe del Estado de Guatemala . . . (Guatemala: Imprenta del
Gobierno del Estado . . . , 1839), 1.
102 After reincorporation, the Guatemalan government split Los Altos’s territories
into six departments (Quetzaltenango, Totonicapán, Sololá, Suchitepéquez, Hue-
huetenango, and San Marcos).
103 “Revolutions in Central America,” United States Democratic Review 40:4 (1857),
326.
104 Dunlop cited in “Revolutions in Central America,” 326.
105 “Revolutions in Central America,” 326.
106 William V. Wells, Explorations and Adventures in Honduras (New York: Harper &
Co., 1857), cited in “Revolutions in Central America,” 326.
107 Woodward, Rafael Carrera; Reeves, Ladinos with Ladinos, Indians with Indians;
Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics.
108 See Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics.
109 For original texts, see Jorge Mario García Laguardia, Constituciones Iberoameri
canas: Guatemala (México: Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, unam, 2006;
Decreto 76 (1839), sec. 1, arts. 2, 3, 6.
110 agca B Legajo 214, Expediente 4941, f. 588, for the ms. copy of Decreto 65
(1839).
111 Decreto 76 (1839), sec. 2, arts. 3, 11, 12, 14, 19. See also Pinto Soria, Reformismo
liberal, 19–22.
112 Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., “Changes in the Nineteenth-Century Guatemalan State
and Its Indian Policies,” in Guatemalan Indians and the State, ed. Carol A. Smith
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 65.
113 Manuel Pineda Mont, Recopilación de las leyes de Guatemala (Guatemala City:
Imprenta de la Paz, 1869–1872), 510–511, Decreto, October 2, 1839, arts. 56–62;
and Decreto, September 21, 1845, 572–574.
114 Luján Muñoz, Breve historia, 96–97.
115 Pinto Soria, Reformismo liberal, 16–18.
116 agca C1 Leg. 56, Exp. 1569, Organización territorial del estado, August–
September 1839, ff. 30–31.
117 agca C1 Leg. 38, Exp. 942, jp Arriaga (Verapáz) to Guatemalan Congress,
April 24, 1839, ff. 5–12.
118 Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics.
119 Woodward, “Changes,” 65; Pattridge, Institution Building, esp. chap. 5.
120 See Griffith, Empires in the Wilderness.
121 Jorge Luján Muñoz, “Del derecho colonial al derecho nacional: El caso de Gua-
temala,” Jahrbuch für Geshhichte Lateinamerikas 38 (2001), http://www-gewi.uni
-graz.at/jbla/jahr01.html; Alejandro Marure, Catálogo de las leyes promulgadas
en el estado de Guatemala, entre 1824 y 1841 (Guatemala: Imprenta La Paz, 1841).
Andrés Fuentes Franco updated this collection with laws from 1842 to 1856 with a
Catálogo razonado in 1856.
314 — Jordana Dym
123 Manifiesto y Decreto N. 15 del Exmo. Señor Presidente del Estado de Guatemala, del
21 de Marzo de 1847, erigiendo dicho Estado en República independiente [facsímile]
(Guatemala: Universidad del Valle, 1997), 8.
124 Guatemala, Decreto N. 15 (1847), 8–11, passim.
125 Guatemala, Decree, March 21, 1847, in Pineda Mont, Recopilación T, 1, 73–75.
126 Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics, 99–100.
127 Woodward, Rafael Carrera, 196.
129 Cited in Taracena Arriola, Invención criolla, 336.
131 Guatemala, Acta Constitutiva, October 19, 1851, arts. 3, 4, and 6.
132 Guatemala, Acta Constitutiva, 1851, arts. 5 and 11.
133 Woodward, Rafael Carrera, chap. 11.

9
From One Patria, Two Nations

in the Andean Heartland
Sarah C. Chambers
I have taken only those measures that have been necessary for the support, protection,
tranquility, and conservation of the Spanish criollos, of the mestizos, zambos and Indians.
For all of them [are] countrymen and compatriots born in our land. —j osé gabriel
túpac amaru, 1780
Bolivia and southern Peru are homogeneous. . . . My goal is to do well and raise t hese
two portions of territory, if I am able, to the height of civilization and common welfare.
—a ndrés de santa cruz, 1837
At first glance, Andean history illustrates well the theme of divergence in the
era of New World independence. In 1500, the Inkas exerted influence over the
most expansive American empire from Cusco; before the end of that century
the new Spanish metropolis of Potosí became a nerve center of the global
economy. But silver production declined after 1650, and in the early nineteenth
c entury the region broke into multiple countries governed by weak states and
lacking cohesive national identities.1 That outcome was not inevitable. This
chapter explores the forces of convergence and divergence within the Andean
heartland—core highlands ranging from the regions around the once Inka cap-
ital at Cusco to the later mining metropolis at Potosí and its hinterlands—to
understand how p eoples with a long history of interactions came to separate
into two nations: Peru and Bolivia.2
Inka roads, armies, and exchanges integrated the heartland in the fifteenth
century. Spanish rule linked the region to the global silver economy in the six-
teenth century, but preserved strong indigenous leadership, ways of produc-
tion, and cultural customs at the local level. Although the heartland was split
between two viceroyalties in 1776, economic, social, and cultural integrations
persisted as evidenced by the uprisings of the 1780s, famously led by Túpac
Amaru. Although political rivalries during the wars of independence led to the
establishment of separate nations, the foundation of Peru and Bolivia as new
countries was contingent—a historical process in need of explanation.
The heartland was the core of what had been a larger Andean zone of re-
source exchange and empire building. Beginning almost four thousand years
ago, Andean peoples began to develop settled agricultural communities and
systems of exchange that distributed products such as corn, tubers, wool, and
coca among highly diversified ecological zones from the coast to the high al-
titude plains. From the shores of Lake Titicaca, Tiwanaku expanded its influ-
ence over much of the southern Andes between 550 and 950, while the Wari
held sway over the central zone (much of contemporary Peru). Over the
course of the fifteenth c entury the Inka built an empire—Tawantinsuyu or
the Land of Four Quarters—that expanded even beyond the former Tiwan-
aku and Wari territories. Some of t hose recently conquered Andean p eoples
helped Spanish invaders defeat the Inka in the sixteenth c entury, and under
this new empire the silver extracted by indigenous laborers from the rich
mountain of Potosí flowed across both the Atlantic and Pacific, much of
it to meet high demand in China.3 Wealthy Spanish miners, in turn, could
import luxurious silks and wines to make life in the harsh environment more
tolerable. Silver also stimulated commerce throughout the Andes to meet the
needs of workers and provide supplies for mining: woolens arrived from far-off
Quito, while mules raised to the south near Tucumán met demand for power
and transportation.4
Spanish colonialism dramatically affected Andean society by pulling native
peoples into a commercial economy and siphoning labor power from agricul-
tural communities to the mines. Nonetheless, unlike the case of mining centers
Two Nations in the Andean Heartland — 317
in Spanish North America, as analyzed by Alfredo Ávila and John Tutino, t hese
forces did not make “a new world.”5 Rather, native Andeans in the heartland
resiliently adapted their cultural traditions and social relations to changing
conditions and demands. Although Potosí itself was a new metropolis—with a
population in 1600 of about one hundred thousand at an elevation of thirteen
thousand feet—it grew within a long-settled region. Despite dramatic demo-
graphic decline, the indigenous population of the Andean heartland provided
labor for the mines, about half of it from a forced draft (the mitá). In addition to
taxes on silver and trade, a separate tax on the indigenous population was criti-
cal to colonial (and later national) revenue. Traditional authorities (kurakas
in Quechua, caciques in Spanish) and many commoners viewed this tribute as
guaranteeing a degree of self-rule, access to communal landholdings, and an ex-
emption from sales taxes when they sold their products in markets. Native An-
deans without land or herds, on the other hand, often resisted payment.6 From
1630 to 1730, silver production in Potosí declined, but agriculturalists and herd-
ers in the heartland—many of them members of indigenous communities—
continued to exchange goods through regional trade networks. When silver
began a modest recovery in the eighteenth century, the south-central highlands
along with their connected tropical valleys (yungas) w ere able to meet the de-
mand for supplies: sugar, cocoa, wine and brandy, woolen textiles and hides,
meat, grains and tubers. While much reduced from the Inka realm of Tawantin-
suyu, this region included much of its former core (Cusco and the heartlands of
the southeastern quarter named Kollasuyu).
The integration created by cultural ties, trade networks, and labor migra-
tion, however, was repeatedly ignored when political authorities drew and re-
drew borders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1776, the Spanish
Bourbons removed the provinces of Upper Peru, including Puno, from the au-
thority of Lima and joined them to the newly created Viceroyalty of Río de la
Plata, with its capital in the Atlantic port of Buenos Aires. The break, however,
was anything but clean. Although silver from Potosí was henceforth exported
through Buenos Aires, communities on both sides of the new administrative
border continued to provide labor and supplies. With the establishment of
a Cusco Audiencia (High Court) in 1788, three provinces of Puno were put
under its jurisdiction, while the rest continued to report to the Audiencia
of Charcas in Chuquisaca until the entire Intendancy of Puno was returned to
Peru in 1796. An 1801 proposal to create a new viceroyalty encompassing heart-
land provinces of Cusco, Puno, and Charcas made sense, but did not come to
fruition.7 In 1825, Simón Bolívar sanctioned the creation of a nation, named in
his honor, independent of e ither Peru or the United Provinces of the Río de la
318— Sarah Chambers
Lima V I C E R O YA LT Y
Huancavelica O F P E R U
Huamanga Cusco
Tinta N
Azángaro
Sorata
Puno
Arequipa La Paz
Moquegua Sicasica Ayopaya
Tacna Cochabamba
Oruro
Arica Macha
Chuquisaca
PA C I F I C O C E A N Potosí
V I C E R O YA LT Y
O F L A P L ATA
0 100 200 300 mi
0 100 200 300 400 500 km Cobija
Map 9.1. The Andean heartland, ca. 1776
Plata (which included the f uture Paraguay and Uruguay as well as Argentina).
He still hoped to build a grand Andean federation that never materialized. Fi
nally, in the wake of the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), Bolivia lost its Pacific
port and Peru its rich nitrate fields to the expanding nation of Chile.
Despite cultural diversity and economic differentiation within the Andean
heartland, one does not need to resort to counterfactuals to find political at-
tempts to reintegrate the region. The g reat Andean rebellions of 1780 to 1782
encompassed this entire zone, and when the capture of Fernando VII created
an imperial crisis in 1808, Viceroy José Fernando de Abascal reclaimed Upper
Peru in a bid to weaken the rebels of Buenos Aires. The last Spanish viceroy of
Peru, José de la Serna, retreated to the highlands, making Cusco the effective
capital and allowing members of its cabildo and Audiencia to imagine a His-
panic reincarnation of the Inka empire. Independence-era leaders did not view
the division of the region into separate nations a foregone conclusion. Even
after a congress in “Upper Peru” declared its independence as Bolivia in 1825,
various schemes imagined reuniting the two “Perus.” Andrés de Santa Cruz led
the most promising attempt; he saw himself as a citizen of both nations and
joined them in confederation from 1836 to 1839.
Although the attempts at independence-era political integration of the An-
dean heartland failed, owing to internal rivalries as well as external opposition,
they challenge us to consider alternatives to the separate nations of Peru and
Bolivia. As in Central America, drawing national boundaries after indepen
dence was a complicated and contingent process. There, as Jordana Dym traces,
Guatemala emerged from processes of both fragmentation (separation from
the larger federation) and integration (strengthening the economic and politi
cal ties among three distinct regions).8 In the Andes, inhabitants of a territory
that had been cohesive for centuries were unable to overcome administrative
divisions introduced by the Bourbons and reaffirmed out of political expedi-
ency after the defeat of the royal army.
Given the contingency of their separation, we should not lose sight of the
commonalities between northern Bolivia and southern Peru. This region shared
a resilient indigenous peasantry who was neither passive nor isolated and at
least some elites and intellectuals who envisioned polities that would incorpo-
rate, rather than exclude and dispossess, such communities. Both before and
after independence from Spain, the term “patria” was invoked to convey com-
mon membership in a polity, allowing Spanish concepts of vecinos as rights-
bearing residents of a corporate community to overlap and interpenetrate both
indigenous understandings of communal membership and evolving notions
of citizenship in broader republics. Belonging to a patria asserted a degree of
shared identity without negating internal diversity. Finally, the borders of a
homeland represented by the patria w ere flexible, rooted in but reaching be-
yond the local community.9 This chapter draws on the rich historiography of
both Peru and Bolivia, as well as sources from the early nineteenth century,
to reassemble those elements into an alternative view of a patria, if not a fully
realized nation, integrated through culture and trade routes as well as politi
cal imaginings. Along the way, this counternarrative will cross several periods
whose chronological boundaries are as imprecise as t hose geographic borders.
Economic Resilience and Movements for Home Rule (ca. 1750–1805)

The history of Peru is often told as a story of decline. Before the arrival of the
Spaniards, native Andeans had developed technologies of agriculture, storage,
and transport that supported dense populations, laying the foundations for the
expansive Inka empire. In the first c entury of colonialism, Spaniards harnessed
these human and material resources to an expanding global market. Peruvian
silver funded the rise of Spain as a world power and stimulated trade from Eu
rope to China. So famous in Europe was the remote Andean metropolis that
the term “Potosí” became synonymous with striking it rich. Then silver pro-
duction entered a long decline and the territory named Peru gradually shrank
from encompassing all Spanish claims in South America to a medium-sized
nation of uncertain prosperity by the end of the nineteenth century.
If we reconsider the Andean heartland during the eighteenth century from
the vantage point of the altiplano rather than Lima, alternative narratives
emerge to challenge expectations of dependency theory that extractive enter-
prises oriented toward the global market would create enclaves of dynamism
within larger zones of underdevelopment.10 The forced labor draft (mitá) did
constitute a double exploitation of indigenous communities, by siphoning off
local resources (wool, foodstuffs, llamas) along with their labor power. None-
theless, native Andeans (women as well as men) responded to t hese pressures
with resilience, continuing traditional exchanges of products among ecologi-
cal zones and even selling surpluses in the new markets. As silver production
declined and the population of Potosí shrank in the later seventeenth c entury,
the peasant economy did not collapse. Some of the reduction in officially regis-
tered silver, moreover, reflected both tax evasion by large refiners and informal
production by groups of skilled indigenous wage laborers.11 Finally, a fter 1730,
both the indigenous population and the production of silver began to recover
from their long decline.12
Although Peru’s value to the Spanish empire could not rival New Spain’s
in the eighteenth century, the Bourbon monarchs did not ignore its potential
as they promoted economic revival and increased revenue collection through-
out the eighteenth century. To stimulate mining, Madrid reduced the tax on
silver, made mercury for processing more readily available, and provided tech-
nical help for upgrading excavations and w ater pumping. Equally important
for the profits of silver entrepreneurs in Potosí, Spanish officials continued to
enforce the mitá despite growing calls for its abolition and looked the other
way as increasing quotas lengthened the shifts of forced laborers. Throughout
the century, Andean silver production increased at an average annual rate of
1.2 percent, although it regained its earlier peak only briefly in the 1780s.13 In
the midst of the recovery, Bourbon reformers opened more ports to trade and
reorganized colonial administration to increase oversight and tax collection.
Travel from the altiplano to e ither coast was difficult, but shipping silver from
Buenos Aires eliminated the overland Panama route, avoided Caribbean at-
tacks by imperial rivals, and reduced silver exported directly across the Pa-
cific. Moreover, authorities in Buenos Aires could increase vigilance against
the contraband silver that had flowed through Brazil since the seventeenth
century. Despite the shifts in export patterns, however, Andean products
continued to move freely across the new boundary between the viceroyalties of
Peru and Río de la Plata.
Demand from the reviving mining centers and expanding cities no lon-
ger drew trade from as widespread an area, in large part b ecause producers in
the Andean heartland met regional needs. Native Andeans w ere exempt from
the sales tax (alcabala), an exception some nonindigenous traders and colo-
nial officials viewed as an unfair competitive edge; thus it is difficult to mea
sure and track commodities produced by indigenous peasants. Sources from
1793, when that exemption was briefly abolished, suggest that native provi-
sioning accounted for a significant proportion of goods consumed in mining
areas.14 Although the vast majority of European goods entering Potosí that year
(80 percent) were imported through Buenos Aires, almost three-quarters of
commodities (as measured by value) w ere produced in the Andean heartland,
including brandy from Tacna and Arequipa, cloth from Cusco, and coca from
La Paz. Notably, much of the coca was produced and transported by native
Andeans. Although large coca haciendas also expanded in response to demand
from mining centers, indigenous communities often found markets for their
cheaper coca during periods of silver contraction.15 Indigenous peasants and
other small farmers in the regions north of Potosí and in Cochabamba similarly
provisioned both the mining areas and the city of La Paz with wheat and corn,
and native Andeans flocked to major trade centers in the region of Oruro.16
Although brandy and cloth were produced on larger enterprises and traded by
Hispanic merchants, the abundance of t hese commodities in the markets and
shops of Potosí demonstrate that the transfer of Upper Peru to the jurisdiction
of Río de la Plata did not discourage trade across the new border.17
While Potosí remained the single most productive mining center in the
Andean heartland, silver production rose throughout Upper and Lower Peru.
Moreover, growing populations in cities like Arequipa also created demand for
foodstuffs and other locally produced goods in addition to European imports.18
Cusco, where producers specialized in sugar, textiles, coca, and hot peppers (ají),
experienced greater economic stagnation than Arequipa; on the other hand,
the obstacles to making quick profits limited encroachment by non-Indians
onto communal lands around Cusco. The major trade routes passed through
the altiplano region around Lake Titicaca, where as much as two-thirds of the
livestock was in indigenous hands and many worked transporting goods on
packs of camelids and mules throughout the south-central Andes. Residents
of the high plains sent the products of herding (wool, hides, meat) as well as
crafts (leather goods and pottery) in both directions: to Arequipa and Cusco
as well as to Oruro and Potosí.19 Although indigenous labor and commodities
both received low compensation, the flexibility of peasant h ousehold produc-
tion allowed for subsistence survival in hard times and modest surpluses when
markets improved.20 In contrast to Mexico and Haiti, where popular rebellions
destroyed export economies to establish familial subsistence production, ex-
ternal and internal trade and commercial and f amily production continued to
converge in the Andean heartland.
Although regional trade offered opportunities to some, demographic and ad-
ministrative changes in the eighteenth century also resulted in economic hard-
ship. The recovery of the indigenous population, a fter the last g reat epidemic
of the 1720s, placed pressure on the land base of communities. Moreover, Bour-
bon measures to increase colonial revenues resulted in more efficient collection
of “tribute,” the indigenous head tax, in part by ending exemptions for foraste
ros (“migrants” who may have been residents of a given community for genera-
tions).21 In 1751, Madrid also legalized the customary practice undertaken by
governors (corregidores) to require communities to buy goods, often at inflated
prices. Cusco elites forged economic and marital alliances with authorities in
Upper Peru, for example, that allowed them to market their textiles through
such repartos.22 Finally, in the 1770s, colonial authorities raised the sales tax
from 2 to 4 and then 6 percent, and increased the range of commodities subject
to taxation. Although indigenous traders selling products from community
plots or herds were exempt from taxation, they were liable for tax on “Castil-
ian” goods that they marketed. Given this loophole, many indigenous traders
feared that more of their cargos would be taxed than had been customary, es-
pecially when the sales tax was extended to coca and grains in 1779 and 1780.23
Colonial subjects in the Andean heartland responded in various ways to
these increasing economic and fiscal pressures. As they had since the conquest,
indigenous communities filed petitions and lawsuits aimed at staking claims
to land, lessening the burden of their tax and labor obligations, and protesting
abuses by both colonial authorities and some kurakas.24 When Bourbon of-
ficials proved less open to negotiation than their predecessors, however, many
peasants and traders turned to open revolt.25 Crowds attacked customhouses
newly established across this economic zone to collect the expanded sales tax, first
in Cochabamba (1774), then La Paz (1777 and 1780) and Arequipa (1780), and
finally there were plans to protest a proposed aduana in Cusco (1780). Evidence
suggests that participation was widespread across classes and ethnic groups,
and the opposition to an expanded alcabala reflected the potential links be-
tween economic circuits and potential polities.26 Although uprisings might
respond to a trigger event, they drew from historical memory of alternative
forms of rule and envisioned new arrangements of power. And trade networks,
figure 9.1. Traders with llamas in nineteenth-century Bolivia.
Courtesy the Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia
especially the circuits plied by muleteers and trajinantes (who used llamas as
pack animals), were an important means of coordinating actions throughout
a wider region. 27
As such a trader, José Gabriel Condorcanqui (1738–1781) had built up a net-
work of contacts that cut across various ethnic and socioeconomic categories.28
He was educated in the Jesuit college in Cusco established for the c hildren of
the indigenous nobility, and l ater in Lima met intellectuals associated with the
University of San Marcos, where professors evaded censorship to discuss en-
lightenment texts. He was on good terms with many of the regional elite, and
his network widened with marriage to mestiza Micaela Bastidas, who played a
key role in their joint economic and political endeavors.29 Despite his education
and commercial success, he too ran up against colonial, specifically Bourbon,
forms of exploitation. His u ncle Marcos Thupa Amaro, kuraka of Surimana, was
“bankrupted by the seizure of a train of mules and a hundred pesos’ worth of
goods because his mitá quota was one man short.”30 Condorcanqui, in turn, had
to pay increased taxes on his trade goods in 1777 and disputed the reparto with
several corregidores, one of whom jailed him for debts.31 Like other indigenous
elites, he repeatedly went to court to establish his claim as hereditary kuraka
of Tinta in the region of Cusco and his royal descent from Inka ruler Túpac
Amaru, executed in 1572 by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo. It sent a powerful
message when the kuraka, taking the name of Túpac Amaru, launched his
movement by executing Corregidor Antonio de Arriaga in 1780.
Historians have long debated the causes and goals of the great Andean
rebellion.32 Túpac Amaru claimed to be acting with orders from the Spanish
monarch, but the language and content of his proclamations and letters were
clearly anticolonial. Issuing orders authoritatively as an Inka, he called for the
reduction of tribute and sales tax rates and the abolition of the mitá.33 He par-
ticipated in and drew from an eighteenth-century revival of Inka history that
included the circulation of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the
Incas, the composition and legal use of Inka genealogies, and portraiture of
kurakas and their wives in Inka dress.34 But Túpac Amaru was also reinvent-
ing what it meant to be an Inka; he declared his Christian faith, prohibiting
harm to priests or desecration of churches, and in his efforts to recruit allies, he
implied that the Andean patria over which he claimed authority could be em-
bedded within the larger empire of the Catholic sovereigns of Castile. Túpac
Amaru appealed to all fellow countrymen born in “Peru” (referring to the full
Andean region rather than the recently reduced viceroyalty)—American Span-
iards, mestizos, and zambos (mulattos) as well as Indians—to unite as compa-
triots in opposition to the corrupt and exploitative officials who came from
Spain.35 Even before securing Cusco, he led his troops toward Lake Titicaca;
rebels in that region continued fighting u ntil 1783.36 In the heartland of Tawa-
ntinsuyu, where stories of a returning or regenerated Inka (Inkarri) had and
would continue to circulate, some non-Indians as well as native Andeans could
imagine their place within a polity governed by an Inka.
Certainly, these coalitions were fragile. Some hereditary nobles chose not
to recognize Túpac Amaru’s overarching authority, but they did not necessarily
reject the larger vision of a reinvigorated authority for their class.37 Similarly, in-
digenous peasants had their own interpretations of who w ere and w ere not their
fellow countrymen, often ignoring o rders not to kill locals of Spanish or mixed
descent, thus scaring off some of the allies Túpac Amaru sought.38 Although
Charles Walker rejects Peruvian nationalist narratives that claim Túpac Amaru
as a precursor to the independence movements of 1810 to 1825, he does argue
that the movement and its ideology constituted a militant “protonationalism.”
Although the rebellion did not succeed in establishing a new polity, its lead-
ers spoke in the name of a patria, indicating “the existence of a unique body of
people and the attempt to attain political gains for this body or nation.”39
Even before Túpac Amaru’s execution of Arriaga, another anticolonial move-
ment was taking shape from the bottom up among the Aymara-speaking com-
munities around La Paz and Potosí. In this region, the legitimacy of hereditary
ethnic leaders had eroded to a greater degree than around Cusco, and local
community authorities (often elected to the colonial office of village alcaldes)
took the initiative in protesting the abusive practices of corregidores in forced
sales and collection of tribute.40 Such local efforts were not new, but an illiter-
ate peasant from the community of Macha came to spearhead a wider collective
strategy. Interestingly, Tomás Katari and his allies initially sought the support of
new Bourbon officials against the entrenched local elite. Katari promised that in
return for being allowed to determine among themselves how to apportion trib-
ute payments, communal authorities could in fact increase revenue by cutting
out corrupt middlemen. When Corregidor Joaquín Alós refused to recognize
his authority, Katari traveled over two thousand miles to Buenos Aires, where
he obtained a viceregal order to the Audiencia of Charcas to investigate the
community claims and enact a just settlement. Instead the Audiencia ordered
Katari’s arrest, and its troops subsequently killed the captive. This act triggered
open revolt by Katari’s followers. Although Katari’s leadership was distinct
from that of Túpac Amaru, his movement also expressed a vision of indigenous
authority at the local level that grew out of “a long-term process of cultural and
political empowerment of the Andean peoples.”41
The Amaru (Quechua) movement formed a tenuous alliance with the
community-led (Aymara) revolt under a new leader from the Sicasica province
near La Paz. Julián Apasa earned his living selling coca and woolens within
the south-central Andean trade circuit, an occupation that allowed him to spread
anticolonial plans and forge a political network. Taking the name Tupaj Katari
(“Resplendent Serpent”) and embodying physical and spiritual characteristics
associated with Aymara warriors, Apasa effectively mobilized his peasant troops,
twice setting siege to La Paz for 109 and 75 days, respectively.42 Although Tupaj
Katari was in communication with Diego Cristóbal Túpac Amaru, who was try-
ing to maintain a multiethnic alliance from Cuzco, the Aymara soldiers often
took retribution on all who gained in colonial exploitation, rather than distin-
guishing those born in America from those who arrived from Europe.43 Tupaj
Katari rose to prominence at the height of anticolonial protest, but had emerged
out of longer-term strategies aimed at reinforcing local authority. Smaller re-
volts in the region of La Paz during the preceding decades had demonstrated
an emerging “democracy” in action in which leaders consulted communal as-
semblies and Aymara peasants experimented with incorporating Spaniards and
mestizos on indigenous terms into visions of a new polity.44
Visions of the polity that might result from Andean rebellion in the 1780s
ranged from Túpac Amaru’s multiethnic patria u nder Inka rule to Tupaj Ka-
tari’s bottom-up federation of mostly Aymara communities. Revolts in which
Quechua and Aymara leaders alike experimented with practices and rituals
that might incorporate non-Indians (albeit in ways those American Spaniards
and mestizos might not welcome) suggest that native Andeans did not neces-
sarily reject all outsiders from their idea of patria. As later in Haiti, where all
citizens were declared “black,” as Carolyn Fick shows, all members of an Andean
patria might be imagined as indigenous.45 Andrés Túpac Amaru, for example,
ordered non-Indians in the town of Sorata “to dress in Indian garb, chew coca,
go barefoot, and call themselves Qollas” (a reference to the Inka territory of
Kollasuyu); in the mining center of Oruro Hispanic rebels voluntarily donned
Inka tunics.46 Such initiatives provide evidence to support Sinclair Thomson’s
claim that “race war,” rather than inevitable, “was a result of political and mili-
tary processes from among an array of different possibilities.”47 Although none
of these revolts prevailed, nor easily conform to Western notions of nationhood,
such movements can be seen as alternative projects to establish home rule of the
patria, some more inclusive but authoritarian, others more exclusive but poten-
tially more democratic.
Several decades would pass after the suppression of the rebellions of the
early 1780s before major political and military movements again shook the
Andes. From their role as critical intermediaries who controlled access to An-
dean labor and resources for Spanish conquerors, kurakas had seen the gradual
erosion of their influence in the face of regime pressures. The defeat of Túpac
Amaru brought an intensification of that trend. In addition to executing or de-
posing kurakas who had supported Túpac Amaru, colonial officials prohibited
displays of Inka heritage; they even took from many loyal kurakas the authority
to collect tribute.48 Viceroy of Peru Teodoro de Croix (1784–1790) also led re-
forms to create a more centralized and disciplined military force that could re-
spond to uprisings more effectively than the local militias who had performed
poorly in 1780.49
It would be a mistake, however, to see a period after 1782 as one of complete
quiescence. Provincial elites (Hispanic by reputation but often of mixed ances-
try) pursued strategies of negotiation and evasion to limit the negative impacts
of the Bourbon reforms, and indigenous communities returned primarily to
the courts in the ongoing effort to protect their resources and limit outside ex-
ploitation.50 One sign of the ongoing appeal of an alternative polity—for diverse
inhabitants of the region—was a conspiracy in 1805. Despite memories of indig-
enous violence in 1780, two Hispanic provincials searched for a descendant of
the Inkas to legitimate a plan to topple Spanish rule. Juan Manuel Ubalde was
born in Arequipa, studied in Cusco, practiced law in Lima, and was appointed
as a substitute member of the recently established Audiencia of Cusco in 1805.
His coconspirator, mineralogist Gabriel Aguilar, was born farther north in
Huánuco, but had traveled widely through the trading circuits of the south-
central Andes.51 Their peregrinations traced possible boundaries of an Andean
patria. Although their plans w ere discovered before they could be carried out,
less than a decade later creoles and kurakas from Cusco jointly launched a re-
bellion, seizing territory from Arequipa to La Paz.
Imperial and Separatist Visions of an Andean Patria (ca. 1809–1825)

