Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (review)

Adelman's most recent book studies the transition from empire to nationhood in both Spanish and Portuguese America. Rather than portraying this passage as foretold—either because empires were doomed to fail, or because nationalism was bound to succeed—Adelman wishes to reconstruct the uncertainties of the process that led to the demise of one political structure and its replacement by another. He centers his narrative on a group of people forced into action after crisis (mainly the crisis of legitimacy in Madrid and Lisbon), and their struggles to redefine a new order. Although their actions were "the consequences, not the cause, of the end of imperial sovereignty" (395), "independence," nonetheless, was a highly complex transformative process. Rather than a tunnel (that is, a clear project) leading away from subjection, it was similar to a labyrinth at times leading nowhere.

Most of the people that concern Adelman are merchants. He describes their growing power in the eighteenth century, and the effects that changes in the system of labor, slavery, international conflict, and war had on most of them. He analyzes why and how some of them were loyal and why and how these same people or others were not. Thus, Adelman is able to demonstrate the ways in which "private interests and public welfare were reassembled to re-imagine the relationship between capitalism and empire" and capitalism and state (173). Crucial to all of these processes was the need to redefine (and justify) the sovereignty of the new polities.

The study of Latin America's movement toward independence has generated innumerable books. In recent decades, the older historiography, stressing the heroic actions of a few select men, or the transformative power of ideas (mainly imported ideas), gave way to a social and political reading of the events that lead to the "implosion" of the Spanish and the Portuguese American empires. Not unlike what Adelman proposes in his book, this newer historiography—for example, the work of Guerra and Rodriguez O—stresses the external pressures that precipitated the conflict and the climactic nature of the events.¹

Adelman's book, however, has a few characteristics that make it both exceptional and important. First, Adelman stresses the role of merchants, which until now has been more stereotyped than studied. Second, Adelman covers both Spanish and Portuguese America, arguing that in many ways more affinities are evident across them than within them. Third, arguing against the separation between colonial and metropolitan history, he envisions the process of independence as a struggle between the various peoples of the empire for the definition of their relationship with one another. Fourth, Adelman's book is also a reflection of the relationship between internal and external dynamics of large-scale social change. Arguing that in his case study, "social revolutions transpired when international pressures of competing sovereignties broke down state systems" (5), he demonstrates that a proper understanding of the transition to independence requires reconstruction (almost) of a "world history" in which local subjects were also shaped by world events (ix). Last but not least, Adelman's book also includes an implicit call to bring the state back into the discussion. Although the merchants who take center stage in this book had primarily commercial interests on their minds, they were also clearly struggling to reconstruct the state by imagining what it could look like, how it could be justified, who would belong to it, and who would be excluded.