ecause histories of Spanish American independence focus their studies on the
B
nations that emerged and work their way back in time, many artificially sepa-
rate Bolivian and Peruvian separatist movements. In most accounts, Peruvians
are identified as the “reluctant rebels”; in t hese interpretations, elites remem-
bered Túpac Amaru and feared provoking another race war, while native An-
deans took no interest in the disputes between Spaniards, whether American
or European.52 Although Lima elites did remain largely royalist, many in the
highlands led or joined revolts. “Bolivians” (the term did not yet exist) have
a somewhat more rebellious reputation, but are noted for their formation of
small republiquetas rather than a united front.53 In both cases, of course, Span-
ish forces were defeated only with the assistance of troops arriving from the
more autonomist regions of Greater Colombia and Río de la Plata. Although
some Andeans (like their counterparts across Spanish America) initially re-
mained loyal to the Spanish Crown and others opted earlier for independence,
most shared a vision of a patria that encompassed territory on both shores of
Lake Titicaca. And leaders in diverse political factions saw the importance of
incorporating the majority indigenous population into their plans.
Urban elites throughout the Spanish empire responded to Napoleon’s cap-
ture of Fernando VII by forming assemblies (juntas) to govern locally in his
name, but their goals varied: some regarded their actions as a temporary mea
sure until monarchism could be restored, o thers hoped to create a space for
greater home rule within a reformed imperial structure, and a few envisioned
a movement t oward full autonomy. Lima, where both officials and merchants
dreamed of reconstituting its former glory as the viceregal capital and exclusive
port for Spanish South America, was notably absent from this trend. Cities
in the Andean heartland, however, were among the first to establish juntas:
gatherings in Chuquisaca and La Paz in 1809 preceded the formation the fol-
lowing year of the more famous assemblies in Caracas and Buenos Aires, and
Cochabamba, Oruro, and Tacna quickly followed in 1810 and 1811.

Although members of the Hispanic elite initiated the junta in La Paz, they
invited indigenous communities to send representatives. Supporters from below,
moreover, pressured for measures such as the abolition of the mitá, the tem-
porary suspension of tribute and sales taxes, and the election of local leaders.
Strikingly reminiscent of earlier attempts to identify all members of an Andean
patria as indigenous, rebels occasionally used the term indio to refer to all t hose
born locally, grouping together “white, almost white (or having white skin), and
real Indians.”54 In addition to attempting to forge an inclusive alliance within
the region around La Paz, leaders planned to extend their movement through-
out the Andean heartland. Their initial declaration was addressed to the “cou-
rageous inhabitants of La Paz and of the entire empire of Peru.” They quickly
gained adherents as far south as Potosí and Chuquisaca and sent troops t oward
Lower Peru and the port of Arica.55 Although they could not hold the city of
La Paz, many continued to fight for their “patria” as guerrillas in the Republi-
queta of Ayopaya, a territory that included landless Aymara, indigenous com-
munities, and mestizo and Hispanic smallholders.56 Notably, rebel authorities
adopted many of the tactics used decades earlier in the area by the Kataristas,
and financed their operations in part by marketing coca.57
The revolts in Upper Peru envisioned an Andean patria that straddled the
boundary between Peru and Río de la Plata, while authorities in Lima and Bue-
nos Aires also vied for control over altiplano territory. Juan José Castelli, who
led the first expedition to extend the power of the porteño junta, proclaimed
that the movement aimed to liberate the indigenous population along with
everyone else. As far away as Huánuco, where American Spaniards w ere trying
to recruit support among the surrounding villages for a revolt, rumors circu-
lated that the “Inka King Castelli” would arrive to liberate the communities
and that members should prepare to greet him with traditional dances.58 From
the other direction, Viceroy José de Abascal in Lima seized upon the crisis as
an opportunity to reunite Lower and Upper Peru, sending troops that scored
victories over both local juntas and porteño forces. Abascal had intensified mil-
itary reform, increasing the size and effectiveness of the Peruvian royal army.59
In an effort to reinforce loyalty to the Crown, he recruited a diverse leadership
to command the largely indigenous and mestizo troops. Among royal officers
were loyal kurakas from Puno and Cusco, notably Mateo García Pumacahua,
earlier decorated for his role in defeating Túpac Amaru. In 1812 Pumacahua
was promoted to brigadier and interim president of the Cusco Audiencia, but
then passed over by the permanent appointment of peninsular Manuel Pardo.
American Spaniards from Arequipa, including Pío Tristan and José Manuel de

Goyeneche, returned from military service in Spain to take command of the
army of Upper Peru. Mestizos such as Agustín Gamarra (Cusco) and Andrés
de Santa Cruz (La Paz) also rose through the ranks.60
Just as Abascal was rewarding loyalty through military commissions, the
convocation of the Cortes in Cádiz further altered political possibilities in the
empire. In a reversal of earlier rebel attempts to Andeanize Spaniards and mesti-
zos, the 1812 Constitution extended “Spanish” nationality to indigenous inhab-
itants, declaring them citizens eligible to vote and abolishing the tribute they
had been assessed since conquest. The exclusion of people of African descent
from citizenship would affect many along both the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts,
but few in the Andean highlands. Many from various classes enthusiastically
embraced the constitution during the brief periods it was in force (1812–1814
and 1820–1823).61 Presumably they shared its vision of a new national polity
in which Spaniards included all “free men who were born and reside any-
where in Spanish dominions, as well as their c hildren” (article 5, section 1).62
The nation, thus defined, was far vaster than the Andean heartland, much less
the later nations of Peru and Bolivia. But the constitution did grant significant
authority to locally elected bodies. A pyramid of municipalities and provinces
within a constitutional monarchy was not so different from what Tristan Platt
suggests was the indigenous vision of “cantons and provinces, departments and
nations as simply the ascending levels of a segmentary system whose smallest
units were to be found within the kinship and residential group.”63
Defense of the constitution was one trigger of a major autonomist move-
ment that began in Cusco. As in the aborted conspiracy of 1805, this rebellion
was initiated by American Spaniards who sought indigenous allies; unlike the
messianic dreams of Aguilar and Ubalde, its vision grew out of a new political
context and its plans were more realizable. In late 1812, a lawyer circulated a let-
ter signed by thirty-seven local notables protesting the delay in calling elections
for the town council (cabildo). The Audiencia tried to restore calm by arresting
some more vocal agitators, but these measures had the opposite effect of mobi-
lizing a protest under José Angulo. When Abascal ordered a hard line against
the protestors, Pumacahua, perhaps smarting from not being confirmed in his
Audiencia post, joined the rebellion. Although he was cautious about his use
of Inka symbolism, his descent from Huayna Capac likely bolstered his legiti-
macy among some, indigenous and nonindigenous alike.64 In 1814, autonomist
forces fanned out, north to Huamanga and Huancavelica and south to Areq-
uipa, Puno, and La Paz, where they w ere more successful. Many soldiers and
officers, like Pumacahua, had just served in the suppression of the revolts in
Upper Peru, but were now mobilized for a new cause. Although the rebels were
defeated by royal troops in 1815—after the restored King Fernando’s abrogation
of the constitution—it revealed again the potential for political alliances that
crossed class and ethnic categories, and the border that had divided the two
Perus in 1776.65 As rebels in the province of Aymaraes expressed it in 1818, “We
are now all of the same body, españoles and tribute-paying Indians.”66
By 1820—when the Cádiz Constitution was reinstated and peninsular troops
prepared to sail to South America—the royal army still controlled much An-
dean territory. The leaders of the increasingly successful moves toward indepen
dence elsewhere in South America recognized that they must end Spanish rule
in the Andes to consolidate their own autonomy. José de San Martín landed
near Lima in 1820 with soldiers from Chile and the Río de la Plata; Simón
Bolívar came with Colombian troops (from regions now Venezuela, Colom-
bia, and Ecuador) and took over patriot command in 1822. The new viceroy of
Peru, José de la Serna, moved his administration from Lima to Cusco, which
he called “the ancient capital of Peru,” opening a last opportunity between 1821
and 1824 to construct an Andean patria within the framework of the Spanish
Constitution. A local newspaper published a poem that envisioned an empire
stretching across the Andes from the Pacific to the Atlantic, led by La Serna
from Cusco.67
Despite the last stand by La Serna, local guerrillas who favored indepen
dence slowly extended their control of territory across the altiplano, while
forces commanded by Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre advanced from the
north. As the balance of power tipped, American-born officers in the royal army
one by one shifted allegiance to the cause of independence. The biographies of
two reveal common roots in the provincial elite of the Andean heartland and
the ongoing ties between Lower and Upper Peru. Agustín Gamarra was born
in 1785 in Cusco, where he learned Quechua before studying Latin. He joined
the king’s army in 1809 to fight insurgency in Upper Peru and later the follow-
ers of Pumacahua, and by 1818 he was promoted to colonel. Then he switched
sides in early 1821, volunteering to serve under San Martín.68 Gamarra’s enemies
insinuated that his m other was an Indian; the mixed heritage of his f uture rival
Andrés de Santa Cruz is undisputed. The father of Santa Cruz, originally from
Huamanga, was a c areer military officer and midlevel royal bureaucrat, serving
the viceroyalties of Peru and Río de la Plata. In the 1780s he was in La Paz to
suppress the Katarista rebellion, and he later married a w oman of the indig-
enous elite whose f amily remained loyal to Spain. Andrés was born in La Paz
but educated in Cusco, where he courted the daughter of an Audiencia judge
whom he later married in Arequipa. He pursued a c areer similar to Gamarra,
joining the royal army in 1809 and rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel in
1817, when he was taken prisoner of war. Escaping to rejoining the royal army
in Peru, he fell captive once again—and changed sides.
In addition to adapting to the fortunes of war, American-born officers saw
that their chances of promotion in the Spanish army were limited. In the in
dependence forces, by contrast, Santa Cruz rose quickly to become Bolívar’s
chief of staff for the Peruvian division. The gambits of Santa Cruz and Gamarra
paid off in 1824 with the definitive patriot victories at Junín (where Santa Cruz
fought) and Ayacucho (where Gamarra participated). Although Bolívar fa-
vored a union of the two Perus, he followed Sucre’s advice to convene a con-
gress in 1825 that founded a separate Bolivia.
An Andean Nation Briefly Realized:

Trade Circuits and Confederation (ca. 1825–1839)
Before picking up the story of the intertwined political trajectories of Gamarra
and Santa Cruz and their roles in promoting an Andean patria from bases in
Peru and Bolivia respectively, let us revisit the regional economy during the first
half of the nineteenth c entury. The prolonged fighting between separatist and
royalist forces between 1809 and 1825 took a serious toll on production across
region. Peasants and workers were pressed into service, armies requisitioned
supplies from communities, and mining came almost to a halt. Nonetheless,
the production of silver and other minerals resumed more quickly than often
assumed, albeit with regional variations. Moderate levels of silver extraction
continued in Potosí, much of it by indigenous and mestizo small-scale pro-
ducers, as the mitá draft was abolished at independence. Puno also remained
an important mining center integrated into both regional trade circuits and
the global market.69 Exports from and imports to Bolivia went through both
the new country’s only port at Cobija on the Pacific, as well as the established
trading center of Arica, which remained part of Peru until 1883. With produc-
tion below pre-1810 levels, however, much Bolivian silver was minted and used
to buy supplies from the regions of Cusco and Arequipa rather than reaching
any port.70
Jurist José María Dalence, a native of Oruro educated in Chuquisaca, pub-
lished an overview on the geography, demography, and economy of Bolivia in
1851 that reveals continuities from late colonial times. La Paz remained the most
populous department, and the most indigenous; along with parts of Potosí and
Oruro, it still produced large quantities of coca and herds of camelids. Dalence
noted that while most of the nation’s borders w ere secure, the boundary between
La Paz and Puno down to Arica remained porous. In addition to Bolivia’s large
figure 9.2. Coinage of a realm that briefly was: The Peru-Bolivia Confederation, 1838
imbalance in global trade, the nation imported more wine, liquor, and sugar
from Cusco, Puno, and Arequipa, than the value of its exports to Peru.71 Strik-
ingly, much of this transborder trade was transacted with small-denomination
coins (known as the peso feble) minted in Bolivia with lower silver content than
either the colonial peso or the postindependence Peruvian currency. For the
most part, European merchants refused to accept this new currency, as did the
Chilean government, which was trying to gain control of new import trades
through its port of Valparaiso. Authorities in Lima periodically protested
the devalued coins, but they continued to circulate within southern Peru. In-
formally, the Andean heartland had its own currency that crossed national
boundaries.72
Although the regional economy experienced much continuity, new export
products also emerged in response to demands of an industrializing Europe.
Southern Peru became an important source of wool for British textile mills.
Trading houses in Arequipa sent mestizo middlemen up into the altiplano to
buy both sheep and alpaca wool, which was shipped out through the port of
Islay; u ntil at least the m
iddle of the nineteenth century, producers also directly
marketed wool at regional fairs in the highlands.73 Although both old and new
exports were important to the postindependence economy of the south-central
Andes, volumes w ere small compared to the colonial period or the later nine-
teenth century. With low revenue from customs duties, the new governments
of Peru and Bolivia continued to collect head taxes (renamed from “tribute”
to “contribution”) from the substantial indigenous populations of the high-
land regions. This taxation policy had contradictory effects. On the one hand,
it distinguished Indians from other Peruvians and Bolivians, setting them up
for second-class citizenship. On the other hand, paying tribute protected com-
munities from privatization and dispossession of their land base.74 As Erick
Langer details, the decades after independence allowed indigenous p eople in
the Andes and elsewhere to gain greater control over their livelihoods.75
Native Andeans constituted a majority in this region, and there were liber-
als on both sides of the new border who w ere relatively optimistic about the
possibilities of integrating them into their vision for a new patria. José Domingo
Choquehuanca, a subprefect and elected representative from Azángaro (near
Lake Titicaca), provides an interesting example. Through his father, a priest, he
was descended from Inka Huayna Capac, but his grandfather, cacique Diego
Chukiwanka, had opposed Túpac Amaru, provoking local rebels to sack his
properties in revenge.76 Choquehuanca, by contrast, joined with other stu-
dents at the university in Chuquisaca to support independence, and he tied
their struggle to earlier indigenous rebellions. He praised the brave fight of in-
digenous rebels for independence since 1780, emphasizing that Azángaro war-
riors had rallied to rebellion in 1814, joined in expeditions to both Arequipa
and La Paz, and continued to fight even after the rebellion’s leaders saw their
cause as lost.77
As he compiled a report on the province’s population and economy cover-
ing the five years a fter independence, Choquehuanca envisioned indigenous
citizens as key participants. According to his figures, the citizens on the civic
registries varied from 20 to 40 percent of the adult male population of each
district, proportions including native Andeans.78 He estimated that as many as
two-thirds of indigenous property o wners along with some mestizos belonged
to the middle class (what he called the acomodados).79 District by district, he
provided estimates of agricultural and textile production, tracking export of
textiles and animal products to Arequipa, Cusco, and La Paz and imports of
coca, liquor, and grains from t hese regions. According to his estimates, about
64 percent of the province’s wool-producing sheep and 71 percent of c attle
were in indigenous hands. Choquehuanca criticized landowners and officials
who called Indians lazy and mistreated them, pointing out that the indigenous
population had learned from colonialism that any outward sign of economic
success was an invitation to expropriation and coerced l abor. “Pay them accord-
ing to the law,” he asserted, “and t here would be more than enough workers for all
manner of labor.”80 Although he acknowledged the difficulties of educating a
population who were not raised to speak Spanish, he claimed that the middling
indigenous population already sent their children to Arequipa to learn Span-
ish in order to expand their trading networks.81 Choquehuanca supported the
political reunification of the Andean heartland, and was later accused by his
political opponents of not being a true citizen of Peru due to his 1789 birth in
Chuquisaca.82 In spirit, he was a citizen of an Andean patria still held together
by a regional economy in which mineral production stimulated agriculture and
small-scale manufacturing.
While trade circuits continued to integrate southern Peru and Bolivia, de-
spite the new national border, economic development in central and northern
Peru followed a distinct path. The greatest mining revival in Peru occurred to
the northeast of Lima at Cerro de Pasco, where copper would eventually re-
place silver as the primary export. Demand for manufactures and foodstuffs
was largely met in its immediate hinterland. Sugar and cotton plantations ex-
panded along the northern coast, but only later would be integrated into the
world market. During the 1820s and 1830s, protectionist, politically conser-
vative elites in Lima and the North faced off against free traders and liberals
in the South, especially Arequipa.83 After 1840, world demand for fertilizers
triggered the infamous guano boom, which for several decades provided the
central government in Lima with critical revenues and enriched the capital’s
merchant elite—but did little to transform the country’s interior highlands,
especially in the South.84
Given economic interests distinct from Lima and northern Peru, elites in
southern Peru and Bolivia, including Gamarra and Santa Cruz, kept alive po
litical plans to reunite the Andean heartland a fter its partition at independence.
The choices before the congress that convened in La Paz in 1825 were to join
Peru, to join the United Provinces (the former viceroyalty of Río de la Plata) or
to declare autonomy. Either of the first two options could have thrown off the
delicate balance of power among emerging republics; local elites w ere wary of
submitting to authorities in e ither Lima or Buenos Aires. The congress voted to
establish an entirely new country, named Bolivia in honor of the “Liberator.”85
(In 1839 the capital’s name was changed from Chuquisaca to Sucre, honoring
the country’s first president.) Santa Cruz, who agreed to be a representative
despite his concern that it would harm his political future in Peru, wrote to a
friend that an important minority, notably delegates from La Paz (who w ere
underrepresented relative to the department’s population), favored union with
Peru. Although the independence of Bolivia was an expedient political com-
promise in 1825, the constitution proposed by Bolívar and approved the follow-
ing year left open the possibility of federation with Peru and even Colombia.86
Despite the creation of two nations, the constitutions of both Peru and
Bolivia granted citizenship to all who had fought in the patriot army. There-
fore, Santa Cruz was able to serve as interim chief executive of Peru in 1827 and
as elected president of Bolivia the next year. Gamarra began by establishing
his power base as prefect of Cusco, from where he crossed the border into
Bolivia in 1828 to overthrow the “foreigner” Sucre before launching his own
presidency of Peru in 1829. The two caudillos became rivals, each eyeing the ter-
ritory governed by the other. As conservative Gamarra fought Peruvian liberals
over trade policies and constitutions, Santa Cruz seized an opportunity to ally
with southern liberals to reunite Bolivia and Peru. From 1836 to 1839 he forged
a Peru-Bolivian confederation of three states: Northern Peru, Southern Peru,
and Bolivia.
Several models influenced the polity Santa Cruz aimed to construct. He
shared Bolívar’s belief that a strong military guaranteed political stability while
providing upward mobility for capable soldiers (uniformed in fine cloth from
Cusco). His promulgation of new civil and criminal codes drew heavily from
Napoleonic laws, adapted to an Andean society that was corporatist and hier-
archical rather than composed of theoretically equal individuals. Santa Cruz’s
continuation of paternalist policies that protected separate jurisdictions for
indigenous communities allowed local Aymara and Quechua authorities to
exercise a degree of sovereignty at the local level. It was no coincidence that
he chose Puno as the site to issue a lengthy decree detailing rights and protec-
tions for indigenous citizens, including exemption from all taxes other than the
“direct contribution” (i.e., tribute).87 In May and June 1836, Santa Cruz visited
Arequipa, Cusco, and Puno, dispensing orders and promoting state institutions
that would appeal to his supporters in Southern Peru: schools and law facul-
ties (reserving places for descendants of the Inkas in Cusco) and compensation
for property losses at the hands of the confederation’s enemies in the “heroic”
city of Arequipa. Most important, he abolished trade barriers. The continu-
ous movement of Santa Cruz, in his role as “protector” of the confederation,
throughout southern Peru and Bolivia prevented one city in the heartland
from claiming preeminence over the others—but did nothing to allay fears in
Lima and northern Peru that their state had a subordinate status.
We w ill never know what forms of governance might eventually have emerged
within the Andean federation. The u nion of Peru and Bolivia was seen as a
threat by neighboring Chile, whose leaders allied with Gamarra to defeat Santa
Cruz’s army in 1839. The confederation also faced internal tensions. Although
support for u nion was strong in La Paz, elites in Chuquisaca feared that Peruvi-
ans would dominate. In Peru, southern free traders were enthusiastic about the
abolition of internal borders, but northerners had little to gain from those mar-
kets. The Lima aristocracy feared losing power to competitors in indigenous
highlands, and Felipe Pardo y Aliaga relentlessly lampooned the confederation
N
PERU
Lima Huancavelica
Huamanga Cusco
Tinta
Azángaro
Puno Sorata
Arequipa La Paz B OLIVIA
Moquegua Sicasica Ayopaya
Tacna Cochabamba
Oruro
Arica Macha
PA C I F I C O C E A N Sucre
Potosí
Cobija
0 100 200 300 400 mi
0 200 400 600 km
Map 9.2. Peru and Bolivia, ca. 1840
and Santa Cruz in satiric verses that ridiculed the notion of indigenous citizen-
ship and leadership.88 Hispanic elites in Lima would neither relinquish their
claim to southern Peru nor accept a broader u nion where the political center of
gravity could shift from the coast to the Andean heartland.
Conclusions
The economic and political integration of an Andean patria centered on Lake
Titicaca reached its apogee under the Peru-Bolivian Confederation, but it did
not collapse in 1839. While subsequent governments in Peru and Bolivia con-
tinually renegotiated commercial treaties, merchants in La Paz and southern
Peru continued to advocate reunification into the 1840s.89 After midcentury,
however, divergence predominated. Distinct export booms of silver in Bolivia
and wool in southern Peru pulled trade circuits toward these nodes within the
global market and away from trans-Andean commerce. As revenue from exports
increased, moreover, national states relied less on the taxes paid by indigenous
populations and the regional currency, the peso feble, depreciated. L ater, with the
construction of railroads to get newly valuable commodities to ports, opportu-
nities declined for indigenous traders with mule or llama trains.90 Th ese eco-
nomic shifts were accompanied by policies to privatize communal land, laying
the groundwork for the expansion of commercial haciendas in the second half
of the century.91
Some provincial elites and intellectuals continued to imagine regional in-
tegration, but their visions were increasingly disconnected from the economic
activities and movements of the heartland’s majority. As late as 1868, Boliv-
ian artist Melchor María Mercado, who was born in Chuquisaca and traveled
throughout Bolivia and southern Peru, painted a series of landscapes linking
the mountains around La Paz down to the coastal cities of Tacna and Arica.92
And as the War of the Pacific heated up in 1880, Peruvian commander-in-chief
Nicolás de Piérola proposed a federation with Bolivia similar to that tried
under Santa Cruz, which his f ather had supported. Invoking a shared history
of struggle against Spain from 1780 to 1825, Piérola declared that when citi-
zens of the renewed federation were asked about their nationality, they would
respond, “I am Inca.” Inka, but presumably not indigenous, as the speeches
and draft treaties mentioned “Indians” merely six times.93 Native Andeans for
their part continued to resist threats to their livelihoods; but increasingly their
movements and alliances were contained within the national borders of Peru
and Bolivia and targeted officials in their respective capitals.94
Advocates of an Andean patria centered in the altiplano did not succeed in
building an enduring nation-state, but not b ecause such plans lacked support
or a material basis between the m iddle of the eighteenth and the m
iddle of the
nineteenth centuries. Boundaries and polities throughout the Americas w ere
in flux in this period, as detailed by the essays in this volume. Although we tend
to associate nations with republics, we have American examples of successful
constitutional monarchies in Cuba and Brazil—and several experiments in
Mexico from 1821 to 1867. The early Andean heartland movements that looked
to an Inka sovereign or a Spanish monarch, were not radically distinct from
the Peru-Bolivia Confederation, with its powerful military caudillo. All these
imagined communities, moreover, were rooted in corporatist politics that rec-
ognized a degree of local authority in communities—Hispanic cabildos or in-
digenous councils.95 The imagined and contested patrias linked communities
in spaces continuously being constructed rather than rigidly bounded.
As drivers of mules and llamas plied their trade along highland routes
throughout the Andean heartland, they carried with them more than wool, coca,
and wheat. News of tax policy, of war and rebellion, of the rise of new Inkas,
and of grievances against Spaniards traversed these same routes. Such reports
were not received and interpreted in identical ways in different provinces or
by distinct social groups. Nevertheless, broad coalitions repeatedly converged
to challenge not just orders from Madrid, but from Lima and Buenos Aires.
Ethnic conflict was always possible, but at key times Spanish liberals declared
Indians to be “Spanish,” and rebels called Spanish Americans “indios.” They
failed, it is true, to establish alternative polities for more than a few years at a
time, facing overwhelming military force from outside, whether Lima or San-
tiago, as well as ongoing internal tensions. But the nations that were established
struggled with their own challenges: to develop strong economic foundations
and promote a common identity, and to resist foreign invasions that further
reduced their borders by the end of the nineteenth c entury. To observers in
Cusco in 1780, La Paz in 1809, or Arequipa in 1836, such boundaries—on maps
as well as in political belonging—were by no means foreordained.
Notes
Conversations with the contributors to this volume helped to shape my thinking. I
would particularly like to thank John Tutino, Erick Langer, and Sinclair Thomson
for their constructive feedback on written drafts. The first epigraph is from Ward
Stavig and Ella Schmidt, eds. and trans., The Tupac Amaru and Catarista Rebellions:
An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2008), 73; the sec-
ond is Santa Cruz as quoted from Juan Gualberto Valdivia in Alfonso Crespo, Santa
Cruz: El cóndor indio (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1944), 206.
1 Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the
Andes, 1810–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
2 It is difficult (and indeed contrary to the spirit of this essay) to draw precise bound
aries for this region. It could include part of modern-day Ayacucho in Peru, but
likely excludes the eastern and far southern regions of Bolivia (i.e., Santa Cruz
and Tarija). Much of the literature refers to this region as the southern Andes (sur
andino), but to clearly distinguish it from either southern Peru or areas even farther
south, I will use the term Andean heartland or south-central Andes. For good
overviews of the historical constitution of this region, see Brooke Larson, “Andean
Communities, Political Cultures, and Markets: The Changing Contours of a Field,”
in Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and

Anthropology, ed. Brooke Larson and Olivia Harris (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1995), 5–53; Marie-Danielle Demélas, La invención política: Bolivia, Ecuador,
Perú en el siglo XIX (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos and Instituto de
Estudios Peruanos, 2003); and Xavier Albó et al., eds., La integración surandina:
Cinco siglos después (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolome
de Las Casas,” Corporación Norte Grande Taller de Estudios Andinos, Universidad
Católica del Norte de Antofagasta, 1996).
3 Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of
World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6:2 (1995): 201–221.
4 Carlos Sempat Assadourian, El sistema de la economía colonial: Mercado interno,
regiones y espacio económico (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1982).
5 Alfredo Ávila and John Tutino, “Becoming Mexico: The Conflictive Search for a
North American Nation,” in this volume. Tutino further distinguishes two zones in
New Spain—a more indigenous Mesoamerica and the racially diverse and econom
ically dynamic Spanish North America in Making a New World: Founding Capital
ism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011).
6 On the complexities of the links among indigenous tribute, communal governance,
and national belonging, see Tristan Platt, Estado boliviano y ayllu andino: Tierra
y tributo en el Norte de Potosí (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1982); Marta
Irurozqui Victoriano, “A bala, piedra y palo”: La construcción de la ciudadanía
política en Bolivia, 1826–1952 (Sevilla: Diputación de Sevilla, 2000); Núria Sala i
Vila, Y se armó el tole tole: Tributo indígena y movimientos sociales en el Virreinato
del Perú, 1790–1814 (Ayacucho: Instituto de Estudios Regionales José María Ar-
guedas, 1996), 39, 164–176; and Christine Hünefeldt, Lucha por la tierra y protesta
indígena: Las comunidades indígenas del Perú entre Colonia y República, 1800–1830
(Bonn: Bonner Amerikanische Studien, 1982), 156–173.
7 Nils Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano, 1780–1930 (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 47–48. Charles Arnade
references a similar plan proposed by the Intendant of Potosí; Charles W. Ar-
nade, The Emergence of the Republic of Bolivia (New York: Russell & Russell, 1957,
1970), 195.
8 Jordana Dym, “The Republic of Guatemala: Stitching Together a New Country,” in
this volume.
9 On concepts of patria, see Rossana Barragán, “Españoles patricios y españoles eu-
ropeos: Conflictos intra-elites e identidades en la ciudad de La Paz en vísperas de la
independencia 1770–1781,” in Entre la retórica y la insurgencia: Las ideas y los mov
imientos sociales en los Andes, siglo XVIII, ed. Charles Walker (Cuzco: Centro de
Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de las Casas,” 1996), 113–171; Marta Iru-
rozqui, “De cómo el vecino hizo al ciudadano en Charcas y de cómo el ciudadano
conservó al vecino en Bolivia, 1809–1830,” in Revolución, independencia y las nuevas
naciones de América, ed. Jaime E. Rodríguez (Madrid: Fundación mapfre tav-
era, 2005), 451–484; Ximena Medinaceli, “Elementos para imaginar una nación:
El discurso del Aldeano,” in Bosquejo del estado en que se halla la riqueza nacional de

Bolivia presentado al examen de la Nación por un Adleano hijo de ella, Año de 1830,
ed. Ana María Lema and Rossana R. Barragán (La Paz: Plural Editores, Facultad
de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés,
1994), 149–155; and Javier F. Marion, “Indios blancos: Nascent Polities and Social
Convergence in the Ayopaya Rebellion, Alto Perú (Bolivia), 1814–1821,” Colonial
Latin American Historical Review 15:4 (2006), 345–375.
10 Assadourian, El sistema de la economía colonial.
11 Peter J. Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1984); Jeffrey A. Cole, The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory In
dian Labor in the Andes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985); Enrique
Tandeter, Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826 (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993); and Ann Zulawski, They Eat from
Their Labor: Work and Social Change in Colonial Bolivia (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). Several historians have demonstrated the ways in which
gender relations were key to indigenous success in commerce (not to mention sur-
vival) within mining regions: Ann Zulawski, “Social Differentiation, Gender, and
Ethnicity: Urban Indian Women in Colonial Bolivia, 1640–1725,” Latin American
Research Review 25:2 (1990): 93–113; Bianca Premo, “From the Pockets of Women:
The Gendering of the Mita, Migration and Tribute in Colonial Chucuito, Peru,”
The Americas 57:1 (2000), 63–94; and Jane E. Mangan, Trading Roles: Gender, Eth
nicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005).
12 Although demand from China drove up silver prices between 1700 and 1750,
Potosí’s recovery did not begin until 1730 and peaked in 1780; Dennis O. Flynn
and Arturo Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-
Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13:2 (2002), 391–427. Profitability
also varied with the price of mercury and ultimately rested on the subsidy provided
by the mitá labor draft; Tandeter, Coercion and Market, esp. 1–51, 115.
13 For production trends, see Richard L. Garner, “Long-Term Silver Mining Trends
in Spanish America: A Comparative Analysis of Peru and Mexico,” American
Historical Review 93:4 (1988), 901–902. On mining in eighteenth-century Upper
Peru, see Herbert Klein, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Community, 2nd
ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). For Lower Peru, see John Fisher,
“Mining and the Peruvian Economy in the Late Colonial Period,” in The Economies
of Mexico and Peru during the Late Colonial Period, 1760–1810, ed. Nils Jacobsen
and Hans-Jürgen Puhle (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1986), 46–59. On Potosí, see
Rose Marie Buechler, The Mining Society of Potosi, 1776–1810 (Ann Arbor: Pub-
lished for Dept. of Geography, Syracuse University, by University Microfilms
International, 1981).
14 Enrique Tandeter, Vilma Milletich, María Matilde Ollier, and Beatríz Ruibal,
“Indians in Late Colonial Markets: Sources and Numbers,” in Larson and Harris,
Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes, 196–223.
15 Herbert S. Klein, Haciendas and Ayllus: Rural Society in the Bolivian Andes in the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

1993), 90–99. Officials in Lima similarly noted that indigenous communities com-
peted effectively with haciendas in Peru; Hünefeldt, Lucha por la tierra y protesta
indígena, 137–138.
16 Platt, Estado boliviano y ayllu andino, 23–35; and María Luisa Soux, El complejo
proceso hacia la independencia de Charcas (1808–1826): Guerra, ciudadanía, conflic
tos locales y participación indígena en Oruro (La Paz: Plural Editores; Lima: ifea,
Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2010), 44–56. Trade between Cocha-
bamba and southern Peru declined in the nineteenth century; see Brooke Larson,
Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba, 1550–1900
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Robert H. Jackson, Regional
Markets and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba, 1539–1960 (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).
17 Tandeter et al., “Indians in Late Colonial Markets,” 205. For studies of the produc-
tion of wines and brandies in the region of Arequipa, see Kendall Brown, Bourbons
and Brandy: Imperial Reform in Eighteenth-Century Arequipa (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1980); and Prudence M. Rice, Vintage Moquegua:
History, Wine, and Archaeology on a Colonial Peruvian Periphery (Austin: Univer-
sity of Texas Press, 2012).
18 On trade between Arequipa and both Cusco and Upper Peru, see Brown, Bourbons
and Brandy, 73–102; and Alberto Flores Galindo, Arequipa y el sur andino: Ensayo
de historia regional (siglos XVIII–XX) (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1977), 24–30.
19 Nils Jacobsen, “Livestock Complexes in Late Colonial Peru and New Spain: An
Attempt at Comparison,” in Jacobsen and Puhle, The Economies of Mexico and Peru
during the Late Colonial Period, 113–142, especially 120.
20 Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, 31–51.
21 Barragán, “Españoles patricios y españoles europeos,” 117; and Sala i Vila, Y se armó
el tole tole, 39.
22 David Cahill, From Rebellion to Independence in the Andes: Soundings from South
ern Peru, 1750–1830 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2002), 45–48.
23 O’Phelan, Un siglo de rebeliones anti-coloniales: Perú y Bolivia, 1700–1783 (Cuzco:
cera Bartolomé de las Casas, 1988), 175–187.
24 Ward Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in
Colonial Peru (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); and Sinclair Thom-
son, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).
25 Drawing the boundaries of eighteenth-century rebellion is complicated. Scarlett
O’Phelan has proposed that the economic zone centered on providing Potosí with
supplies (and, one could add, labor) and running through the highlands to Lima,
gave rise to a zone of political consciousness and rebellion; Scarlett O’Phelan,
Rebellions and Revolts in Eighteenth-Century Peru and Upper Peru (Köln: Böhlau,
1985). Steve J. Stern has argued for including the central highlands of Peru as an
area of anticolonial resistance; Steven J. Stern, “The Age of Andean Insurrec-
tion, 1742–1782: A Reappraisal,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the
Andean Peasant World: 18th to 20th Centuries, ed. Stern (Madison: University

of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 34–93. In a spatial analysis of rebellion limited to the
region of Cuzco, Magnus Mörner and Efraín Trelles find a correlation between the
attitudes of kurakas and communities toward Túpac Amaru based upon the old
Inca divisions of Chinchasuyo (largely loyalist in 1780) and Kollasuyo (largely rebel
in 1780); Magnus Mörner and Efraín Trelles, “A Test of Causal Interpretations of
the Túpac Amaru Rebellion,” in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness,
94–109, especially 100–109.
26 O’Phelan, Rebellions and Revolts in Eighteenth-Century Peru and Upper Peru;
David Cahill, “Taxonomy of a Colonial ‘Riot’: The Arequipa Disturbances of
1780,” in Reform and Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru, ed. John R.
Fisher, Allan J. Kuethe, and Anthony McFarlane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1990), 255–291; and Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citi
zens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 17–20.
27 For the role of traders in various revolts, see O’Phelan, Rebellions and Revolts in
Eighteenth-Century Peru and Upper Peru. For traders generally, see Luis Miguel
Glave, Trajinantes: Caminos indígenas en la sociedad colonial, siglos XVI/XVII
(Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario, 1989).
28 On Túpac Amaru as a muleteer, see Mörner and Trelles, “A Test of Causal Inter-
pretations of the Túpac Amaru Rebellion,” 102; and Stavig, The World of Túpac
Amaru, 157.
29 Charles F. Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru,
1780–1840 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 25–28. On the role of
Bastidas and other women, see Leon G. Campbell, “Women and the Great Rebel-
lion in Peru, 1780–1783,” Americ as 42:2 (1985): 163–196; and Charles F. Walker, The
Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2014).
30 John H. Rowe, “The Incas u nder Spanish Colonial Institutions,” Hispanic Ameri
can Historical Review 37:2 (1957), 176 as quoted in Stavig, The World of Túpac
Amaru, 206.
31 Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru, 215, 221; and Cahill, From Rebellion to Indepen
dence in the Andes, 97.
32 In addition to the works cited in other notes, see Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebel
lion, and Sergio Serulnikov, Revolution in the Andes: The Age of Túpac Amaru,
trans. David Frye (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
33 Documents about the rebellion w ere transcribed and published in Comisión
Nacional del Sesquicentenario de la Independencia del Perú, Colección documental
de la independencia del Perú, Vol. 2, La Rebelión de Túpac Amaru (Lima, 1971).
34 John Rowe, “El movimiento nacional inca del siglo XVIII,” in Túpac Amaru
II—1780, ed. Alberto Flores Galindo (Lima: Retablo de Pael Ediciones, 1976),
13–53; Thomas Cummins, “We Are the Other: Peruvian Portraits of Colonial
Kurakacuna,” in Transatlantic Encounters: The History of Early Colonial Peru, ed.
Rolena Adorno and Kenneth Andrien (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991), 203–231; and Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca (Lima: Editorial

Horizonte, 1988), translated and published in English by Carlos Aguirre, Charles F.
Walker, and Willie Hiatt as In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
35 See, for example, Túpac Amaru’s “Edict to the Province of Chichas,” in Stavig and
Schmidt, The Tupac Amaru and Catarista Rebellions, 73–74.
36 Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion, 86–108, 180–242.
37 See, for example, Leon G. Campbell, “Ideology and Factionalism during the G reat
Rebellion, 1780–1782,” in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 110–139.
For a study of the kuraka class during this period, see David T. Garrett, Shadows of
Empire: The Indian Nobility of Cusco, 1750–1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2005).
38 Jan Szemiński, “Why Kill the Spaniard? New Perspectives on Andean Insurrection-
ary Ideology in the 18th Century,” in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness,
166–192.
39 Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 16–22, 51–54; quote on p. 17.
40 Thomson, We Alone Will Rule, especially 3–138.
41 Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in
the Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003), 220.
2
4 On Túpaj Katari, see Thomson, We Alone Will Rule, 180–231.
43 Nicholas Robins argues that the movement aimed at carrying out a genocide
against non-Indians; Nicholas A. Robins, Genocide and Millennialism in Upper
Peru: The Great Rebellion of 1780–1782 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).
44 Thomson, We Alone Will Rule, 276.
45 Carolyn Fick, “From Slave Colony to Black Nation: Haiti’s Revolutionary Inver-
sion,” in this volume.
46 Sinclair Thomson, “Was There Race in Colonial Latin America?: Identifying
Selves and Others in the Insurgent Andes,” in Histories of Race and Racism: The
Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Laura Gotkowitz
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 85. On the rebellion in Oruro, see
also Fernando Cajías de la Vega, Oruro 1781: Sublevación de indios y rebelión Criolla,
2 vols. (La Paz: Instituto de Estudios Bolivianos, 2005).
7
4 Thomson, “Was There Race in Colonial Latin America?,” 79.
48 Garrett, Shadows of Empire, 211–256.
49 Leon G. Campbell, “The Army of Peru and the Túpac Amaru Revolt, 1780–1783,”
Hispanic American Historical Review 56:1 (1976), 31–57; and Mónica Ricketts, “The
Rise of the Bourbon Military in Peru, 1768–1820,” Colonial Latin American Review
21:3 (2012), 413–439.
50 Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 55–83; Thomson, We Alone Will Rule, 232–268; Cham-
bers, From Subjects to Citizens, 31–37, 45–90; and Sala i Vila, Y se armó el tole tole.
For the importance of the establishment of an Audiencia in Cusco as a forum for
indigenous legal protest, see David Cahill and Scarlett O’Phelan, “Forging Their
Own History: Indian Insurgency in the Southern Peruvian Sierra,” Bulletin of
Latin American Research 11:2 (1992), 125–167, especially 130–131.

51 On Ubalde and Aguilar, see Alberto Flores Galindo, “In Search of an Inca,” in
Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 193–210.
52 For an example of the “reluctant rebels” interpretation, see John Lynch, The Spanish
American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1986). For some of
the interpretive debates within Peru, see Alberto Flores Galindo, ed., Independencia
y revolución, 2 vols. (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1987). For a refutation
of the notion that there was little internal support for independence within Peru
or Bolivia, see Scarlet O’Phelan Godoy, “El mito de la ‘independencia concedida’:
Los programas políticos del siglo XVIII y del temprano XIX en el Perú y Alto Perú
(1730–1814),” Histórica 9:2 (1985), 155–191.
53 Arnade, The Emergence of the Republic of Bolivia; René Danilo Arze Aguirre, Par
ticipación popular en la independencia de Bolivia (La Paz, Bolivia: Organización de
los Estados Americanos, 1979); and Marion, “Indios blancos.” For a primary source
narrative in which a midlevel patriot leader occasionally acknowledges the heroism
of indigenous combatants, see José Santos Vargas, Diario de un comandante de la
independencia americana, 1814–1825 (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1982).
54 Soux, El complejo proceso hacia la independencia de Charcas, 230–240; quote on
234; and Marion, “Indios blancos,” 366–367.
55 Soux, El complejo proceso hacia la independencia de Charcas, 118–119; and Arze
Aguirre, Participación popular, 160–161. According to Scarlett O’Phelan, members
of the leadership included natives of Cusco and Arequipa as well as La Paz, Scarlett
O’Phelan Godoy, “Santa Cruz y Gamarra: El proyecto de la confederación y el
control político del sur andino,” in Guerra, región y nación: La Confederación Perú-
Boliviana, 1836–1839, ed. Carlos Donoso Rojas and Jaime Rosenblitt B. (Santiago:
Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, 2009), 17–38; here 21–22.
56 Arnade, The Emergence of The Republic of Bolivia; Arze Aguirre, Participación popu
lar; Marion, “Indios blancos”; Vargas, Diario de un comandante; and Irurozqui, “De
cómo el vecino hizo al ciudadano.”
57 Marion, “Indios blancos,” 361–365.
58 Hünefeldt, Lucha por la tierra y protesta indígena, 174–187; and Sarah C. Cham-
bers, “The Limits of a Pan-Ethnic Alliance in the Independence of Peru: The
Huánuco Rebellion of 1812” (ma thesis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1986).
59 Ricketts, “The Rise of the Bourbon Military in Peru,” 419.
60 Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens, 35–36.
61 Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens, 140; Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 92, and Nata-
lia Sobrevilla Perea, The Caudillo of the Andes: Andrés de Santa Cruz (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 44–45. Núria Sala i Vila is currently research-
ing elections held in Peru during the liberal period of 1820 to 1823.
62 Rafael Garófano and Juan Ramón de Páramo, La constitución gaditana de 1812,
2nd ed. (Cádiz: Diputación de Cádiz, 1987); for a translation of t hese articles into
English, see Sarah C. Chambers and John Charles Chasteen, Latin American Inde
pendence: An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010), 97.
63 Tristan Platt, “Simón Bolívar, the Sun of Justice and the Amerindian Virgin: Andean
Conceptions of the Patria in Nineteenth-Century Potosí,” Journal of Latin American

Studies 25 (1993), 159–185. Víctor Peralta Ruiz and Marta Irurozqui Victoriano,
Por la concordia, la fusión y el unitarismo: Estado y caudillismo en Bolivia, 1825–1880
(Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000), 139–248, discuss
the ways in which Spanish concepts of local belonging (vecindad) continued to
shape understandings of citizenship (ciudadanía) into the nineteenth century.
Langer, citing Platt, notes that for elites as well as Indians, notions of being Ameri-
can remained strong as compared to specific national identities; Erick D. Langer,
“Bajo la sombra del Cerro Rico; Redes comerciales y el fracaso del nacionalismo
económico en el Potosí del siglo XIX,” Revista Andina 37 (2003), 77–91, here 84.
64 For an argument that indigenous peasants in villages around Cusco and Puno no
longer envisioned an Inka restoration, see Cahill and O’Phelan, “Forging Their
Own History.”
65 On this rebellion, see Hünefeldt, Lucha por la tierra y protesta indígena, 41–53; and
Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 97–105.
66 Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 111.
67 John R. Fisher, “The Royalist Regime in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1820–1824,” Jour
nal of Latin American Studies 32 (2000): 52–84.
68 Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 121–123. One of Peru’s leading historians and a native
of Tacna mused that had the 1814 rebellion succeeded, the Peruvian nation would
have had a “mestizo, indigenous, creole and provincial” identity; Jorge Basadre, El
azar en la historia y sus límites (Lima: Ediciones PLV, 1973), 146.
69 Langer, “Bajo la sombra del Cerro Rico,” 77–91; Antonio Mitre, “El monedero de
los Andes: Región economica y moneda boliviana en el siglo XIX,” hisla: Revista
Latinoamericana de Historia Económica y Social 8 (1986): 13–74; and José Deustua,
La minería peruana y la iniciación de la república, 1820–1840 (Lima: Instituto de
Estudios Peruanos, 1986).
70 Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, 57; Erick D. Langer and Viviana E. Conti, “Circui-
tos comerciales tradicionales y cambio económico en los Andes Centromeridio-
nales (1830–1930),” Desarrollo Económico 31:121 (1991), 91–111; and Erick D. Langer,
“Bringing the Economic Back In: Andean Indians and the Construction of the
Nation-State in Nineteenth-Century Bolivia,” Journal of Latin American Studies 41
(2009), 527–551.
71 José María Dalence, Bosquejo estadístico de Bolivia (1851; reprint; La Paz: Editorial
Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, 1975), especially 23–24, 177–182, 201, 244–247,
and 268–278. See also Iván Ramiro Jiménez, “Abundancia y carestía: La irrupción
de las importaciones y la crisis del comercio interno hacia 1830,” in Lema and
Barragán, Bosquejo del estado, 157–173; and Tristan Platt, “Ethnic Calendars and
Market Interventions among the Ayllus of Lipes during the Nineteenth Century,”
in Larson and Harris, Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes, 259–296.
7 2 Mitre, “El monedero de los Andes.”
73 Flores Galindo, Arequipa y el sur andino, 59–79; and Jacobsen, Mirages of Transi
tion, 51–77. For later developments, see Manuel Burga and Wilson Reátegui, Lanas
y capital mercantil en el sur: La casa Ricketts, 1895–1935 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios
Peruanos, 1981).

74 Víctor Peralta Ruiz, En pos del tributo en el Cusco rural, 1826–1854 (Cuzco: cera
Bartolomé de las Casas, 1991); Erwin Grieshaber, “Survival of Indian Communities
in Nineteenth-Century Bolivia: A Regional Comparison,” Journal of Latin Ameri
can Studies 12:2 (1980), 223–269; Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, 121–132; Walker,
Smoldering Ashes, 186–221.
75 Erick D. Langer, “Indigenous Independence in Spanish South America,” in this
volume.
76 Augusto Ramos Zambrano, Fundación de Puno y otros ensayos históricos (Arequipa:
Instituto de Estudios Históricos Pukara, 2004), 45–48.
77 José Domingo Choquehuanca, Ensayo de estadística completa de los ramos
económico-políticos de la provincia de Azángaro en el Departamento de Puno de la
República Peruana, del quinquenio contado desde 1825 hasta 1829 inclusive (Lima:
Imprenta de Manuel Corral, 1833), 29, 58–59.
78 For other cases from this region in which local elites imagined or even treated the
indigenous population as citizens, see Cecilia Méndez, The Plebeian Republic: The
Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State, 1820–1850 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005); Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens; and Peralta
Ruiz and Irurozqui Victoriano, Por la concordia, la fusión y el unitarismo.
79 Choquehuanca, Ensayo de estadística, 60.
80 Choquehuanca, Ensayo de estadística, 70. For a work that expresses more of a clas-
sical vision of liberalism with less local color, see José Domingo Choquehuanca,
Complemento al régimen representativo (1845; reprint, Lima: Crédito Editorial,
1949). An anonymous contemporary of Choquehuanca from Bolivia similarly
proposed development of the internal economy, but was more cautious in his
assessment of the place of native Andeans in the nation; see Lema and Barragán,
Bosquejo del estado.
81 Choquehuanca, Ensayo de estadística, 67.
82 Leonardo Altuve Carrillo, Choquehuanca y su arenga a Bolívar (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Planeta, 1991), especially 341–346.
83 Paul Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State
in Postindependence Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); and
Gootenberg, “North-South: Trade Policy, Regionalisms, and Caudillismo in Post-
Independence Peru,” Journal of Latin American Studies 12:2 (1991), 273–308. On
the distinct orientation of the northern Peruvian economy during the eighteenth
century, see Susana Aldana Rivera, “Un norte diferente para la independencia
peruana,” in El Siglo XIX: Bolivia y América Latina, ed. Rossana Barragán, Dora
Cajías, and Seemin Qayum (La Paz: Muela del Diablo Editores, 1997), 61–77.
84 Paul Gootenberg persuasively argues against an earlier dependency interpretation
of guano, but it still left the South untouched; Gootenberg, Imagining Develop
ment: Economic Ideas in Peru’s “Fictitious Prosperity” of Guano, 1840–1880 (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
85 For the text of the independence declaration, see Peru, Ministerio de Relaciones Ex
teriores, Colección de los tratados, convenciones capitulaciones, armisticios, y otros actos
diplomáticos y políticos celebrados desde la independencia hasta el día, precedida de

una introducción que comprende la época colonial, vol. 2 (Lima: Imprenta del Estado,
1890), 154–158.
86 On the declaration of an independent Bolivia, see Sobrevilla Perea, The Caudillo of
the Andes, 93; Arnade, The Emergence of the Republic of Bolivia, 195–198; and José
Luís Roca, Ni con Lima, ni con Buenos Aires: La formación de un estado nacional
en Charcas (La Paz: Plural Editores; and Lima: ifea, 2007). On the underrepre
sentation of La Paz, with its large indigenous population, see Rossana Barragán,
“Los elegidos: En torno a la representación territorial y la re-unión de los poderes
en Bolivia entre 1825 y 1840,” in La mirada esquiva: Reflexiones históricas sobre la
interacción del estado y la ciudadanía en los Andes (Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú), siglo
xix, ed. Marta Irurozqui Victoriano (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas, 2005), 93–123.
87 On the formation of the confederation and the governance style and institu-
tions implemented by Santa Cruz, see Sobrevilla Perea, The Caudillo of the Andes,
114–146; O’Phelan Godoy, “Santa Cruz y Gamarra”; Phillip Taylor Parkerson, An
drés de Santa Cruz y la Confederación Perú-Boliviana, 1835–1839 (La Paz: Librería
Editorial “Juventud,” 1984); Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada, “A Break with the Past?:
Santa Cruz and the Constitution,” in Political Culture in the Andes, 1750–1950, ed.
Nils Jacobsen and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005), 96–115; Rossana Barragán, “The ‘Spirit’ of Bolivian Laws: Citizenship,
Infamy and Patrichary,” in Honor, Status and Law in Modern Latin America, ed.
Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, and Lara Putnam (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 66–86; Peralta Ruiz and Irurozqui Victoriano, Por la concordia,
la fusión y el unitarismo, 109–135; and Jaime Rosenblitt Berdichesky, “El comercio
tacneño y la Confederación Perú-Boliviana,” in Donoso and Rosenblitt, Guerra,
región y nación, 159–180. For the decrees of Santa Cruz in southern Peru, see Carlos
Ortiz de Zevallos Paz-Soldán, ed., Archivo Diplomático Peruano, vol. 9: Confeder
ación Perú-Boliviana (1835–1839), part 1 (Lima: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores
del Perú, 1972), 435–571; for the decree on Indians (Puno, May 9, 1809), 488–493.
88 Cecilia Méndez G., “Incas Sí, Indios No: Notes on Peruvian Creole National-
ism and Its Contemporary Crisis,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28 (1996):
197–225.
89 Rossana Barragán, Espacio urbano y dinámica étnica: La Paz en el siglo XIX (La
Paz: hisbol, 1990), 41–47; for treaties, see Bolivia and José Rosendo Gutiérrez,
Colección de los tratado y convenciones celebrados por la República de Bolivia con los
estados extranjeros (Santiago: El Independiente, 1869).
90 Flores Galindo, Arequipa y el sur andino, 83–93; Langer, “Bringing the Economic
Back In,” 547–548; Mitre, “El monedero de los Andes,” 39.
91 Klein, Haciendas and Ayllus, 112–159; Platt, Estado boliviano y ayllu andino, 36–72;
Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, 151–258; and Erick D. Langer and Robert H.
Jackson, “Liberalism and the Land Question in Bolivia, 1825–1920,” in Liberals,
the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform
in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America, ed. Robert H. Jackson (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 171–192.

92 Melchor María Mercado, Album de paisajes, tipos humanos y costumbres de Bolivia
(1841–1869) (Sucre: Archivo y Biblioteca Nacional de Bolivia, 1991), esp. plates on
160–177 and 185–188.
93 Justiniano Cavero Eguzquiza and Simón Martínez Izquierdo, Geografía de los Es
tados Unidos Perú-Bolivianos o sea República de los Incas (Lima, 1880); quote on xv.
For an analysis of Inca imagery from independence through the War of the Pacific,
see Teresa Gisbert, Iconografía y Mitos Indígenas en el Arte (La Paz: Gisbert y Cia.
sa, 1980), 175–186.
94 Although witnesses to an indigenous rebellion in Puno as late as 1915 claimed
there were aspirations to join with communities in Bolivia; O’Phelan Godoy,
“Santa Cruz y Gamarra,” 17–18. And Ollanta Humala, on his election as Peruvian
president in 2011, spoke of aspirations to reunite Peru and Bolivia; “Humala Invites
Morales to Consider the Re-unification of Peru and Bolivia,” MercoPress: South
Atlantic News Agency (Montevideo), June 22, 2011, http://en.mercopress.c om, ac-
cessed June 22, 2015.
95 Although my interpretation of how nations emerged in Spanish America differs
from that of Benedict Anderson, his conceptual framework is productive; Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nation
alism (London: Verso, 1983).

10
Indigenous Ind ep end ence

in Spanish South Amer ica
Erick D. Langer
The independence of Latin America from 1810 to 1825 is one of the great po
litical events of the modern era. All but a handful of the Iberian colonies broke
from their colonial rulers and established new nations. Other than Brazil (and
briefly Mexico), these new states became republics, as had the United States a
few decades earlier. This broad storyline, however, too often overshadows an
equally important and very complicated process by which indigenous peoples
claimed greater autonomy for many decades a fter independence. Many gained
considerable new autonomy within emerging nations; some found or increased
independence; and overall, native peoples often prospered after 1820 in ways
they had not been able to during long colonial centuries. Many who had never
been conquered by Europeans were able to take back lands lost in the eigh
teenth century. They, as well as native peoples who had lived within colonial
polities, remained engaged with the newly independent states as they had
before with the colonial empires—but many found new, more autonomous
ways of engagement. This distinguishes the fifty years after independence from
the colonial period and the era of national consolidation that followed after
1860. During this period, while new nations often struggled, many indigenous
p eoples enjoyed unprecedented independence.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the window of opportunity
closed as Spanish American elites1 and the national states they ruled consoli-
dated power and made alliances with outsiders to crush the autonomy gained
by indigenous p eoples during and in the decades after independence. The
state-building processes that s haped Latin America in the second half of the
nineteenth century brought the increasing subjugation and marginalization
of native populations. This “third conquest” worsened conditions for indig-
enous people more than the late eighteenth-century consolidation of the co-
lonial state (which Nancy Farriss calls the “second conquest”).2 The process of
indigenous subjugation and marginalization has only recently begun to reverse;
from the 1970s and accelerating into the early twenty-first century, indigenous
peoples began to regain a share of political and economic power. The process
has been slow and very uneven, as have the results for indigenous majorities.
This essay focuses on the era from late colonial times to the late 1860s, when
indigenous peoples forged spaces in which they claimed increased political au-
tonomy and relative economic prosperity. The picture is complicated, but the
overarching trends are clear. Indigenous populations across the Americas ex-
hibited many different characteristics and cannot be simply subsumed u nder
the (artificial) category of “Indians.”3 Not only w ere there vast regional and
national differences—the state did matter—but most indigenous populations
were part of one of two general yet divergent categories: they w ere e ither peas-
ants integrated into the colonial states, or p eoples who resisted the hegemony
of the Spanish or Portuguese, British or French Crowns and remained indepen
dent of the colonial (and later, national) states. The numbers of these indepen
dent peoples were small compared to the peasants living under colonial (mostly
Spanish) rule in the eighteenth c entury, but the uncolonized controlled the
majority of the territory of Latin America (and the Americ as) until after 1860.
Although we have much less documentation about these long-independent
peoples, they matter for the importance of their own histories and cultures, and
because like the indigenous peasants within the new republics, they profoundly
affected the ways new nation-states became new countries.
This chapter argues, based on my own work within the new scholarly under-
standing of indigenous peoples from 1800 to 1870, that while political vision-
aries faced the complex conflicts of nation building, many indigenous p eoples
Indigenous Independence in Spanish South America — 351
enjoyed unprecedented decades of power and prosperity. I concentrate on the
Andean highlands and adjacent lowlands. As John Tutino argued for indigenous
peasant communities within Mexico, this was a period of “decompression” in
which the extractive colonial economies collapsed and state confiscatory pow-
ers weakened.4 Meanwhile, along the frontiers the lack of formal militaries and
infrastructure such as forts, missions, and roads meant that many indigenous
peoples were able to liberate themselves from European or Spanish American
hegemony or push back the frontiers and liberate territory that the Spanish had
taken in the decades prior to independence.5
The scale of the Atlantic economy and the focus of documentation on the
commercial sectors make it difficult to detail the changing levels of economic
engagement and power at the regional, community, and household levels. Yet
growing complaints of commercial difficulties and scarcities of profit among
those who presumed to be powerful, and increasing evidence of independent
production and commercial participation among long subordinate or marginal
peoples, document new indigenous autonomies across the Andes and into
nearby lowlands. These assertions of popular independence in times of struggles
to create politically independent states paralleled the consolidations of “house
hold production” that Carolyn Fick details for Saint Domingue as it became
Haiti, and Alfredo Ávila and John Tutino show in the complicated process of
Mexico’s political development. The increased autonomy claimed by indigenous
peoples (and former slaves in Haiti) differentiates the Andes and Mesoamerica
(and the revolutionary plantation colony) from regions of the Americas, no-
tably the United States, Cuba, and Brazil, where postindependence expan-
sion of slavery consolidated power and increased coercions within plantation
systems—and, in the United States and Brazil, increased pressures t oward the
displacement of nearby native peoples. In the case of the Andes, participation
in the Atlantic economy continued during times of contested nation making,
if at reduced levels, as Sarah Chambers emphasizes in chapter 9. And in that
continuation, highland indigenous communities become increasingly impor
tant producers and interlocutors with the Atlantic economy and an incipient in-
dustrial capitalism, reinforcing the Andean ways of redistribution and reciprocity
that Chambers also highlights. On the eastern frontiers, independent peoples
took advantage of weakened and contested state powers in the long-colonized
highlands to mix military power and trade relations to access goods—weapons,
tools, cloth, and more—they did not produce. Only after 1860 did the equation
change, as indigenous p eoples were put u nder pressure by Spanish American
elites and states that took advantage of deepening ties with North Atlantic capi-
talism to forge a new economic model and marginalize indigenous p eoples.
352— Erick Langer
Tightening the Screws: Empire and Indigenous P eoples before 1810
Indigenous peoples within and near Spain’s empire faced a “second conquest”—
and sometimes a first—during the decades after 1750. Across the Andean high-
lands, indigenous peasants suffered from an intensifying reparto de mercancías,
in which the local officials called corregidores exacted rising surpluses through
monopoly sales of goods—backed by the officials’ administrative and judicial
powers. Meanwhile Spanish authorities began to replace community officials
with outsiders, often mestizos, sometimes Spaniards, seeking greater control
over indigenous communities and their resources. Priests worked to squeeze
more monies from their indigenous charges, often leading to conflicts among
Church leaders, regime officials, and resistant communities. The successes of
these assertions of power and surplus extraction were uneven, but they were
especially resented in the Andean region, where the silver economy and thus
commercial opportunities were weaker than in New Spain.6
The increased pressures on and exploitation of the indigenous peasantry
came to a partial end by the 1780s, in the aftermath of the Great Rebellion in
the Southern Andes (1780–1784), which extended far beyond the rising fa-
mously led by Túpac Amaru. Three major movements emerged from Andean
communities, ranging from Potosí to Cuzco, with diff erent motivations; all gen-
erated great violence; all w
ere suppressed by Spanish forces hastily sent from
other regions of the viceroyalty. Many of these troops were mestizo or mulatto
militias recently organized as part of the Bourbon reforms that attempted to
impose the “second conquest.”7
The defeat of the uprisings, the execution many leaders, and the punishments
meted out to participants and their communities blocked this first move toward
greater “Andean independence”—though not necessarily nation-making. Less
emphasized but also important, the Spanish Crown prohibited the repartos,
and by 1784 the office of corregidor was abolished, replaced by intendentes and
subdelegados who were prohibited from trading in their jurisdictions (with
only partial success). The new system—and the threat of another insurgency—
did alleviate the most resented exactions on the peasant population.8 There
were gains taken in defeat.
Before and after the uprisings, both a cause of the revolts and a consequence
of the state’s reforms afterward, Andean communities reconsidered and reorga
nized their internal leadership structures. Hereditary kurakas, the local nobil-
ity that often traced origins to pre-Inka times and had entrenched their status
as key intermediaries linking the Spanish and indigenous worlds during the late
sixteenth-century consolidation of the silver boom led by Potosí, lost ground
to commoners claiming leadership in the communities. At times, communities
ran the old kurakas (as well as non-Indian ones set up by Spanish authorities)
out of town or even killed them, insisting that the común was to rule. After the
Great Rebellion, led by kurakas such as Túpac Amaru—at times pressed by
commoners against abusive kurakas—regime reforms accelerated the demise of
the indigenous nobility. Annually elected alcaldes de indios replaced hereditary
indigenous leaders in Andean communities.9 The mix of rebellion and reform
accelerated a new political culture among indigenous peasants in the Andes—a
grassroots democracy that soon engaged the new, liberal winds that reverber-
ated through the empire in the era of Cádiz.
The situation was different in the frontier areas east of the Andean heart-
land. There the Spanish Bourbon regime brought severe pressure on indig-
enous groups that had remained independent. They had not faced, or had
fended off, the first conquest. Through the seventeenth century and into the
eighteenth, the Spanish regime had remained mostly in the territories claimed
in the sixteenth.10 The revitalization of the Spanish state u nder Bourbons and
the search for resources and revenues in a commercially dynamic and imperi-
ally competitive eighteenth century brought a more aggressive frontier policy.
Military expeditions brought forts into long-uncolonized regions, followed by
the establishment of missions under the Franciscans who aimed to incorporate,
convert, and subordinate independent peoples. Scientific-military expeditions
explored territories unknown to Crown officials. By the first decade of the nine-
teenth, the Spanish regime had expanded its reach into the lowland centers of
indigenous resistance of South America: across the arid Chaco plains; pressing
the southern borders of Chile past the Bío Bío River into Araucanía; and deep
into the pampas of the Río de la Plata region. In Chile, intensified negotia-
tions with the various native peoples south of the Bío Bío opened long-held
indigenous territories to Spanish settlers. Independent peoples submitted to
the frontier militias concentrated in new forts or lived around new missions set
in regions where the European presence was new and intensifying. As David
Weber argued, in the late colonial period the Spanish regime pressed a dynamic
and successful (in Spanish terms) frontier policy based on a new conception of
the Indian as “savage,” supported by scientific explorations, militarization, and
systematic trade with independent p eoples.11
These policies and programs drove Spanish control beyond boundaries in
place for over a century.12 The only region of South America where the new
Spanish aggressive policy did not work and where the Spanish did not gain ini-
tiative, territory, and influence was the jungle zone east of central Peru. There
the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion expelled the Franciscan missions in the
rough foothills east of the central Sierra in the 1740s.13 But this was an exception.
354— Erick Langer
Popayán
Areas effectively controlled by indigenous populations
Pasto
Quito
PERU
CE
NT
RA
Lima SI
L
E
Huanta R R A Cuzco
Lake
A Titicaca
Huaqui
BOLIVIA
N
La Paz
D
EA
Santa Cruz
Oruro
N
Tomina
CO
Potosí
MM
CHIRIGUANOS
UNI
PACIFIC
TIES
OCEAN Asunción
Salta
Gran
Chaco
GUARANÍ
Cordoba
CHILE
A R GENTINE
CONF EDER
ED ER ATION
Santiago
RANQUELES Salinas Buenos Aires
Grandes
PEHUENCHE
Bío Bío River

MAPUCHE
0 100 200 300 400 500 mi
0 200 400 600 800 km
Map 10.1. Spanish imperial control in South America, ca. 1800

Across most frontier areas, the militarization through militias and professional
troops, often followed by missions and sometimes by new Hispanic settlers,
brought advances against independent indigenous peoples.
Regaining Power: Independence and Indigenous Peoples

The long struggles for independence set off a fter 1808 by Napoleon’s assault on
the imperial center in Spain and energized a fter 1810 by the participations of-
fered and limited u nder Cádiz liberalism, brought new pressure on integrated
indigenous populations across the Andes, as conflicts between autonomists and
royalists became civil wars. Too often, interpretations of independence suggest
that along the Andean mountain spine from the Audiencia de Quito (roughly
present-day Ecuador) to the altiplano and high valleys ending south of Potosí,
the dense settlements of long-colonized indigenous communities stood aside,
in contrast to the assertive participations of so many in the G reat Rebellion of
the 1780s. It appears that Spanish Americans remained in charge during the
wars that led to independence, and that indigenous p eoples mostly served as
transporters of goods and dependent auxiliaries, while often seeing their cattle
and foodstuffs taken by troops on both sides. Yet indigenous men served in
various armies and communities, backing one side or another based on local
interests, conflicts, and opportunities. Many, likely a majority of integrated
indigenous peoples, tried to keep their heads down and stay out of fighting
among factions of people who had long aimed to rule them and claim their
labor and surpluses. Some indigenous communities, as in Pasto, New Granada
(today Colombia), backed the royalist cause after the Popayán governor de-
creased their tribute. They created a “popular royalism” that favored the com-
moners over the traditional powers, as some communities had farther south in
the Great Rebellion.14 When communities could negotiate participation on
favorable terms, they might join the fray for a time; but as independence con-
flicts became generalized and violent, dealing with whatever army passed by
became a strategy for survival.
A spate of urban movements across the Andes debated autonomy and loy-
alty in the aftermath of Napoleon’s assault on imperial legitimacy in 1808. A pa-
triot army sent from the city of Buenos Aires u nder Juan José Castelli entered
Upper Peru (now Bolivia) but was defeated in 1811 at Huaqui, on the altiplano
near Lake Titicaca. The porteños initially gained support in many indigenous
communities along their march. Castelli proclaimed the end of tribute pay-
ments and denounced the “slavery” he imagined the Indians suffered, asserting
that the Buenos Aires junta saw the Indians as “brothers.”15 Indigenous auxilia-
356— Erick Langer
ries were instrumental in the Argentine army’s victories in Suipacha, but Cas-
telli’s favor toward Indians turned many non-Indians against the “patriots.” At
the battle of Huaqui, the native auxiliaries who accompanied Castelli waited
on the sidelines. With defeat at Huaqui, the porteño troops dispersed and
began to sack the surrounding countryside and the Potosí treasury. The Indians
of Sicasica refused to aid Castelli in his retreat. Other indigenous groups took
advantage of the confusion to sack the city of La Paz, presumably controlled by
“patriot” troops from Cochabamba.16 The American Spaniards of La Paz made
peace with the royalists and kept their peace until independence was declared.
Such urban adaptations for and against Cádiz liberalism sent conflict into
the countryside. Th ere Spanish American leaders seeking autonomy allied with
indigenous villages to mount guerrilla campaigns against the loyalist forces. The
most notable indigenous rebellion was the Pumacahua rising of 1814. Mateo
García Pumacahua traced his lineage back to Inka kings; he had been a loyal-
ist and a leading commander against Túpac Amaru in the 1780s. He became
interim president of the Audiencia (the High Court and primary colonial au-
thority in Cuzco). Feeling marginalized by loyalist authorities, in 1814 he joined
a rebellion begun and led by Spanish Americans; Pumacahua became the main
military commander and attracted many Indians to his rebel army. However, the
rebellion was suppressed by well-armed Spanish troops and Indian auxiliaries in
1815 as Fernando VII reclaimed power and abrogated the Cádiz Constitution.
Pumacahua was executed in the regional capital of Sicuani.17
Most of the guerrilla republiquetas w ere pacified by 1816. Overt combat be-
tween loyalists and groups seeking autonomy receded in the Andes until 1820,
when Spanish liberals preparing to lead an expedition to fight the indepen
dence movement led by Simón Bolívar in Gran Colombia (modern Colombia
and Venezuela) forced Ferdinand VII to reinstitute the Cádiz Constitution and
its liberal precepts. That provided the opening for pro-independence armies
to move north from Buenos Aires and Chile and south from Gran Colombia,
to crush a still-loyal royalist Andean core. Bolívar and San Martín understood
that only the “liberation” of the deeply indigenous Andean highland core, still
ruled by powers loyal to Spain, could ensure political autonomy in their Cara-
cas and Buenos Aires homelands.
The conflicts that led to independence in the Andes mixed civil wars among
Spanish Americans and changing participation among indigenous leaders and
communities as dynamics and opportunities evolved. Early events in Upper
Peru revealed American Spaniards’ ambivalence and indigenous communities’
independence. In both Perus, elites feared that a revolution might become what
they saw as a race war—that is, a rising of indigenous masses reminiscent of the
1780s. Spanish Americans had long benefited from the colonial system and in
their dominance over the Indians, notably by receiving tribute and labor via the
mitá and other means. Many native Andeans were leery of Spanish Americans
and, after their initial enthusiasm for the Auxiliary Army from Buenos Aires,
also of “foreigners” who promised much, but whose power and commitment
to indigenous welfare proved tenuous. In the small republiquetas later formed
to fight the royalists, Indians, mestizos, and Americans Spaniards mixed, but
españoles americanos held most of the leadership.18 In the regions that became
Peru, many indigenous communities only mobilized in 1820, when the vicere-
gal court faced a siege from porteño general San Martín’s army from Chile and
fled Lima seeking refuge in the ancient indigenous capital at Cuzco.19 Even
then, most native communities stood aside from the conflicts that created Peru
and Bolivia.20
The situation was diff erent on the frontiers. The wars that shook the Spanish
empire and eventually led to independence had even more profound effects there.
For independent peoples who did not recognize themselves as “Indians”—
this was a Spanish term—these regions were not margins but homelands. For
people who had remained free of Spanish rule, often while obtaining arms and
other goods through raids and trades, the wars opened new times of real in
dependence and economic expansion. And for many, the times of indigenous
independence lasted long into the nineteenth century.
There were many and diverse reasons for the assertion of independent in-
digenous peoples along what the Spanish called la frontera. Many troops sta-
tioned at the frontier in the Bourbon military buildup left to fight on one
side or the other in the independence wars (it was frontier troops, including
the gauchos of the pampas and the llaneros of Venezuela and Colombia who
backed San Martín and Bolívar). Royalist leaders knew that the most experi-
enced troops manned the frontier forts; they repeatedly called them to defend
the regime. Patriots recruited the same forces whenever they could. As wars
persisted and widened within the core regions of the colonies, the officials saw
higher priorities than funding frontier forts. As silver revenues fell and tribute
payments dried up in the highland communities, governments could not sup-
port the forts. As troops and subsidies withdrew, indigenous peoples took over
vast swaths of territory. In some regions, the mission system meant to contain
and convert frontier ethnic groups collapsed when Spanish missionaries left,
whether by force or fear. This occurred among once-thriving Franciscan mis-
sions among the Chiriguanos in the Andean foothills of eastern Upper Peru. In
1813, seventeen missions contained more than eighteen thousand Indians. By
358— Erick Langer

1825, only two missions remained.21 Similar processes weakened missions on
the pampas and in the southern Chile.
Amid complex conflicts and adaptations along diverse frontiers, indepen
dent indigenous p eoples recouped territories they had lost to Bourbon imperial
offensives. Some independent Indians fought on the side of the patriots, includ-
ing the Chiriguano cacique Cumbay. In 1813 he met porteño general Manuel
Belgrano in Potosí to offer his warriors to the patriot leader.22 The Pehuenche
in Chile favored the royalists and collaborated with loyal officers to attack the
recently established Chilean republic.23 In turn, the Chilean patriot leader José
Miguel Carrera had allied with the Ranquel Indians across the Andes to fight
against patriot rivals.24 Independent p eoples took different sides during the
wars; most aimed to promote their own independence; few developed an ideo-
logical predilection among Spanish Americans or Europeans, whose visions of
Indians differed little and never included indigenous independence.
In sum, the wars in the early nineteenth century affected South American
indigenous peoples differently. Peasants living u nder colonial Spanish rule
suffered the depredations of warfare, losing livestock and supplies to passing
armies. Many were forced to work for one side or the other as porters, spies,
providing shelter and the like. Other indigenous p eoples aimed to take their
fates in their own hands, with limited success. The Pumacahua rebellion failed,
in part because of the fear the earlier Great Rebellion in the 1780s still engen-
dered among American Spaniards. At and beyond the frontier, independent
peoples had different experiences. They quickly saw a lessening of the pressure
of the late colonial state; in many regions they took back control over areas
they had lost to Bourbon conquest. Some independent groups joined the wars,
often on the side of the patriots. They helped create a military balance that
favored their own independence—recouping lost territory and populations.
fter Independence: Indigenous Power and Wealth

A
Once the wars were over, new and still contested Andean states relied more
than ever on indigenous peoples and their tribute payments to sustain them-
selves. Other sources of income, notably mining revenues, diminished dramati-
cally. The dependence of the new states in the Andes on tribute incomes led
to a rebalancing of power between them, the indigenous communities within
them, and the increasingly independent peoples on their margins. The new
states did not have the capacity to put much pressure on indigenous groups,
within or without, while many Spanish Americans looked to redefine the
colonial pact in which indigenous groups held a predetermined subordinate
Popayán
Areas that colonial governments claim but do not control
Pasto
VICEROYALTY
Quito OF NEW GRANADA
VICEROYALTY
OF BRAZIL
VICEROYALTY
CE
NT
OF PERU
RA
Lima SI
L
E
Huanta R R A Cuzco
Lake
Titicaca
Huaqui
La Paz
Oruro Santa Cruz
Tomina
Potosí Potosí
Chiriguano
Missions
PACIFIC Salta
OCEAN
Gran Chaco
VICEROYALTY
OF RÍO DE LA PLATA
Cordoba
CHILE
Buenos Aires
Bío Bío River
0 100 200 300 400 500 mi
0 200 400 600 800 km
Map 10.2. Spanish South America, ca. 1820

position. This led to experiments in defining the nation as a multiethnic con-
struct, attempts abandoned in the last quarter of the nineteenth c entury. Then
indigenous peoples returned to subordinate positions; even worse, government
policies deliberately marginalized them, or attempted to eliminate them com-
pletely, either physically (as happened along many frontiers), or as distinct
peoples with their own institutions, cultures, and languages.
After Spanish rule ended and while nations w ere constructed and debated,
the indigenous peoples integrated within the new states and the independent
natives at their margins claimed real gains. The rising autonomy of indigenous
peasants and communities within the nations led to greater prosperity and often
higher standards of living b ecause neither the state nor Spanish American
landlords had the ability to extract as much surplus as during colonial times. In
contrast to developments in Mexico, the new Andean governments reinstated
the indigenous tribute, soon a fter abolishing it in the afterglow of indepen
dence. In Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, governments w ere desperately short of
25
funds, as other revenue sources did not materialize. They gave the renewed
tribute different names, but the idea was the same—each Indian male between
fifteen and fifty paid a tax in return for access to community land. That pact made
explicit a relation implicit in the Spanish colonial order. It also made new states
dependent on indigenous communities and gave their members, especially
their men, a sense of entitlement to their lands. Across the Andes, the head tax
endured at levels less than the colonial tribute. No government increased the
amount of the head tax while the system remained in place. Presuming infla-
tion over the nineteenth c entury, the head tax became a shrinking burden on
each household—while solidifying rights to lands and autonomies in indig-
enous communities.26
Elsewhere in South America, tribute ended. In some, areas, tribute had
counted for l ittle and was abolished early in the republican era or shortly there-
after. In the regions that became Argentina, the only Indians to pay tribute
lived as peasants in the far northwestern part of the federation’s Andean prov-
inces, and their contributions were insignificant to the national treasury. The
Buenos Aires revolutionary government abolished tribute in 1811, before the
invasion of Upper Peru.27 In Colombia, the Congress of Cúcuta abolished In-
dian tribute in 1821; it lived on briefly as a “personal contribution,” but largely
disappeared by the end of the 1820s.28
Across the Andes, the basis for peasant organization, the república de indios,
was strengthened as weak states relied on indigenous leaders to administer vil-
lages and collect tributes; the persistence of tribute fortified the village structures
put in place to collect it. A few Spanish Americans became tribute collectors,
now more a measure of integration into indigenous communities than an inser-
tion of outside interference (as such attempts had become under Spanish rule).
Arguably, postindependence Spanish South America was more republican and
local governance stronger than in any period u ntil the agrarian reforms of the
twentieth century. It was a time of republican governance based in indigenous
peasant villages, often invisible to Spanish American and mestizo townspeople,
who suffered from caudillismo and ongoing political instability. The exception
seems to have been Ecuador, where many highland Indian villages w ere con-
29
trolled by Spanish American and mestizo landlords and officials.
After independence, debate widened among Spanish Americans about
whether Indians constituted citizens as other members of society did. Follow-
ing the precedent of Cádiz, initial responses were yes: all citizens—no longer
colonial subjects—should be equal.30 When General José de San Martín in-
vaded Lima with his Chilean and porteño troops, he decreed that all citizens
should be called Peruvians; in the highlands this was taken to mean only Indi-
ans.31 Simón Bolívar, in a famous 1824 decree that also followed Cádiz prece
dents, proclaimed that all Indian communities should be broken up and their
lands distributed among their members. Lands not claimed by individual Indi-
ans would be sold by the state in public auction. A year later, Bolívar provided
a formula for dividing the land, providing Indian caciques twice the land of
ordinary community members, but also abolishing hereditary leadership (caci
cazgos).32 After Bolívar left and while facing fiscal penury and an indigenous ma-
jority demanding traditional roles and rights, the Bolivian state reversed t hese
laws in the late 1820s. That reversal meant that integrated indigenous p eoples in
the Andes remained differentiated by the old “stain” of conquest and tributary
subordination, though every country masked the fact by calling the tribute by
different names, such as “personal contribution” (contribución personal ). People
thus marked as Indian still voted in national elections, but as the c entury wore
on, literacy and landowning requirements increasingly excluded rural p eoples,
Indian or not. This did not affect village-level administration, which was sub-
sumed under the Indian republics reinforced by the consolidation of their resi-
dents’ separate status.33 In sum—and in diverse local ways—indigenous peoples
faced prejudice in the nations yet consolidated power and production in their
communities.
Despite the equivocal and diminishing citizenship rights of Indian in na-
tional republics, their social rights remained intact or even expanded in their
local communities—the heirs to colonial indigenous republics. We have little
information on labor regimes in the early national decades. The information
we have suggests a less oppressive hacienda regime; in some cases some land
362— Erick Langer
reforms effectively turned renters (arrenderos)34 into smallholders. In others
landlords gave haciendas to Indians, as happened in Tomina Province in south-
ern Bolivia, where the priest Manuel Martín Santa Cruz in his 1857 testament
donated his hacienda, Collpa Lupiara, to his Indian arrenderos.35
Similarly, we lack information on advanced pay and obligated rural labor
on estates (too often called called debt peonage, implying domination that was
rarely real) for the first few decades after independence. Still, Arnold Bauer has
argued that postindependence labor relations were relatively favorable to the
hacienda workers—a situation well documented across Mexico. Estate owners
could not rely on weak states for police power to find or return workers who
took proffered advances of goods and wages and then absconded. More reveal-
ing, why would employers offer pay in advance, given very weak enforcement
mechanisms? The advances worked as enticements to labor, offered to men
with lands and rights in entrenched communities. If they did not perform the
work or repay, estates could rarely make their debtors pay in the decades of
indigenous independence.36 In Colombia, for example, Aline Helg shows that
neither the state nor landlords could discipline labor in the mountainous and
heavily forested Caribbean region, where p eople easily escaped and many villages
were beyond the powers of governments or landlords.37
National state and landlord powers also weakened when indigenous lead-
ers became local and regional authorities. Cecilia Méndez has shown that in
the aftermath of the royalist rebellion in Huanta from 1825 to 1828, the indig-
enous peasant leaders Tadeo Choque and Antonio Abad Huachaca remained
the regional authorities, the former as provincial governor, the latter as a jus-
tice of the peace. They fought for the heartland caudillo Andrés de Santa Cruz
in the 1830s and u ntil the ends of their lives remained the power brokers of
their districts.38
Struggling national states without the resources and power to favor Spanish
Americans and their commercial enterprises meant that indigenous peasants
could engage in activities without governments or landlords being able (or at
times even interested) to take the surplus. In the Andes, indigenous peasants
controlled much of the food production and most of the transport sector, pro-
visioning cities and mining centers as well as carrying minerals to the coast
and imported goods into the highlands. Many traded in contraband silver,
colluding with import/export merchants and, at times, with mine o wners too.
Informal alliance among indigenous muleteers and llama herders, merchants,
and silver miners worked to keep the state weak so that all could avoid taxes.39
No wonder the definition of the Andean states was vague and contested for de
cades, as Sarah Chambers shows. Many Spanish American elites and indigenous
communities did not see defined boundaries or stable powers as in their best
interests.
Andean peasant communities joined in extensive commerce, supplying cit-
ies with foodstuffs and locally made textiles, along with forage, fuel, and wood
(though the difficulty of getting at the municipal records has hindered a full
analysis of its importance). Until the late nineteenth c entury, indigenous com-
munities held the vast majority of arable land, making their predominance of
food production a certainty. Tristan Platt has documented that northern Potosí
communities produced the wheat that supplied much of the Bolivian high-
lands. Municipal police records provide evidence of the amount of foodstuffs
that indigenous traders sold in nineteenth-century cities such as Oruro and
Potosí.40
Outside the control of the new states—though not outside their imagined
boundaries—still-independent peoples joined in important commerce often
tied to international trade; with no state authority to record it, their commerce
remains unmeasured. Most significant was the c attle trade in the South Ameri-
can pampas. Kristine Jones details how the raiding economies of the Mapuche
and other peoples of the Southern Cone as well as the Comanche and Apache
who ruled between Mexico and the United States became enterprises important
to the world economy. They competed directly and successfully with Spanish
Americans for the resources of their regions.41 Such raiding economies made
possible the rise of proto-states such as Calfucará, an alliance of Araucanian and
Pampas Indians who dominated the salt licks of the Salinas Grandes where the
cattle herds taken from the pampas had to pass on their way west to Chile.42
The commercial opportunities claimed by independent Indians were tied
to the weakness of the new republics.43 The frontier military balance shifted to
favor independent Indians—an advantage that endured to the 1870s. The new
states facing difficulties financing activities in their core regions and wracked by
internecine conflict drew frontier-hardened militias to help rule their heartland
cores—often to little avail. Some leaders tried to bring independent Indians
into the fight, but at their peril. Such independent peoples brought indepen
dent agendas, sometimes launching campaigns against their “allies” and often
raiding for their own advantage, debilitating national frontiers even more. In
only one case is it clear that the engagement of independent indigenous war-
riors brought gains to Spanish Americans: Juan Manuel de Rosas, the governor
of Buenos Aires, allied himself with Calfucará and other caciques to fight the
Voroganos allied with the Carrera brothers in disputes over rule of the Argen-
tine Confederation in 1830. To succeed, Rosas had to pay his Indian allies thou-
sands of horses and cattle, along with expensive sugar and tobacco.44
364— Erick Langer
The balance of power favoring independent Indians led to uneasy relations
with frontier towns and villages, and large landlords too. Alliances shifted con-
stantly as political realities changed, reflecting rivalries on both sides of the fron-
tier. In central Argentina, along the eastern frontier of Peru, and in southeastern
Bolivia fights among political factions, different jurisdictions, and indigenous
peoples with their own allies and enemies led to raids and conflicts in which in-
digenous groups might ally with Spanish American states or factions to launch
strikes against indigenous groups or Spanish American towns linked to their po
litical opponents. Violence was endemic across frontier regions, affecting e very
political and social unit from national and indigenous federation leaders all the
way down to the h ousehold level. Baretta and Markoff long ago detected endur-
ing violence on c attle frontiers in Latin America; this analysis suggests that the
violence as was as much about political power as about cattle.45
In these decades of independence, indigenous groups leveraged superior
powers of violence to gain access to goods they otherwise would not have had.
Landlords and local officials paid goods to keep Indians at bay. In Argentina,
provincial governments paid indios amigos what they called vicios, goods such
as tobacco and sugar, h orses and c attle, to compensate their service as buf-
fers to other, hostile Indians. Many leaders of powerful groups on the pampas
and in Patagonia maintained constant written communication with provincial
governors. Some maintained embassies in provincial capitals, creating state-like
relations with their provincial peers.46 In Bolivia, landlords and departmental
governors paid Chiriguanos to remain allies—tribute Spanish Americans paid
to Indians. Still, independent Indians often switched allegiances, leading Span-
ish Americans to accuse them of treachery—as if indigenous peoples could
not have their own strategic, diplomatic, and economic interests. Much of the
frustration came as Spanish Americans saw that they were the weaker party—
the payers of tribute. They could only hope that independent Indians would
become dependent on them for goods they could not produce themselves: fire-
arms, sugar, and fine cloth. As there were usually multiple suppliers, alliances
remained fragile and raids continued.47
The decades from the 1820s to the 1860s, or even the 1880s (depending on
the region) saw indigenous peoples claim lives more independent and often
more well off than during late colonial times. The peasants and communities
that had been integrated into the Spanish polity a fter the conquest w ere rarely
integrated fully as citizens within national states after independence. But
they managed quite well without much interference from state authorities.
As landed villag ers provided most of the foodstuffs to the towns and vil-
lages throughout the Andes, peasants clung to the tributary regime—a small
figure 10.1. Indigenous independence—imagining the threat after its end
burden exchanged for great local autonomy. Weak states continued to support
the communities, reinforcing local self-rule and the landholding essential to
villagers, regional economies, and state revenues. Local patriarchal democra-
cies continued within villages entrenched in rights long ago granted to them
as repúblicas de indios.
Spanish American landlords had little access to capital during the postinde
pendence period of weak markets; they could not rely on weak and contested
states to force l abor or the repayment of advances. So supposedly powerful elites
pressed favors and advances to keep men on the job, even guaranteeing credit
at local shops.48 At and beyond the frontiers, independent raids by indigenous
peoples that Spanish Americans insisted on calling “Indians”—presuming their
subordination while the latter repeatedly demonstrated their power—brought
constantly shifting alliances, wars, and trades, and even the payment of tributes
by Spaniards to Indians. Political turbulence was everywhere, in national heart-
lands, along frontiers, and beyond. So too was unprecedented indigenous in
dependence: in communities denied full citizenship, but guaranteed lands and
local autonomies; among independent peoples who would not recognize that
they should live as Indians, docile and dependent.
366— Erick Langer
Indigenous and Popular Independence across the Americas
Indigenous independence reached far beyond the Andean highlands and nearby
lowlands during the decades after 1810. In the Mesoamerican regions of central
and southern Mexico, former indigenous republics lost legal sanction and faced
attempts to privatize their lands, yet decades of national commercial troubles and
political instability allowed many communities to consolidate control of produc-
tion for sustenance and local markets.49 In the once commercially rich Bajío, a
decade of insurgency took down the silver economy and enabled indigenous and
mixed-race peoples, long without rights to indigenous republics, to take con-
trol of local production while prejudicing the commercial foundations of the
nation.50 And beyond the frontiers of a once expansive New Spain, a Coman-
che empire built in a century of war and trade with Spanish North America
used mobile cavalries to mount assertive raids and active trades and emerge as the
dominant power on the high plains west of the Mississippi from 1810 and 1850.51
Assertions of indigenous independence after 1810 are most notable in and
near the Andes and New Spain, once the core regions of Spain’s American em-
pire. The fall of the empire and the collapse of the silver economies weakened
regime powers and cut entrepreneurial opportunities, opening spaces in which
indigenous communities and other popular groups pressed claims to indepen
dence within struggling new nations. The fall of Spain’s empire and the silver
economies also undermined the Spanish American nations’ abilities to press
power beyond their borders, enabling Comanche, Mapuche, and other inde
pendent peoples’ new assertions of power.
Assertions of indigenous and popular independence extended beyond the
regions once pivotal to the silver economies. In the western highlands of Gua-
temala, Maya communities grounded in indigenous republics and entrenched
on the land made themselves central to the struggles that created a Guatemala
nation separate from the imagined Central American Federation.52 In lowland
Yucatán, a region famously beyond the dynamism of New Spain’s silver econ-
omy, communities pressed their interests after 1821—culminating in a devastat-
ing war for Maya independence (too long mislabeled a caste war) in the 1840s
that threatened the capital at Mérida and enabled thousands to live in true in
dependence for decades.53 Far to the south, in the interior headwaters of the
Río de la Plata system, Guaraní p eoples long dealing with Jesuit missions (until
the 1767 expulsion) in lands contested by Spanish and Portuguese frontiers-
men became the foundation of a Guaraní-speaking Paraguay after 1810, turning
inward against participation in Atlantic trade.54
While popular assertions of independence were most widespread and suc-
cessful across Spain’s former domains, they w ere important in the Atlantic slave
societies, too. That former slaves ruled Haiti is often noted as a hemispheric ex-
ception; that ex-slaves t here shaped the second American nation by taking the
land for family production is less often noted and makes Haitian independence
less exceptional. Autonomy on the land was a key goal and a widespread reality
across the hemisphere in the age of independence. And Haitians’ success helped
inspire parallel risings by slaves seeking their definitions of freedom and inde
pendence across Atlantic America. Near Richmond, V irginia, the conspiracy
known as Gabriel’s Rebellion developed in 1800 while the Haitian Revolution
continued. The plot was revealed to authorities; the conspirators arrested and
executed—yet the threat alone led national politicians to resolve an emerging
political crisis, preserving national unity and the emerging economy of cotton
and slavery.55 The 1812 Aponte rebellion challenged slavery in Cuba in the year
the Cádiz Constitution proclaimed liberties for American Spaniards and in-
digenous peoples too, but not people of African ancestry.56 Slaves rose in British
Demerara in 1823 and in Bahia, Brazil, in 1835.57 Conspiracies rumored and real
were everywhere where slavery continued.58 When the United States fell into
civil war over slavery in 1860, slaves quickly looked to their own interests in a
conflict they could not control.59 Amid that struggle, slaves in Dutch Guyana
rose against their bondage.60
Many people of African ancestry bound to labor as slaves pursued inde
pendence across the Americas. After Haiti, however, they found little success.
Did the reconsolidation of slave-based export economies (beyond Haiti) a fter
1800 provide economic resources, sustain state powers, and contain slaves’ as-
sertions? The contrast with the widespread collapse of silver, enduring political
instability, and the meaningful turn to indigenous independence in Spanish
America seems clear.
Key exceptions to indigenous independence during the first half of the
nineteenth century confirm that comparative understanding. Where expand-
ing slave-based production for export sustained early commercial prosperity,
funded political stability, and drove expansion into interiors to further export
production, notably in the U.S. South, indigenous peoples faced war and dis-
placement. Andrew Jackson’s campaigns and the forced removal of the Chero-
kee to Oklahoma are the most famous of the assaults that make the contrast
clear.61 In Brazil’s south-central interior, indigenous peoples faced pressures
culminating in war just before the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808.
The contested shift to political independence that led to the Brazilian empire
brought brief times of relief that soon became a contested indigenous inde
pendence as coffee plantations worked with slave labor expanded into natives’
homeland.62
368— Erick Langer
In the making of new countries across the Americas, complexity and di-
vergence were everywhere. Still, revealing patterns emerge: where commercial
economies struggled and state-making proved long and contested, indigenous
peoples claimed meaningful independence; where slavery and export prosper-
ity persisted, slaves sought “independence” on the model of Haiti, yet found
little success; where cotton and slavery drove into indigenous lands, slavery ex-
panded and native p eoples faced death and displacement. Only in Haiti did the
laboring subjects of colonial prosperity claim enduring independence. They
inspired many others—and set fear spreading among those who still aimed
to profit from slavery. For their self-liberating efforts, Haitians gained lives of
autonomous poverty on the land, faced military rulers at home, and lived ex-
cluded from the world of commercial nations—the only world that mattered
among those who ruled across the Atlantic and the Americas in the nineteenth
c entury.
While political visionaries struggled to create states that would allow po
litical independence to a few across the Americas, indigenous peoples, slaves of
African ancestry, and diverse others pressed their own visions of independence.
For them, access to land, community rights, family production, and cultural
autonomy were often more important than state powers. The latter, a fter all,
were often mobilized against popular groups pressing their versions of inde
pendence. During decades when state building was contested and commercial
economies strugg led, indigenous and popular independence was a clear goal
and a widely lived reality—in Haiti, across Spanish America, and in continen-
tal interiors never subjected to colonial rule. It rarely survived the expansion
of export economies and the consolidations of state power that marked the
Americas after 1870.
Notes
1 The term they identified themselves with was españoles americanos, in distinction
to indios or mestizos. In later times, scholars have called them creoles (criollos), but
this is not what they called themselves, at least not in the Andes. For an essay on the
use of españoles americanos in the south-central Andes, see Tristan Platt, “Historias
unidas, memorias escindidas: Las empresas mineras de los hermanos Ortiz y la
construcción de las élites nacionales, Salta y Potosí 1800–1880,” in Dos décadas de
investigación en historia económica comparada en América Latina: Homenaje a Carlos
Sempat Assadourian, ed. Margaret Menegus (Mexico City: Colegio de México,
1999), 285–362.
2 Nancy Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Sur
vival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 355–388.

3 There is a huge literature on the meaning of “Indian,” the evolution of the term,
and the uses of the word. See for example Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s
Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York:
Random House, 1978); for Latin America, see for example the recent works of
Rebecca Earle, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish
America, 1810–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), and James F.
Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest
Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
4 See John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrar
ian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), chap. 6.
5 This was not the case for the Portuguese. The continuity in the state u nder the
Braganza dynasty even after independence helped enable the Brazilian empire to
maintain its frontiers and even expand, to the detriment of independent groups.
See Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the
Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2006).
6 Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule. For an overview of the effects of the
reparto, see Karen Spalding, “Exploitation as an Economic System: The State and
the Extraction of Surplus in Colonial Peru,” in The Inca and Aztec States 1400–
1800: Anthropology and History, ed. George A. Collier, Renato I. Rosaldo, and
John D. Wirth (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 322–344, and Scarlett O’Phelan
Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales: Perú y Bolivia 1700–1783 (Cuzco:
Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas, 1988); for the replace-
ment of indigenous community leaders, see Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial
Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). For the conflict between priests and
late colonial authorities, Nicholas A. Robins, Priest-Indian Conflict in Upper Peru:
The Generation of Rebellion, 1750–1780 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007).
7 See Leon G. Campbell, The Military and Society in Colonial Peru, 1750–1810 (Phila-
delphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978). The most complete up-to-date
analyses of the revolt are Charles F. Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cam-
bridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), and Sergio Serulnikov, Revolution in the Andes:
The Age of Túpac Amaru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Also see the
essay by Sarah Chambers for more detail on the revolts.
8 For the best overview of the aftermath of the Great Rebellion, see Charles F.
Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 55–83. However, Walker does not
deal adequately with the issue of the alleviation of the tax burden on Andean
peasants.
9 See S. Elizabeth Penry, “The Rey Común: Indigenous Political Discourse in
Eighteenth-Century Alto Perú,” in The Collective and the Public in Latin Ame
rica: Cultural Identities and Political Order, ed. Luis Roniger and Tamar Herzog
(Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2000), 219–237. For an overview of this change,
see Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, Kurakas sin sucesiones: Del cacique al alcalde de indios.
370— Erick Langer

Perú y Bolivia 1750–1835 (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolomé
de las Casas, 1997).
10 This does not mean that the Spanish (and the Portuguese) hadn’t explored virtually
all of the Americas by the sixteenth century; other than some slave raiding—
especially the bandeiras of the Portuguese—the boundaries established by the end
of the sixteenth century between the colonial states and the independent Indians
remained remarkably stable. They largely paralleled the limits of peasant econo-
mies the Spanish had conquered, with some expansion especially into northern
Mexico because of the silver to be had there. In the case of Brazil, the discovery
of diamonds and gold in the Minas Gerais region in the late seventeenth c entury
brought about similar expansion of Portuguese control.
11 The literature on late colonial frontier activities is too vast to recite here. For some
suggestive work, see David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age
of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Richard W. Slatta,
“Spanish Colonial Military Strategy and Ideology,” in Contested Grounds: Compara
tive Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, ed. Donna J.
Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 83–96.
12 Weber, Bárbaros. As Pekka Hämäläinen points out for the northern reaches of
Spanish America, the Spanish entered into an alliance with the Comanche to
contain the Apaches. The situation there was more complicated than might appear
from Spanish records. See Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2008), chap. 3.
13 There are many books on the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion, though few in the
recent past. For a summary of the significance of the rebellion, see Steve J. Stern, “The
Age of Andean Insurrection, 1742–1782: A Reappraisal,” in Resistance, Rebellion,
and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World 18th to 20th Centuries, ed. Steve J.
Stern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 34–93. For a study of the
subsequent period, see Nuria Sala i Vila, Selva y Andes: Ayacucho (1780–1929). His
toria de una región en la encrucijada (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas, Instituto de Historia, 2001).
14 See Marcela Echeverri, “Popular Royalists, Empire, and Politics in Southwestern
New Granada, 1809–1819,” Hispanic American Historical Review 91:2 (2011),
237–269.
15 “Proclama de Castelli a los indios del virreinato de Perú,” as cited in René Danilo
Arze Aguirre, Participación popular en la independencia de Bolivia (La Paz: Fun-
dación Cultural Quipus, 1987), 145.
16 “Proclama de Castelli a los indios del virreinato de Perú,” 148–151.
17 Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 97–14.
18 There is an increasing literature on the small guerrilla movements in Upper Peru
and an analysis of the ethnic composition of t hese movements. See for example
Javier Marion, “Indios Blancos: Nascent Polities and Social Convergence in Bolivia’s
Ayopaya Rebellion, 1814–1821,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 15:4
(2006). For the classic account of the republiquetas, see Charles W. Arnade, La
dramática insurgencia de Bolivia (La Paz: Editorial Juventud, 1972), 47–72.

19 See Ezequiel Beltrán Gallardo, Las guerrillas de Yauyos en la emancipación del Perú
1820–1824 (Lima: Editores Técnicos, 1977).
20 The best discussion of this issue is José Luis Roca, Ni con Lima ni con Buenos Aires:
La formación de un Estado nacional en Charcas (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estu-
dios Andinos/Plural, 2007).
21 See Alejandro M. Corrado, El Colegio Franciscano de Tarija y sus misiones, 2nd ed.,
vol. 2 (Tarija: Editorial Offset Franciscana, 1990), 288–292, and Erick D. Langer,
Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier
in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2009), 50.
22 For an analysis of this encounter, see Thierry Saignes, Historia del pueblo chiri
guano, coord. Isabelle Combès (La Paz: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos,
2007), 117–122.
23 Pilar Herr, “Indian-Spanish Relations on Chile’s Southern Frontier, 1819–1832,” in
Langer, Indians, State and Frontier, unpublished ms.
24 Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, El ostracismo de los Carreras (Santiago: Imprenta del
Ferrocarril, 1857), 329–350.
25 See Mark van Aken, “The Lingering Death of Indian Tribute in Ecuador,” Hispanic
American Historical Review 61:3 (1981), 429–459; Víctor Peralta Ruíz, En pos del
tributo: Burocracia estatal, élite regional y comunidades indígenas en el Cusco rural,
1826–1854 (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de Las
Casas, 1991); and Erick D. Langer, “El liberalismo y la abolición de la comunidad
indígena en Bolivia en el siglo XIX,” Historia y Cultura 14 (1988), 59–95. A good
summary of the Andes as a whole is Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making:
Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge
26 We need studies on prices in nineteenth-century Latin America to prove this
point.
27 See David Bushnell, Reform and Reaction in the Platine Provinces, 1810–1852
(Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1983), 9–11.
28 David Bushnell, The Santander Regime in Gran Colombia (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1970), 175–176. Also see Larson, Trials of Nation Making, 71–102. My
thanks to Marcela Echeverri, who helped me understand the complexities of Indian
tribute in Colombia.
29 Andrés Guerrero, “The Administration of Dominated Populations u nder a
Regime of Customary Citizenship: The Case of Postcolonial Ecuador,” in After
Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas, ed. Mark Thurner and
Andrés Guerrero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 272–309, and
Erin O’Connor, Gender, Indian, Nation: The Contradictions of Making Ecuador,
1830–1925 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007).
30 In fact, this is what the 1812 Cádiz Constitution posited, but Ferdinand VII re-
neged on it when he returned to power in 1816.
31 Mark Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial
Nationmaking in Andean Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 24.
372— Erick Langer

32 José Flores Moncayo, Legislación boliviana del indio (La Paz: n.p., 1953), 23–39. In
this, Bolívar followed the ideas of the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz, which defined all
citizens born in Spanish territories as Spanish citizens. For Cádiz, see the essay by
Roberto Breña.
33 For the Andes, see Thurner, From Two Republics; Marta Irurozqui, “A bala, piedra
y palo”: La construcción de la ciudadanía política en Bolivia, 1826–1952 (Seville:
Diputación de Sevilla, 2000), and Larson, Trials of Nation Making.
34 “Arrendero” is a category that implied paying rent in money, goods, and services to
the landlord in return for the use of a plot of land and a small h ouse.
35 Notaría de Padilla (Chuquisaca, Bolivia), 1882, fs. 176–179.
36 Arnold J. Bauer, “Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and
Oppression,” Hispanic American Historical Review 59:1 (1979), 34–63. It is possible
that the concept of debt peonage only began in the 1840s as an invention of U.S.
imperialists who wanted to equate labor conditions in Mexico with slavery in
the United States, thus justifying the U.S. invasion of Mexico and the taking of
half its territory. See Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the
Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002),
esp. 189–213.
37 Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
38 Cecilia Méndez, The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of
the Peruvian State, 1820–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
39 See Erick D. Langer, “Bringing the Economic Back In: Andean Indians and the
Construction of the Nation-State in Nineteenth-Century Bolivia,” Journal of Latin
American Studies 41:3 (2009), 527–551.
40 Tristan Platt, Estado tributario y librecambio en Potosí (siglo XIX): Mercado indí
gena, proyecto proteccionista y lucha de ideologías monetarias (La Paz: Instituto de
Historia Social Boliviana, 1986). These records exist in the municipal archives as
well as fragments in the police records of the Archivo Nacional de Bolivia (Sucre)
in Tribunal Nacional de Cuentas.
41 Kristine L. Jones, “Comparative Raiding Economies: North and South,” in Guy
and Sheridan, Contested Ground, 97–114. For the Comanche, see Hämäläinen,
Comanche Empire.
42 See Kristine L. Jones, “Calfucará and Namuncurá: Nation Builders on the Pampas,”
in The H uman Tradition in Latin America: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Judith Ewell
and William H. Beezley (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1989), 175–186.
Also see Julio Vezub, Valentín Saygüeque y la “Gobernación indígena de las Manza
nas”: Poder y etnicidad en la Patagonia Septentrional (1860–1881) (Buenos Aires: Pro-
meteo Libros, 2009), and Silvia Ratto, Indios y cristianos: Entre la guerra y la paz en
las fronteras (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2007). What is still missing, of course, is
an analysis of what happened to the cattle on the western side of the Andes. Did the
hides end up in the ballast tanks of whalers who called on ports in southern Chile?
43 Here there is a marked distinction with imperial Brazil, which did not suffer from
this weakness.

44 See Daniel Villar, Juan Francisco Jiménez, and Silvia Mabel Ratto, Conflicto, poder
y justicia en la frontera bonaerense 1818–1832 (Bahía Blanca: Universidad Nacional
del Sur, 2003). For the military balance of power on nineteenth-century frontiers,
see Langer, “The Eastern Andean Frontier (Bolivia and Argentina) and Latin
American Frontiers: Comparative Contexts (19th and 20th Centuries),” The Amer
icas, 59:1 ( July 2002), 33–63.
45 Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff, “Civilization and Barbarism: Cattle
Frontiers in Latin America,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20:4
(1978), 587–620. For eastern Peru, see Sala i Vila, Selva y Andes. Also see Erick D.
Langer, “La violencia cotidiana en la frontera: Conflictos interétnicos en el Chaco
boliviano,” Sociedades en movimiento: Los pueblos indígenas de América latina en
el siglo XIX, comp. Raúl J. Mandrini and Carlos D. Paz (Tandil, Argentina: iehs,
2007), 19–32.
46 See Vezub, Valentín Saygüeque. Geraldine Davies is working on a dissertation on
these relations and has found more correspondence of the type that Vezub found.
47 There is an increasing literature on these relations. See for example Silvia Ratto,
“El ‘negocio pacífico de los indios’: La frontera bonaerense durante el gobierno
de Rosas,” Siglo XIX: Revista de Historia 15 (1994), 25–47; and Erick D. Langer,
“Foreign Cloth in the Lowland Frontier: Commerce and Consumption of Textiles
in Bolivia, 1830–1930,” in The Allure of the Foreign: The Role of Imports in Post-
Colonial Latin America, ed. Benjamin S. Orlove (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 1997), 93–112.
48 See for example Erick D. Langer and Gina Hames, “Commerce and Credit on the
Periphery: Tarija Merchants, 1830–1914,” Hispanic American Historical Review 74:2
(May 1994), 285–316.
49 John Tutino argued this long ago in From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico.
50 See John Tutino, “The Revolution in Mexican Independence: Insurgency and the
Renegotiation of Property, Production, and Patriarchy in the Bajío, 1800–1855,”
Hispanic American Historical Review 78:3 (1998), 367–418.
51 The key study is Hämäläinen, Comanche Empire.
52 This is detailed by Jordana Dym in chapter 7.
53 In her classic study Maya Society under Colonial Rule, Nancy Farriss emphasized
that enduring Maya community and cultural autonomies were constructed in a
context of marginal Spanish commercial development. On the 1840s Maya War
for Independence, the classic study remains Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatán
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964). Studies taking regional politics and
community interests into greater account began with Terry Rugeley, Yucatan’s Maya
Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
54 See Julia Sarreal, The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), and Thomas Whigham, The Politics of
River Trade: Tradition and Development in the Upper Plata, 1780–1870 (Albuquer-
que: University of New Mexico Press, 1991).
55 Douglas Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800
and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); on the politics
374— Erick Langer

of 1800, see James Horn, Sue Ellen Lewis, and Peter Onuf, eds., The Revolution
of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2002).
56 Matt Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic
Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
57 See Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave
Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and João Reis, Slave
Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1995).
58 For example, Robert Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La
Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
59 That the conflict was ultimately about slavery is detailed in Chandra Manning,
What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York:
Knopf, 2008). Manning explores slaves turn to self-liberation during the war in
Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2016).
0
6 Marjoleine Kors is writing a major analysis of this conflict.
61 Among many studies, see two books by William McLaughlin: Cherokee Renascence
in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), which
details the rise of Cherokee independence in times of national uncertainty, and
After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokee’s Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839–1880 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), which emphasizes the search for
indigenous independence in the face of a forced removal.
62 Langfur, The Forbidden Lands.

Epilogue
Consolidating Divergence
The Americas and the World after 1850
Erick D. Langer and John Tutino
fter a century of conflict and transformation the diverse new countries of the
A
Americas began to consolidate around 1870. Polities stabilized. The United
States held together after the Civil War; Brazil became a republic in 1889; Cuba
a nation in 1895. The many nations of Spanish America settled into new bound
aries and found a new political calm notable in the shadow of the preceding de
cades of conflict. Economies accelerated in the entrenched world of industrial
capitalism. The United States—at least its industrial Northeast—joined in in-
dustrial leadership. The rest of the Americas found new dynamism as commod-
ity exporters: old silver regions turned to new crops and minerals to supply the
industrial cores; long marginal areas found roles in the global economy; and
the old Atlantic exporters carried on as they faced the end of slavery.
The mid-nineteenth century, however, was not without conflicts, contradic-
tions, and new divergences. A series of wars proved pivotal to the end of slavery,
the end of indigenous independence, and the consolidation of states sustained
by export economies. First and most transforming was the War for North
America of 1846–1848. That conflict brought Texas with lands for the expan-
sion of cotton and slavery and California with gold mines that stimulated west-
ern settlement into the republican union. It left Mexico with half its territorial
claims, continuing commercial difficulties, political instability—and enduring
indigenous autonomies. And it began the demise of Comanche power.1 The
challenge of incorporating Mexican and indigenous territories into the United
States reopened the question of the expansion of slavery, leading to the deadly
civil war of 1860–1865 that ended slavery, preserved the Union, and enabled
a continental expansion driven by northern industries, commercial farming
across the Midwest and West (as railroads, barbed wire, and repeating r ifles
ended Comanche and other indigenous independence), and mining and graz-
ing across the far West—while a once-dynamic South struggled to produce cot-
ton without slavery (or rights for ex-slaves).
The end of the U.S. Civil War coincided with the War of the Triple Alli-
ance (better, the War against Paraguay) of 1864–1870. A Brazilian empire still
grounded in coffee and slavery allied with Uruguayan and Argentine republics
rising as suppliers of wool, livestock, and wheat to industrial Britain to attack
Paraguay—a nation of Guaraní independence, language, and culture all but
closed to world trade. Britain backed its allied suppliers in a conflict that de-
stroyed the Guaraní peoples and their independence, forcing the interior of
South America open to trade.2 While that conflict raged, a multiracial alliance
in Cuba r ose in 1868 to challenge Spanish rule and slavery in a war that lasted
a decade; Spanish rule survived to oversee a process that ended slavery in 1886.
Cuba began to make sugar without slaves, and soon without Spain, as the war
of 1895–1898 led to independence u nder U.S. hegemony.3
Meanwhile, in the shadow of the destructive U.S. Civil War and while
the Ten Years War challenging slavery continued in Cuba, Brazilian military
officers returning from what proved a difficult war against Guaraní Paraguay
began to question slavery. They resisted service as slave chasers, enabling de
cades in which northeastern planters facing declining sugar markets sold slaves
to southern planters expanding coffee production, creating an empire with a
free North and a slave South. Slaves increasingly ran away and resisted; north-
ern states and southern cities ended slavery, allowing them to recruit runaways
(many they had recently sold away) as free workers. Slavery fell in Brazil in
1888, followed a year later by the collapse of the empire that had sustained it.4
As the nineteenth century approached its end, slavery finally ended as a major
support of export production in the Americ as. The fall of slavery coincided with
Epilogue — 377
the consolidation of republics: in the United States after 1865, in Brazil after
1889, in Cuba from 1895. Yet former slaves faced exclusions everywhere: all the
former slave societies recruited growing numbers of immigrants to sustain
urban and rural production. As Haitians had faced beginning in 1804, the
emancipation of slaves led to marginalization of ex-slaves and their descen-
dants. After a long conflictive era of making new countries, former Atlantic
slave societies found diff erent roles in the world of industrial capitalism that ex-
panded rapidly after 1870: Haitians remained committed to f amily production
and excluded from global trades; Brazilians continued to produce increasing
amounts of coffee, leading world production without slaves; Cubans continued
to supply U.S. markets with sugar, ruled by U.S. investors who brought prejudices
against Afro-Cubans and limits to Cuba’s republican independence.5
The United States, by contrast, soared to continental hegemony after 1870.
An urbanizing Northeast saw its industries begin to compete in global markets;
the South provided cotton raised by ex-slave sharecroppers facing Jim Crow ex-
clusions; farmers across the Mississippi basin and beyond gained mechanized
ways of production in new markets ruled by powerful rail and commercial
trusts that provoked populist discontent; and regions taken from Mexico and
cleared of Comanche and other native p eoples boomed with a mix of mining,
commercial grazing, and irrigated agriculture as Anglo-American entrepre-
neurs promoted a transformation of the Spanish North American economy by
mixing European settlers and Mexican workers. The rise of the United States
to global importance in the world of industrial capitalism came with enduring
internal contradictions.6
Meanwhile, the core regions of Spanish America—once home to g reat in-
digenous states; then from 1550 to 1810 the center of silver economies pivotal to
global trades—after 1870 consolidated national republics built on new export
economies that enabled the subordination of the indigenous peoples that had
found unprecedented (and often unrecognized) independence after 1810. New
countries became oligarchic republics s haped by liberal land rules, the triumph
of export-import flows fueling an industrial capitalism centered along a North
Atlantic axis, and political exclusions that kept power and prosperity among
elite Spanish Americans and immigrant allies who brought capital and ties to
global markets.
The diverse national outcomes are well known. Peru found wool and guano
as exports to fund state consolidation and constrain indigenous communities—
processes furthered when copper from Cerro de Pasco brought added export
revenues and state powers.7 Bolivia found export revenues in tin in the late
nineteenth century—and used them to subordinate assertive Aymara and
378— Erick Langer and John Tutino
o thers on the eastern frontiers.8 Chile stabilized early, thanks to the earnings
of feeding gold-rush California and despite an active indigenous frontier to
the south; it later flourished with nitrate exports (in large part in coastal zones
taken from Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884); it consoli-
dated its liberal, oligarchic, export republic with late nineteenth-century cop-
per sales.9 Struggling republics from Colombia and Venezuela through Central
America to Guatemala found coffee the way to revenues in world trade; they
strengthened state powers—and pressed against mixed populations and native
communities that often faced attacks on lands and demands for labor that
brought new subordinations.10
Mexico lived parallel yet different developments after 1870: liberals in power
pressed to privatize indigenous community lands, promote foreign investment,
and stimulate exports while limiting political participations. Silver finally
regained the heights of earlier times in the 1870s—as the United States and
Germany joined Britain on the gold standard, ensuring that the value of silver
plummeted. Still, politics stabilized while vanilla exports rose in the 1860s, cof-
fee in the 1880s, henequen (supplying twine to mechanizing agriculture in the
United States) in the 1890s, and copper and petroleum (supplying U.S. indus-
try) around 1900.11 The diversity of exports made Mexico different, as did its
internal industrialization—rare outside the United States in the nineteenth-
century Americas. Textile industries founded in the 1830s survived and ex-
panded to serve national markets. More notably, Monterrey—long a small
northeastern town suddenly near the U.S. border a fter the war of the 1840s—
gained capital by facilitating exports of slave-grown Confederate cotton to
British and northern U.S. mills during the Civil War. It used the capital and
entrepreneurial skills generated then, and its rise as a rail junction in the 1880s,
to build textile, beer, glass, and iron industries serving Mexican markets from
the 1890s—soon joined by Guggenheim-owned smelters processing silver ore
for export to the United States.12
A glance might suggest that Mexico had emerged from the collapse of silver,
political conflicts, indigenous autonomies, international wars, and territorial
losses to build a republic and an economy set to prosper in the world of indus-
trial capitalism. It was the only American nation outside the United States to
combine industry and agriculture for local markets and exports, along with
rising mineral and energy sectors. But Mexican industries came late; they re-
mained constrained to supplying limited national markets. As in most of Span-
ish America, in Mexico commodity exports drove prosperity that favored a few
and excluded the many (except as poor producers and poorly paid workers) to
sustain an oligarchic republic of deepening inequities.
Epilogue — 379
Everywhere in the Americas, the consolidation of nations s haped by concen-
trating prosperity and widening exclusions came with the promotion among
the powerful of new theories of racial hierarchy in which people of European
ancestry were proclaimed inherently superior, legitimating the subordination
and marginalization of all non-Europeans, whether of indigenous, African, or
mixed ancestry. Racial exclusions and discriminations might vary from the
sharp black-white lines drawn in the United States, to the gradations of color
accepted in Brazil and the Caribbean, to the diverse anti-indigenous visions
that formed across Spanish America—with greater or lesser openness to mixed
peoples. Still, “scientific” exclusions proliferated as republics consolidated in
the late nineteenth century.13
By 1900, the old European empires were gone (except for a few Caribbean
remnants). Slavery too had finally vanished in the Americas as a sanctioned
way of production for profit. Such celebrated triumphs, however, came with
economies that still profited the few and marginalized the many—whether
once independent indigenous p eoples or recently freed slaves. And in the ex-
pansion of socially exclusionary export economies serving an industrial capital-
ism that concentrated production and power in northwestern Europe and the
northeastern United States, the people of the republics consolidating across
the Americas shared much with o thers around the world.
In the United States, the industries, railroads, mine operators, oil devel-
opers, and the commercial interests that integrated an urbanizing Northeast
and Midwest with a still agro-pastoral South and West (and western mines) all
boomed—except in recurrent years of collapse. Sharecroppers descended from
slaves grew the cotton that sustained northern industries—and faced racial ex-
clusion. Also excluded were the surviving natives forced into reservations to
make their lands available for commercial expansion, the Mexicans still present
or newly arrived who laid tracks, built dams and irrigation systems, worked
mines, and picked crops. Less excluded but clearly prejudiced w ere the many
farmers, often of European immigrant ancestry, who lived with climate and
market uncertainties that led to mounting debts while railroads and commodi-
ties traders profited from their produce. Also prejudiced w ere the newly ar-
rived immigrants crushed into urban slums or dispersed in mill towns across the
Northeast, struggling to find work at more than poverty wages while the indus-
tries they sustained drove continental expansion and global trades. Viewed as a
single nation—the United States was on the rise. Viewed as a continental em-
pire, while industries and cities rose in the Northeast bringing profit to some,
prosperity to many, and lives of difficult labor to too many, people across the
rest of the nation faced export economies that concentrated wealth and preju-
diced producers—freed slaves, Mexicans, Native Americans, and many workers
and farmers of European ancestry, too. One only need read populist political
rhetoric to know that many Euro-Americans living during westward expansion
believed they faced exploitations around 1900.
While a rising United States prospered from exclusions within and Latin
American nations forged oligarchic republics grounded in export economies
and social subordinations, the late nineteenth century saw a new expansion of
European empires. People across Africa and the M iddle East, South and South-
east Asia, faced armies empowered by the same technologies that subordinated
independent Amerindians. Made dependent on European rulers, newly colo-
nized regions were drawn into the same world of industrial capitalism that
shaped countries across the Americas. They too supplied commodities to in-
dustrial centers—and bought industrial products. And European imperial rule
came sanctioned by the same “scientific” racisms that legitimated New World
exclusions. “Native” p eoples everywhere lost lands, lived exploitations, and faced
denigration as workers often imagined as lazy and requiring coercion.14
The second generation European empires of the late nineteenth c entury did
not replicate the early global polities that integrated the first world economy
after 1500. The first empires faced slow transport and communications capaci-
ties; their military powers were limited and easily replicated (note the resistant
power of New World nomads once they gained h orses and firearms). The result
was the polycentric first world economy in which Potosí and the Bajío could be
more important than Madrid or Seville, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro more impor
tant than Lisbon, Saint Domingue as important as Paris.
The second wave of European empires used new industrial technologies
of transport and communication and newly deadly weapons to draw a wider
world of o thers into the economy of capitalist concentration: China and South
Asia, once key industrial regions of the polycentric world economy; an Islamic
world that had led the world in trade and technology before 1400; African
kingdoms that engaged in diverse trades before focusing on supplying slaves.
After 1870, all but China w ere drawn into empires; all including China w ere
pressed to supply commodities and cheap labor and buy industrial products.
Capitalists and empire builders everywhere justified their powers and others’
subordination as grounded in “inherent” racial differences.
Latin American republics and African, Islamic, and Asian imperial subjects
became essential peripheries in the world of concentrated industrial capitalism
around 1900. Yet that world would not last. And the American republics that
had emerged from the new countries formed in the conflictive transformations
of 1750 to 1850 found that, as republics, they faced better chances than many
Epilogue — 381
recently colonized regions in the new era of national assertion and global trans-
formation that began in 1910.
The challenge to the global industrial capitalism only consolidated after
1870 came quickly. Mexico—perhaps the most promising and polarized of the
Spanish American republics—collapsed in revolution in 1910. In 1914, Britain
and Germany, industrial powers competing for global hegemony, faced off in
a deadly G reat War. The United States joined to turn the tide in Britain’s f avor
while Russia exploded in a revolution that challenged capitalism—but not
industrialization. While victorious Anglo-Americans worked to restore indus-
trial capitalism, Mexico and the Soviet Union began contrasting projects of na-
tional development, the former capitalist, the latter socialist. Global industrial
capitalism collapsed in the Depression of the 1930s, turning the Americas and
the world toward a search for “national development.”
People across the hemisphere dreamed that the benefits of industrialism,
long concentrated in Britain, northwestern Europe, and the northeastern
United States, could be brought home to benefit everyone. There were possi-
bilities in large nations like Mexico, which had a strong industrial start, and in
Argentina and Brazil, which had limited starts but ample and diverse resources.
Elsewhere, the dream often proved an illusion. But for decades, while the in-
dustrial powers faced depression and wars hot and cold, American republics
turned to promising and sometimes promoting shared welfare among their di-
verse peoples. In the same era, the p eoples of the second colonial empires w ere
first drawn into their rulers’ wars and then turned to anticolonial campaigns
that ended imperial rule between 1945 and 1970; they left deep divisions, en-
trenched exclusions, and insurmountable challenges of national development,
especially if equity was a goal.
Throughout the twentieth c entury, Spanish America’s indigenous peoples
pressed rights to fair, prosperous, and often-autonomous inclusion within na-
tions. The Mexican revolution was revolutionary b ecause villagers led by Emil-
iano Zapata fought for rights to land and self-rule long grounded in indigenous
republics and recently lost u nder liberal reforms. They lost the war but won the
land, forcing a new regime claiming to be revolutionary (while seeking national
capitalist development) to return land to communities. L ater, major agrarian
reforms occurred in Bolivia in 1953 and in Peru in the late 1960s, giving land
to rural workers who had labored on the haciendas. The Mexican example,
however uneven in application and outcomes, became a beacon for indigenous
peoples and rural villagers across the Americas—resonating in movements for
indigenous rights from Chiapas to Ecuador and beyond in the late twentieth
c entury.15
Broad promises of national development with egalitarian inclusions in the
United States helped movements for African American, women’s, Mexican
American, and others’ rights to flourish in the face of enduring resistance during
decades of war, depression, war, cold war, and colonial adventures. Parallel move-
ments rose across the Caribbean and in Brazil, too—and in the diverse societies
across the globe that remained divided by racist legacies as they emerged from
the last colonial empires.
The new countries that emerged from the first colonial empires across the
Americas lived histories laden with conflict and contradiction, promise and
challenge. The empires that organized the first global economy from 1500 to
1810 offered subordinating inclusions to indigenous peoples who survived the
disease-driven depopulation that s haped the sixteenth c entury, especially in the
Spanish domains that forged the silver economies that drove global trades for
centuries. The same empires forced millions of enslaved Africans to l abor in the
spaces vacated by that depopulation, especially in Atlantic plantations that sent
sugar, tobacco, and other goods to Europe.
The century of conflict that took down the first colonial empires across the
Americas, created new countries, and spurred industrial capitalism led first to
contested nations and indigenous independence across Spanish America; stron-
ger nations (and an enduring colony) built on expanding slavery in the United
States, Brazil, and Cuba; and an isolated nation of poverty in revolutionary
Haiti. Contradictions w ere everywhere—as were promises of liberation and
openings to autonomy. The global consolidation of industrial capitalism after
1870 brought export economies, oligarchic republics, and subordinated (and
often expropriated) indigenous peoples across Spanish America. It brought the
end of slavery in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil—and kept former slaves
marginal and often excluded. Haitians found little change or gain. Then the
turn to national development after 1910 opened possibilities (always limited
and often contested) for indigenous communities, excluded racial groups, and
women across the hemisphere and around the world—in times marked by
global wars and depressions, national revolutions and anticolonial movements.
There have been real gains—and obvious limits.
As promises of national development give way a globalization often pre-
sented as a utopian opportunity, centuries of history of conflict and contra-
diction, opportunity and uncertainty—and changing divergences—across the
Americas and the world suggest that those seeking just inclusions and shared
prosperity should keep one eye on the promise and another on the enduring po-
tential for constraints, conflicts, and contradictions. Dynamic cities and growing
industries now spread across the globe. Yet concentrations of power, production,
Epilogue — 383
and prosperity mix everywhere with exclusions, poverty, and marginality. Be-
fore 1850, slavery forced millions of Africans to migrate to labor; now millions
around the world seek to migrate in search of distant opportunities—while
powerful states work to limit their mobility. Coercions remain, sometimes forc-
ing people to labor, often pressing them to stay home—or in the shadows—
to face marginality. Meanwhile, indigenous p eoples in the Andes, across the
Americas, and around the world again press for autonomies that might enable
them to participate with real benefits. Historic challenges persist—in new glo-
balizing formulations of production and power, participation and resistance.
The once new countries of the nineteenth-century Americas face continuing
challenges—shared by many newer countries across the globe.
Notes
1 See Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2008), and Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and
the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
2 On Paraguay and the war, see Thomas Wigham, The Politics of River Trade: Tradi
tion and Development in the Upper Plata, 1870–1970 (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1991), and E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin
America in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
3 See Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and Gillian McGillivray, Blazing
Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–1959 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
4 See Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Robert Conrad, The Destruction
of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973);
and Robert Brent Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (Boston: Atheneum,
1972).
5 On Cuba and the United States, see Louis Pérez, On Becoming Cuban: Identity,
Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
6 See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper,
2002); Monica Prasad, The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox
of Poverty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Michael Kazin, The
Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998);
and Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and L abor War
in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
7 See Paul Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in
Postindependence Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Nils Jacob-
sen, Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano, 1780–1930 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993); and Florencia Mallon, The Defense of Community in the

Peru’s Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860–1940
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
8 See Erick Langer, Economic Change and Rural Resistance in Southern Bolivia,
1880–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989) and Expecting Pears
from an Elm Tree; see also Laura Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indig
enous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (Durham, NC: Duke
9 Harold Blakemore, British Nitrates and Chilean Politics, 1886–96 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1974), and Thomas Klubock, Contested Communities:
Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1951 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
10 Marco Palacios, Coffee in Colombia: An Economic, Social, and Political History,
1850–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); William Roseberry,
Coffee and Capitalism in the Venezuelan Andes (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1984); and Robert Williams, States and Social Evolution: Coffee and the Rise of Na
tional Governments in Central America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1994).
11 On vanilla, Emilio Kourí, A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community
in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); on coffee,
Heather Fowler Salamini, Working Women, Entrepreneurs, and the Mexican Revo
lution: The Coffee Culture of Córdoba, Veracruz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2013); on henequen, Allen Wells and Gilbert Joseph, Summer of Discontent,
Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatán, 1876–1915
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); on oil, Jonathan Brown, Oil and
Revolution in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
12 On textiles, Aurora Gomez-Galvariatto, Industry and Revolution: Social and Eco
nomic Change in the Orizaba Valley, Mexico (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2013); on Monterrey, Rodolfo Fernández, “Revolution and the Industrial
City: Violence and Capitalism in Monterrey, Mexico, 1880–1920” (PhD diss.,
Georgetown University, 2014).
13 Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the
Andes, 1810–1910 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Nancy Ste-
pan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1991); Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Pol
itics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000).
14 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2003).
15 See Lynn Stephen, Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), and Waskar Ari, Earth Politics:
Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia’s Indigenous Intellectuals (Durham, NC:
Epilogue — 385
Contributors
alfredo Ávila is Research Professor at the Institute of Historical Research

at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is author of En nombre
de la nación and Para la libertad: Los republicanos en tiempos del imperio, 1821–
23. He is working on a history of early experiments with liberalism in Spanish
American countries.
roberto breña is Research Professor in the Center for International Stud-

ies of the Colegio de México. His books include El primer liberalismo español
y los precesos de emancipación de América, 1808–1824 and El imperio de las
circunstancias: Las independencies hispanoamericanas y la revolución liberal
española.
sarah chambers is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota,

Twin Cities. She is author of From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and
Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 and Families in War and Peace: Chile from
Colony to Nation. She continues to study women and gender in the formation
of American nations.
jordana dym is Professor of History at Skidmore College. She is author of

From Sovereign Villages to Nation States: City, State, and Federation in Central
America, 1759–1839, and coeditor of Politics, Economy, and Society in Bour
bon Central America, 1759–1821 and Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic
Reader.
carolyn fick serves as Associate Professor of History at Concordia Univer-

sity, Montreal. Her book The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution
from Below opened the recent rethinking of that movement from the perspec-
tive the slaves that took arms to free themselves and found a black nation.
erick langer is Professor of History and International Affairs at George-

town University. His books include Economic Change and Rural Resistance in
Southern Bolivia, 1880–1930 and Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan
Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949.
adam rothman is Professor of History at Georgetown University. He is

author of Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South
and Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery and is
currently working on a general history of emancipation in the United States.
david sartorius is Associate Professor of History at the University of

Maryland, College Park. He is author of Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire
in Spanish Cuba. He is currently working on politics and sexuality in Cuban
slave society.
kirsten schultz is Associate Professor of History at Seton Hall Univer-

sity. Her book Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Court
in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 is a key study of transatlantic power. She is now
completing a new analysis of governance in eighteenth-century Brazil.
john tutino is Professor of History and International Affairs, and Director

of the Americ as Initiative, at Georgetown University. He is author of From In
surrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940
and Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North
America.
388 — Contributors
Index
Abad y Queipo, Manuel, 246 352–69; indigenous peoples, 17, 59, 330, 334,
Abascal, José Fernando de, 90, 319, 329, 330 336, 361, 363; juntas, 328–29; map, 319;
Abasolo, Mariano, 245 patria, 320, 327, 328–32, 337–38; products,
Accau, Jean-Jacques, 167 322; silver economy, 16, 33–35, 43, 58, 317;
Adams, John, 149–50 trade networks, 318, 322–23. See also indig-
Adelman, Jeremy, 4, 186, 192 enous populations; specific countries
Age of Revolution, 71–73, 95–98. See also Andrada e Silva, José Bonifacio de, 218
Cádiz liberalism; specific wars Angulo, José, 330
Aguilar, Gabriel, 328 Antiguo Régimen, 79
Alamán, Lucas, 256–57, 259, 261–62 Apache peoples, 238, 364
alcabala. See sales taxes Apasa, Julián, 326
alcaldes de indios, 297, 302, 326, 354 Apatzingán Constitution (1814), 250
Alfonso X, 190–91 Apodaca, Juan de, 252, 253
Allende, Ignacio, 245 Aponte rebellion (1812), 368
Alós, Joaquín, 326 Arce, Manuel José, 293
Alto Douro Company, 207 Argentina, 59, 364
Alvarado, Pedro de, 280 Argüelles, Agustín, 85, 245
Amaru movements. See Andean rebellions Arista, Mariano, 263
American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), 8, 11, Arizpe, Miguel Ramos, 245, 256–57, 264
42, 113–14 Army of the Three Guarantees, 263
Americas: challenges and outcomes, 11–19; Arredondo, Joaquín, 252
consolidation of, 376; divergence of, 9–10; Articles of Confederation, 114
in European empires, 26–27; independence, Atlantic export economies, 11, 18, 38–40, 51–55,
50–51, 381–82; indigenous adaptation, 3; 204–5. See also specific products
indigenous independence, 350–69; integrated Austin, Stephen, 264–65
history, 3–10; maps, 34, 54, 75; in world Aycinena, Mariano, 293
economy, 27–33. See also Latin America; Aymara movement. See u nder Andean
Spanish America; specific countries rebellions
ANC. See National Constituent Assembly Aztec p eoples, 234
Andean rebellions, 319, 323–24, 329–31;
Aymara movement, 325–27; Great Rebellion Bahia, Brazil, 368
in the Southern Andes, 353, 354; Túpac Bajío, Mexico: revolution in, 6, 9, 11, 32, 47–48,
Amaru rebellion, 43, 73, 317, 325, 353 61; as trade center, 5–6, 15, 36, 234, 241, 248,
Andes: boundaries, 320, 338; confederation, 367
332–37, 333; head taxes, 258, 323, 333, 361; in Banco de Avío, 262
dependence, 331; indigenous independence, Barbados, 39
Barbeyrac, 82 Bustamente, José de, 285
Baretta, Silvio R. Duncan, 365 Byron, Lord, 77
Barrundia, José Francisco, 304, 306
Barrundia Zepeda, Juan, 292–93 cacao trade, 40, 289
Basques, 282, 293 caciques. See kurakas
Bastidas, Micaela, 324 Cádiz Constitution (1812), 7, 9, 73, 77, 87; goal
Battle of Ayacucho (1824), 91 of, 89; implementation in Spanish America,
Battle of New Orleans (1815), 116 89–93, 185, 187–91, 192, 213, 247, 248, 249,
Battle of San Jacinto (1836), 265 252, 285–86, 290–91, 330–31; intellectual
Battle of the Alamo (1836), 265 sources of, 81–87; Preliminary Discourse,
Bauer, Arnold, 363 85–86
Beckert, Sven, 5, 55 Cádiz liberalism, 11–12, 15, 17, 51, 74–87,
Belgrano, Manuel, 359 247–52; Catholicism as sole religion, 80;
Bentham, Jeremy, 179 Church reaction to, 81; intellectual sources
Bill of Rights, 115 of, 81–87; main protagonists, 78; Spanish
Blackburn, Robin, 3, 4 America and, 87–98, 285, 288; tenets, 79–80
Black Hawk War (1832), 119 Calfucará, 364
Bolívar, Simón, 17, 51, 168, 192, 318–19, 331, 362 Calhoun, John, 120–21
Bolivia, 3, 10, 17, 58, 318–19, 324, 365; agrarian California: gold rush, 61–62, 121; as U.S. state,
reforms, 382; confederation with Peru, 269, 377
332–38; exports, 378–79; map, 337 Calleja, Félix, 246, 249–50, 251
Bourbon dynasty, 85, 236, 237, 241, 251–52, 280, Campomanes, Pedro Rodríiguez, 179
282–83, 284, 321, 323 Canada, 112–13
Boxer, Charles, 204 Caracas, 87–88, 90
Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 163, 164, 166–67 Carlos III, 81, 83, 282
Bravo, Nicolás, 257–58, 267 Carlos IV, 76, 81, 83, 242, 243
Brazil: coffee trade, 9, 14, 54, 182, 201–2, 221, Carrera, José Miguel, 359
368, 377; constitutionalism, 214; as Empire, Carrera, Rafael, 299–300, 301, 303–5, 306
202–3, 210, 223–24; free trade, 211; in global Casáus y Torres, Ramón, 302
economy, 204–10, 218, 220; gold trade, Catholicism, 80, 81, 235, 257
39–40, 42, 205–7; independence, 8, 13–14, cattle trade, 364
54, 201, 211–22; indigenous labor appropria- Cherokee Constitution (1827), 119
tion, 207–8; indigenous marginalization, Chiapas, 286, 288–89
223, 368; juntas de fazenda, 208; maps, 206, Chile, 17, 58, 92, 319, 336, 379
217; Portuguese court in, 8–9, 201–2, 220; China: demand for silver, 42–43, 44–45, 48,
Portuguese monarchy in, 47, 51, 212, 243; as 234, 317; demise of, 10; as economic power,
Republic, 224; slave trade, 2, 6, 9, 14, 39–40, 5, 25, 381; opium trade, 48–49; porcelain
46, 52–54, 182–83, 202, 203, 207, 208–9, trade, 25; silk trade, 25; trade routes, 29, 31
212, 218–22, 221, 377; sovereignty, 212–17, cholera epidemic, 265–66, 299
222–24; sugar trade, 38, 40, 52; tobacco Choque, Tadeo, 363
trade, 204 Choquehuanca, José Domingo, 333–34
Britain: on Brazilian independence, 218, 219; Christophe, Henri, 146, 156, 159, 160–62
industrial revolution, 5, 7, 12, 16, 31–32; citizenship: of indigenous populations, 79, 89,
investment in Mexico, 258–59; world 330; to patriot army fighters, 335; of people
economy, domination of, 43–45, 62, 212, of African descent, 330; popular sovereignty
258 and, 167, 288; post-abolition, 147, 153, 158,
Brown, John, 125 162, 164, 167. See also specific countries
Buenos Aires, 58–59, 87–88, 90, 318, 321, 322 Civil War, U.S. (1861–1864), 2, 10, 12, 14, 62,
Burnet, David, 265 121–29, 128, 269, 368, 377
Bustamente, Anastasio, 260, 261, 262 cochineal trade, 16, 36–37, 60, 281, 292, 294,
Bustamente, Carlos María de, 247, 250 297
390 — Index
Cochrane, Thomas, 216 Cumbay, 359
Code Henry (1811), 160 Cuzco, 16–17, 316–17, 319
Code Noir (1685), 143
coffee trade, 161, 165, 169, 297, 379; slavery and, Dalence, José María, 332
6, 9, 180–81, 368, 377 Dávila, Pedrarias, 280
Colombia, 58, 168, 178, 279, 331, 358, 361, 363 Declaration of Independence (U.S.), 112
Columbus, Christopher, 26 Declaration of the Rights and Man and Citi-
Comanche, 10, 17, 18, 61, 256, 264, 267, 364, zen (France), 143
367, 377 Demerara, Guyana, 52, 368
Committees of Correspondence, 112 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 146, 156, 159, 160
Communist Manifesto (Marx/Engels), 121 Díaz, Porfirio, 271
Companhia Geral do Comércio do Grão Pará Diderot, Denis, 179
e Maranhão, 207 Directorio que se deve observer nas Povoaçõs dos
Compromise of 1850, 121, 125 Indio do Pará, e Maranhaõ, 208–10, 223
Condorcanqui, José Gabriel. See Túpac Amaru, Directory’s Constitution (France, 1795), 153
José Gabriel divine right, 6, 79, 80, 192–93
Confederate government, 126 Douglas, Stephen, 125
Consolidation of Royal Bonds, 242–43 Dubois, Laurent, 5
Constitución de la Monarquía Española (1812). Dulce, Domingo, 191
See Cádiz Constitution (1812) Durán, Gabriel, 263
Constitution of 1791 (France), 81, 83–84 Dutch Empire, 39, 41, 204, 368
Constitution of Coahuila and Texas (1827), Dutch Guyana, 368
264
Continental Congress, 112 East India Company, 41, 44
copper mining, 30, 335, 378 Echavarrí, Antonio, 255
corregidores, 302, 323, 325–26, 353 Ecuador, 58, 279, 362
Cortés, Hernán, 280 electoral rights, U.S., 12
Cortes Gerais, Extraordinárias e Constituintes Elliott, J. H., 4
da Nação Portuguesa, 213–16 Elorza, Antonio, 83
Cortes of Cádiz, 9, 73–74, 76–77, 88–89, 185, El Salvador, 16, 286, 293
245, 330. See also Cádiz liberalism Engels, Friedrich, 121
Costa Rica, 16, 280 Escalera, La, conspiracy, 189, 191
cotton trade, 10, 12, 46, 48, 50, 56–57; slavery Estado da Índia, 204
in, 54–55, 109, 123–24. See also textile Estates General (France), 143
trade Euro-Atlantic Wars (1750–1830), 5
creoles, 118–19, 177, 179, 189, 191, 284, 287, 289,
290, 328 federalism, 117
Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 111 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, 247
Croix, Teodoro de, 327 Fernando VII, 15, 50, 60, 242, 243, 252–53, 258,
Cruz, José de la, 252 328, 330–31; Cádiz liberalism and, 76, 77,
Cuba: Cádiz Constitution in, 187–91; call to 78–79, 80, 81, 87–88, 90, 187; dissolution
independence, 175–76, 177–78, 188, 191–93; of Cortes, 73; reinstallation of, 81, 89, 91;
coffee and slave trade, 180–81; creole elite, support for, 93, 285, 286
189; economic expansion, 179–80, 182; Ferrer, Ada, 180–81, 192
foreign trade, 183–84; independence, 377; Findlay, Ronald, 5, 27, 30, 32
land distribution, 180; as loyal colony, 8, Fischer, Sybille, 157–58
13, 176–77, 186–87; map, 178; politics of Flores, Cirilo, 289–90, 292–93
Spanish rule, 185–92, 193–94; slave popula- forced labor draft. See mitá
tion, 181; slave rebellion, 368; sugar and France, 46–47, 74, 113–14, 139, 152, 168,
slave trade, 2, 3, 6, 9, 46, 49, 52, 60, 176–77, 242–43. See also Napoleonic wars
182–83, 183, 184–85 Franciscan missions, 354, 358
Index — 391
Frank, Andre Gunder, 27 continuities and ruptures, 306–7; federa-
French constitutional thought, 81, 82, 83–84 tion challenges, 293–95; foreign residents,
French National Convention, 145 298–99; immigrants, 303; indigenous
French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1815), 8, majorities in, 3, 16; indigenous rights,
96, 115 291–92; indigo trade, 284–85, 291, 292,
Fuente, Alejandro de la, 182, 190 294, 297; as indivisible, 303–4; literacy,
Fuentes Franco, Andrés, 303 302; Livingston Codes, 297; map, 294, 296;
Fuentes y Guzmán, Francisco Antonio, rebellions, 304–5, 306; sovereignty, 306–7;
278–79 state formation, 290–93, 297, 306; state to
Fugitive Slave Clause, 115 republic, 300–303; taxation, 299–300
Fugitive Slave Law (1850), 125 Guatemala (Kingdom), 10, 15–16, 60, 278, 286;
Furtado, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça, citizenship, 286, 287–88; divided districts
207–8 in, 279–84, 283, 286, 288; independence,
fur trade, 33 cusp of, 284–88; independence, fissures of,
288–90; indigenous rights, 287; map, 283
Galbaud, Thomas, 145 Guatemala City, Guatemala, 280, 281, 282, 285,
Galdíz, Pedro, 187 291, 304
Galindo, Juan, 295 Guerra, François-Xavier, 76, 95
Gálvez, Mariano, 295, 296–98, 303, 306 Guerrero, Vicente, 244, 251, 252–53, 260–62
Gamarra, Agustín, 329–30, 331, 332, 336 Guridi y Alcocer, José Miguel, 245
García Paláez, Antonio, 300–301 Gusmão, Alexandre de, 207
Garrison, William Lloyd, 124–25 Gutiérrez Estrada, José María, 266–67
Gazeta de Guatemala (newspaper), 282
Gettysburg Address (1863), 127 Habsburg dynasty, 39, 84–85, 204, 280
Godoy, Manuel, 74, 78, 83, 242, 243 Haiti, 2, 164; citizenship, 147, 153, 158, 162,
gold standard, 379 164, 167; coffee trade, 161, 165, 169; as
gold trade, 26, 27–28, 33, 42, 49; California divided, 160–62; freedom in, 146–47;
gold rush, 61–62, 121; costs and infrastruc- independence, 148–57, 168, 368, 369; land
ture, 205–7; slavery in, 204–5 distribution, 162–67; map, 166; peasant em-
Goman, Jean-Baptiste, 163 powerment, 163–67; plantation citizenship,
Gómez Farías, Valentín, 262, 263, 264–65, 266 147–48; plantation economy, 5, 49, 143, 157,
Gómez Pedraza, Manuel, 260 163, 168–69; plantation structure, 149–50,
Goya, Francisco, 74 153–55, 159, 160–61; poverty in, 6; slavery in,
Goyeneche, José Manuel, 329–30 3, 14; trade relations, 148–49, 155. See also
Granada, Nicaragua, 285 Saint Domingue
Granados, Luis Fernando, 6 Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), 4, 8, 11,
grana trade. See cochineal trade 12–13, 45–46, 51–52, 96; background,
Gran Colombia, Federation of, 168, 279, 357 142–45; sugar trade, demise of, 168–69
Grand Anse, Haiti, 163 Hamilton, Alexander, 49, 107–9, 110, 115
Great Depression (1929–1939), 62 Hamnett, Brian, 92
Great Rebellion in the Southern Andes Harpers Ferry Raid (1859), 125
(1780–1784), 353, 354 Hartford Convention (1814), 116
Great Sioux War (1876), 120 Havana, Cuba: British seizure of, 42, 208;
Grito de Dolores, 245–46 economic expansion, 179–80, 182, 294;
Grotius, 82 shipbuilding, 37
Guanajuato, 36, 37 head taxes, 258, 323, 333, 361. See also tribute
guano exports, 58, 335, 378 payments
Guaraní peoples, 59, 367, 377 Helg, Aline, 363
Guatemala (country), 286; borders, 294, 295, Herrarte, José Mariano, 303
296; cochineal trade, 292, 294, 297; coffee Herrera, José Joaquín de, 267
trade, 297, 306; conservative regime, 301–5; Hidalgo, Miguel, 47–48, 88, 245–46
392 — Index
Hispaniola, 139, 152. See also Haiti; Saint Johnson, Samuel, 111
Domingue Jones, Kristine, 364
historic nationalism (nacionalismo histórico), José I, 207
81, 84–88 Jovellanos, 84–85
Honduras, 16, 286, 293 Juárez, Benito, 270–71
House of Braganza, 204 Juarros, Domingo, 278–79, 281, 282, 285
Houston, Samuel, 265 Juguetillo, El (journal), 247
Huachaca, Antonio Abad, 363 Junta Americana, 246
Humboldt, Alexander von, 234 Junta Central, 76, 87
Junta de Reformas de Ultramar, 191
imperialism, 8 Junta Nacional Americana, 248
Inca/Inka peoples, 30, 33–35, 316–17 juntas de fazenda, 208
India, 5, 11, 41, 42, 44
indigenous populations: appropriation of Katari, Tomás, 326
labor, 207–10; appropriation of land from, Katari, Tupaj. See Apasa, Julián
6, 17, 362; arable land of, 364; citizenship, Knight, Franklin, 179
79, 89, 362; colonized vs. uncolonized, kurakas, 33, 35, 318, 327–28, 329, 353–54, 362
351; cultural assimilation, 307; diseases
from Europe, 26, 39, 234; displacement of, ladinos, 16, 281, 284, 289, 291, 298, 300, 307
1–2, 119–20; on frontier, independence of, Langfur, Hal, 210, 223
358–59; grassroots democracy, 354; hacienda Langley, Lester, 3–4
regimes, 362–63; head taxes, 258, 323, 333, La Parra, Emilio, 83
361; independence, 17–18, 268, 350–69, 366; Larrazábal, Antonio, 300–301
inversions, 55–63; local politics, 239–40, Latin America: commodity production in, 168;
336; marginalization of, 223, 361, 380; post- impoverishment, 183–84; independence,
independence, 359–66; second conquest 48, 52, 177, 381–82; indigenous indepen
of, 351, 353–56; self-rule, 8, 237, 280–81; dence, 350–69; military-authoritarian rule
stereotyped conceptions of, 354; third in, 51; monarchies in, 162. See also Americas;
conquest of, 351; tribute payments, 89, 237, specific countries
246, 254, 284, 287, 318, 323–26, 329, 330–31, Laurens, Henry, 112
333–34, 359, 361–62, 369; weak republics Leclerc, Charles Victor-Emmanuel, 155, 156
and, 364–66. See also specific countries; Leo XII, 258
specific peoples liberalism, Hispanic, 7, 79, 81. See also Cádiz
indigo trade, 16, 40, 60, 284–85, 291, 292, 294, liberalism
297 Lin, Man-Houng, 48
industrial capitalism: consolidation of, 382, Lincoln, Abraham, 109, 125, 126–28
383; rise of, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 12, 376; U.S. transi- Livingston Codes, 297
tion to, 122–23, 129 Los Altos, Guatemala, 288, 289, 299, 300, 303,
Infiesta, Ramón, 185, 186 304–5, 306
Inka. See Inca/Inka peoples Louisiana, 39, 118–19
Inquisition, abolition of, 80 Louisiana Purchase (1803), 8, 116, 117–18
intendentes, 353 Louis XVI, 46, 142
Iturbide, Agustín de, 51, 60, 252–55, 288 Lynch, John, 3
Iturrigaray, José de, 243, 245
Machado, Gerardo, 185
Jackson, Andrew, 116, 119 maize production, 30
Jamaica, 39 Manchester, Alan, 212
Jefferson, Thomas, 49–50, 115–16, 117, 155–56 Manifest Destiny, 120
Jesuit missions, 38, 208, 367 Manifesto de los Persas, 93
João, King, 8, 14, 51, 211, 213, 219 Mantúfar, Lorenzo, 295
Johnson, Lyman, 59 Mapuche peoples, 364
Index — 393
Maravall, Antonio de, 83 Montiel, José Cleto, 287
Mariana, Juan de, 81–82 Morán, José, 255
Marichal, Carlos, 47 Morazán, Francisco, 300
Markoff, John, 365 Morelos, José María, 246, 248–50, 257–58
Martínez, Juan Antonio, 305 Moya, José, 181
Martínez Marina, Francisco, 84–85 mulattoes, 159–60, 163–64, 167, 249, 281, 287
Marure, Alejandro, 295, 303 Muñoz del Monte, Francisco, 189
Marx, Karl, 79–80
Masonic lodges, 188, 199n44, 260 nacionalismo histórico. See historic nationalism
Maurepas, 156 (nacionalismo histórico)
Maximilian, 270 Napoleon Bonaparte, 153, 155–56
Maxwell, Kenneth, 207 Napoleonic wars, 7, 8–9, 12, 16, 17, 47, 73, 74,
Maya peoples, 15–16, 29, 280–81, 298, 307, 367 87, 211, 242–43
Méndez, Cecilia, 363 National Constituent Assembly (ANC), 289–90
Mesoamerica, 14, 30, 235, 237, 239 nationalist historicism. See historic nationalism
Methuen Treaty (1703), 41, 205 (nacionalismo histórico)
Mexía, Teodoro, 298 native peoples. See indigenous populations;
Mexican-American War (1846–1848), 266–69, specific populations
377 Natural Law, 81, 82–83
Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), 4, 9, 382 neoliberalism, 7
Mexica peoples. See Aztec peoples neoscholasticism, 81–82
Mexico, 2; abolition of slavery, 120, 264; Brit- Neo-Thomism, 82
ish investment, 258–59; Catholicism of, 257; Netherlands. See Dutch Empire
cholera epidemic, 265–66; Church, role of, New Granada, 92, 356
262–63; commodity exports, 379–80; Con- New Monthly Magazine, 278, 291–92
stitution, 233, 257; constitutional change, New Spain, 1, 367; Cádiz Constitution,
266; on Cuban independence, 176, 177–78; implementation, 247, 248, 249, 252; Cádiz
economic change in, 60–62, 256–61; as liberalism in, 247–56; Declaration of In
Federal Republic, 257; independence, dependence, 250; map, 235; monarchy in,
90–91, 233, 242–46, 253–54; indigenous 252–56; politics in, 239–42; rebellion, 88,
majorities in, 3; indigenous rights, 383; land 91, 233, 242–46, 253–54; silver economy,
appropriation, 6; loss of territory, 234; map, 5–6, 14, 15, 33–38, 233, 234–38, 248, 255–56;
270; sovereignty, 257, 258; Texas secession, textile trade, 238, 241; as Viceroyalty, 17, 58,
10, 12, 15, 61, 120, 261–66, 267, 377; textile 59–60, 88, 89–90, 353. See also Mexico
trade, 267; trade among diverse peoples, 29. New World. See Americas
See also New Spain Nicaragua, 16, 280, 285
Mexico City, Mexico, 1; role in silver trade, nitrate exports, 17, 58, 319, 379
36, 237 North, Douglass, 27
Mier y Terán, Manuel de, 261, 262 Northwest Ordinance (1787), 117
Miki, Yuko, 223
Minas Gerais, 205, 209 O’Donojú, Juan, 253
mining: in Brazilian economy, 205; collapse of, Ogé, Vincent, 144
15. See also copper mining; gold trade; silver opium trade, 48–49
trade; tin mining Oriente, Guatemala, 284, 288, 298, 300, 305
mission system, 238, 264, 298; civil society and, O’Rourke, Kevin, 5, 27, 30, 32
117, 119; collapse of, 358–59; Franciscan, 354, Ortiz, Fernando, 177, 193
358; funding of, 237; Jesuit, 38, 367 Ortiz, Josefa, 245
Missouri Compromise, 50 Osorno, Francisco, 249
mitá, 33–35, 318, 321, 325, 329, 332, 358
modernity, 181 Panama Congress (1826), 168
Montejo family, 280 Paraguay, 59
394 — Index
Pardo, Manuel, 329 Quebec Act (1774), 112–13
Pardo y Aliaga, Felipe, 336–37 Quechua movement. See Andean rebellions
Paredes, Mariano, 305 Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 284, 285, 287,
Parthasarathi, Prasannan, 27, 41, 44 289–90, 291, 293, 299, 304–5, 306
patria, Andean: use of term, 320, 327; visions quilombolas, 210, 222–23
of, 328–32 Quito insurrection (1765), 73
Pattridge, Blake, 303
Peace of Amiens (1802), 46–47 racial hierarchy theories, 380–81, 383
Pedro I, 14, 51, 203, 213–16, 215, 219–20, 222 Ramírez, Alejandro, 188–89
Pedro II, 203, 222 Ranquel Indians, 359
Peña, Manuel de la, 269 Rayón, Ignacio, 246
Peninsular War (1808–1814), 7, 211 Red Stick Rebellion (1813–1814), 116
Pensador mexicano, El (journal), 247 Reeves, René, 300
Perkins, John, 192–93 Reform Wars (1858–1860), 2, 18–19, 270
Pernambucan Revolt (1817), 211 República dos Palmares, 210
Peru, 3, 10, 17, 58, 319; agrarian reforms, republicanism, 8, 95
382; confederation with Bolivia, 332–38; Revolutionary War (1775–1783). See American
economics and home rule, 320–28; exports, Revolutionary War (1775–1783)
378; map, 337; silver trade, 320–21 rice trade, 40
Pétion, Alexandre, 156–57, 160, 162–63, 164, Rigaud, André, 151, 159
165, 168 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: as capital, 208, 222, 243;
Phillip II, 40 Portuguese court in, 8–9, 201–2, 220; Portu-
Pickering, Timothy, 151 guese monarchy in, 47, 51, 212, 243
Piquet peasant rebellion (1844–1847), 167 Río de la Plata, Brazil, 58, 90, 92, 207, 217,
Plan de Iguala (1821), 8, 253 318–19
Plan de Jalapa (1829), 261 Rivera Maestre, Miguel, 295
Platt, Tristan, 330, 364 Rivera Paz, Mariano, 300
Poinsett, Joel, 260 Rodríguez, Mario, 288
Polk, James, 120, 267–68 Rosas, Juan Manuel, 364
Polverel, Étienne, 145, 146–47 Rothschild, Emma, 181
Pombal, Marquês de, 207–10, 223 Roume, Philippe, 152
Pomeranz, Kenneth, 5, 27, 28, 109
Pontiac’s War (1763–1766), 110 Saco, José Antonio, 189–90
popular liberalism, use of term, 94–95 Sagra, Ramón de la, 189
popular sovereignty: citizenship and, 167, 288; Saint Domingue, 1; map, 140; name change to
end of in Guatemala, 305; fear of, 90; in Haiti, 157; plantation citizenship, 147–48;
Mexican constitution, 257; movements, 9; plantation economy, 5, 49, 143, 157, 163,
origins of, 4, 7, 11, 13, 85, 91; rise of, 19, 51; 168–69; plantation structure, 149–50, 153–55,
slavery and, 54–55, 125; universal rights and, 159, 169; slave trade, 5, 13, 138, 139–42; sugar
254; in U.S., 12 trade, 5, 13, 39, 139–40, 168–69; trade rela-
porcelain trade, 25 tions, 148–49, 155
Portuguese America, 9; constitution, 213–14; sales taxes, 282, 284, 318, 322, 323, 325–26, 329
global economy and, 41, 204–10; map, Salvucci, Linda, 183
34; Portuguese monarchy in, 47, 51, 212, Salvucci, Richard, 183
243; slave trade, 39, 46, 207, 208–9, 212; Sánchez-Mejía, María Luisa, 85
sovereignty, 210, 212–14, 216, 223–24; state- San Martín, José de, 17, 51, 331, 358, 362
nation, 224n1. See also Brazil Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 177–79, 255,
Potosí, 16–17, 33–35, 316–18, 320–21 260, 261, 262–63, 265, 268–69
Pufendorf, 82 Santa Cruz, Andrés de, 316, 319, 329–30,
Pumacahua, Mateo García, 329, 330 331–32, 335, 336, 363
Puno, Intendancy of, 318 Santo Domingo, 152
Index — 395
scholasticism, 81–82 213, 247, 248, 249, 252; fall of empire, 367;
School of Salamanca, 81–82 indigenous independence, 350–69; map,
Schwartz, Stuart, 206–7 360. See also Americas; Latin America;
Seminario Guatemalteco (newspaper), 297 specific countries
Seminole War (1835–1842), 119–20 Spanish Enlightenment, 81, 83–84
Serna, José de la, 319, 331 spice trade, 25, 29
Seven Years’ War (1757–1763), 42, 109–10, Stevens, Edward, 150, 151
113–14, 142, 236 Suárez, Francisco, 81–82
Seward, William, 121–22 subdelegados, 353
Sheller, Mimi, 167 sugar trade, 2, 3; Dutch involvement, 39, 204;
silk trade, 25, 26, 29 silver and, 40–41; slavery in, 6, 9, 11, 26, 27,
silver trade, 2, 3, 26, 27–28; collapse of, 15, 18, 38–41, 124, 139–42, 141, 176–77
48, 62, 234, 236, 248, 255–56; contraband, Sullivan-González, Douglass, 300–301, 304
363–64; economic impact of, 5–6, 11, 14, 16, Supreme Being, concept of, 157, 172n35
33–38, 42, 233, 234–38, 317; politics in, 240;
rise of, 61, 318; slavery in, 40–41 Taino, 157
Skinner, Quentin, 82 Taracena, Arturo, 289, 299
slave trade, 2, 3, 5, 10, 182–83, 208–10, 383; abo- taxes. See head taxes; sales taxes; tribute
lition of, 120–21, 124, 145, 152–53, 157, 269, payments
376, 377–78, 380, 383–84; in coffee produc- Tecumseh, 116
tion, 6, 9; in cotton production, 54–55, 109, Ten Years’ War (1868–1878), 184–85, 377
123–24; in gold production, 204–5; popular Teotihuacan, Mexico, 29
sovereignty and, 12, 54–55, 125; reproduc- Ternavasio, Marcela, 90
tion and, 140; second slave societies, 182; in Texas: secession from Mexico, 10, 12, 15, 61, 120,
silver production, 40–41; in sugar produc- 261–66, 267; as U.S. state, 269, 377
tion, 6, 9, 11, 26, 27, 38–41, 124, 139–42, 141, textile trade, 17, 25, 31, 44–45, 48, 205, 238, 241,
176–77. See also specific countries 267, 378. See also cotton trade
Slave Trade Clause, 115 Thomas, Robert Paul, 27
Slidell, John, 267–68 Thomism. See neo-Thomism
Sociedad Abolicionista Española, 191 Thomson, Sinclair, 327
Sociedad Económica de Amantes del País, Thupa Amaro, Marcos, 324
282, 284 tin mining, 378–79
Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, Tiradentes conspiracy (1789), 209
179–80 Tiwanaku, 317
Soles y Rayos de Bolívar, independence plot tobacco trade, 40, 204, 237
(1823), 178 Tocquevile, Alexis de, 119
Sons of Liberty, 112 Toltec p eoples, 29
Sonthonax, Léger Félicité, 145, 146–47 Tomich, Dale, 182
Sousa Coutinho, Rodrigo de, 208, 210, 211 Tories, 8
South Asia: demise of, 10; as economic power, Totonicapán, Guatemala, 287–88, 289, 291
25, 381; opium trade, 48; Portuguese trade Toussaint Lourverture, François-Dominique,
with, 26; textile trade, 25, 31, 44–45; trade 142, 145, 146, 147–56, 159
routes, 29, 31 trade. See slave trade; specific products
Southeast Asian spice trade, 25, 29 Treaties of Commerce and Navigation (1810),
sovereignty, popular. See popular sovereignty 212
Spain, 4, 41, 236; absolutism in, 73, 79, 81, 91, Treaty of Basel (1795), 152
94, 250, 251–52; occupation of, 7, 12, 15, Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo (1848), 121
47, 73, 74; politics of rule, 185–92. See also Treaty of Madrid (1750), 207, 223–24
Cádiz liberalism Treaty of Mortefontaine (1800), 155
Spanish America: Cádiz Constitution, Treaty of Paris (1783), 42
implementation, 89–93, 185, 187–91, 192, Treaty of Ryswick (1697), 139
396 — Index
Treaty of San Ildefonso (1777), 117, 155, 207 Valle, José Cecilio del, 294, 295
Treaty of Subsidy (1803), 242 Varela, Féliz, 189
Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), 207 Varela Suanzes, Joaquín, 82
Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 41 Vattel, 82
tribute payments, 89, 237, 246, 254, 284, Vega, Garcilaso de la, 325
287, 318, 323–26, 329, 330–31, 333–34, 359, Venegas, Francisco Xavier, 245
361–62, 369. See also head taxes Venezuela, 58, 88, 92, 279, 358
Trienio Liberal (1820–1823), 89, 90–91 Victoria, Guadalupe, 260
Tristan, Pío, 329–30 Vitoria, Francisco de, 81–82
Túpac Amaru (Inca ruler), 324 Vive, Luis Dionisio, 189
Túpac Amaru, Andrés, 327 Voroganos, 364
Túpac Amaru, Diego Christóbal, 326
Túpac Amaru, José Gabriel, 316, 324–25 Walker, Charles, 325
Túpac Amaru rebellion (1780), 43, 73, 317, Walker, Samuel R., 192
325, 353 war capitalism, 5, 6, 55. See also slave trade;
sugar trade
Ubalde, Juan Manuel, 327–28 War for North America (1846–1848).
Union of the Iberian Crowns (1580–1640), 204 See Mexican-American War (1846–1848)
United States of America: California as state, War of 1812, 8, 12, 116
269, 377; colonial population, 110; diver- War of Spanish Succession (1700–1714),
gence in, 109; electoral rights, 12; as federal 41
union, 109–16; Louisiana Purchase, 8, 116, War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870),
117–18; maps, 113, 126; Northeast economic 377
power, 18; religious diversity, 111; as rising Washington, George, 114
empire, 116–21; slavery in southern states, 2, Weber, David, 354
6, 46, 54–55, 109, 121–29, 182–83, 368; ter- Weber, Max, 27
ritories, 1–2; Texas as state, 269, 377; union Woodward, Ralph Lee, 299, 300, 304
and empire, use of terms, 109, 116–17 world economy: Americas in, 27–33; domina-
universal rights and popular sovereignty, 254 tion by Britain, 43–45, 62, 212, 258; first
Urrea, José, 266 and second empires and, 381; as polycentric,
Uruguay, 59, 217, 219 30–31; silver trade in, 33–38
U.S. Constitution: compromises, 114–15; World War I (1914–1918), 62
Fugitive Slave Clause, 115; Hamilton on,
107–8; Slave Trade Clause, 115; Thirteenth Xavier-Guerra, François, 7
Amendment, 127
U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), 120, 121 Zapata, Emiliano, 382
uti possedetis principle, 279 Zavala, Lorenzo de, 260, 261, 265
Index — 397

New Countries. Capitalism, Revolutions, and Nations in The Americas, 1750-1870

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Duke University Press Durham and London 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

part i. hemispheric challenges

1. The Amer­i­cas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism—25

2. The Cádiz Liberal Revolution

part ii. atlantic transformations

3. Union, Capitalism, and Slavery in

4. From Slave Colony to Black Nation:

5. Cuban Counterpoint: Colonialism

part iii. spanish american inversions

7. Becoming Mexico: The Conflictive

8. The Republic of Guatemala:

9. From One Patria, Two Nations in

10. Indigenous In­de­pen­dence in

Epilogue. Consolidating Divergence:

revolutions, nations, and

In Search of an Integrated History

the Ame­r icas in the Rise of

In 1500, the Amer­i­cas ­were home to power­ful states concentrated in western

The Amer­i­cas in the World Economy: The Challenge

Ame­ricas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 29

Ame­ricas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 31

American Silver and the First World Economy

Ame­ricas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 33

St. Louis New York

PORTUGUESE BRAZIL Recife

Lima Cuzco Salvador

0 500 1000 1500 mi

Map 1.1. The Amer­i­cas, ca. 1780

Kingdom of Guatemala, growers around San Salvador raised indigo, another

The Atlantic Economy: Sugar and Slavery

Silver and Sugar and Slavery: Global Integration

New Challenges, 1750–1790

The First ­Great Transformation

Crucible of Conflict, 1790–1825

Divergence in Atlantic Ame­rica

Guatemala CARIBBEAN SEA

PERU BRAZIL Recife

Lima Cuzco Salvador

0 500 1000 1500 mi

Map 1.2. The Amer­i­cas, ca. 1850

Inversions in Spanish and Indigenous Ame­rica

Ame­ricas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 61

Ame­ricas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 63

Ame­ricas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 65

Ame­ricas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 67

Ame­ricas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 69

The Cádiz Liberal Revolution

Liberal Revolution and Spanish America — 73

CAPTAINCY GENERAL Maracaibo Coro

PORTUGUESE BRAZIL Recife

Lima Cuzco Salvador

0 500 1000 1500 mi

A few lines ahead:

True pro­gress means protecting liberty in each individual’s exercise of

­ ese liberal ele­ments in the “Discourse” ­were partially grounded in some

Cádiz Liberalism and Spanish Ame­rica

Liberalism and the Mundo Hispánico in the Age of Revolution

Liberal Revolution and Spanish America — 99

Liberal Revolution and Spanish America — 101

Liberal Revolution and Spanish America — 103

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. The Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism—25

10. Indigenous Independence in

the Amer icas in the Rise of

In 1500, the Americas were home to powerful states concentrated in western

The Americas in the World Economy: The Challenge

Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 29

Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 31

Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 33

Map 1.1. The Americas, ca. 1780

The First Great Transformation

Divergence in Atlantic America

Map 1.2. The Americas, ca. 1850

Inversions in Spanish and Indigenous America

Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 61

Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 63

Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 65

Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 67

Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism — 69

True progress means protecting liberty in each individual’s exercise of

ese liberal elements in the “Discourse” were partially grounded in some

Cádiz Liberalism and Spanish America

U nion, Capitalism, and Slavery in the

Map 3.1. The United States in North America, ca. 1790

Union, Capitalism, and Slavery in the

Map 3.2. The United States in North America, ca. 1860

Union, Capitalism, and Slavery in the

Union, Capitalism, and Slavery in the

Union, Capitalism, and Slavery in the

Union, Capitalism, and Slavery in the

Union, Capitalism, and Slavery in the

Saint Domingue: The Quintessential Slave Colony

the twenty-four-hour multistage process of hauling, milling, boiling the cane

The Road to Independence

In important ways Brazil became a new country in the early nineteenth

Atlantic Transformations and Brazil’s Independence — 203

Map 6.1. Brazil in the eighteenth c entury

Atlantic Transformations and Brazil’s Independence — 209

Atlantic Transformations and Brazil’s Independence — 213

Map 6.2. Brazil in the nineteenth century

Atlantic Transformations and Brazil’s Independence — 223

Atlantic Transformations and Brazil’s Independence — 225

Atlantic Transformations and Brazil’s Independence — 227

Atlantic Transformations and Brazil’s Independence — 229

Map 7.1. New Spain in North America, ca. 1790

There were coercions and exploitations in the reconstruction of Mesoamer-

After the War That Decided Everything