Las revoluciones en el mundo atlántico (review)

With a nod to the Haitian and United States revolutions and to comparative studies of Iberian-American independence, most of the sixteen texts in this volume examine Spanish American political change from 1808 to the mid-nineteenth century, a period that included variegated processes of independence and independence’s consequences, including modifications of political and legal culture. This coherent collaboration confirms not only the vitality of the political history of independence as bicentennial commemorations and conferences proliferate, but also the benefits of new methods that work beyond the constricting confines of national frameworks. In taking “revolutions” to mean the emergence throughout the Americas of “republican life,” the new history’s practitioners engage in a comparative process that respects national histories and traditions but presents transitions from ancien régime governance to political modernity as having more than one home and trajectory.

The editors’ brief but useful Introduction identifies many concepts connecting this volume’s studies of the Age of Revolutions, from analyses of popular sovereignty, representative government, the republic, the citizen, elections, and constitutions, to engagement with public space, the role of the press, and new sociabilities. Additional themes woven through the collected works include the impact of the Church, race, the state or state institutions, and legal codes and practices on the formation or disruption of political communities. Reaching back to Roman law and forward to Haiti’s current racial tensions, and drawing on foundational scholarship of François-Xavier Guerra, Jaime Rodriguez, John Lynch, and Antonio Annino (among others), this volume takes the long-standing revolutionary turn in scholarship of Latin American independence and fixes it within the firmament of Atlantic history.

Jack Greene sets the stage, arguing that the U.S. process of independence took the first step in dismantling the early modern European imperial system of governance, a dismantling which is the volume’s unifying “revolution.” In Greene’s analysis, British America, like Spanish America, experienced a colonial period in which consensus, not force, guaranteed loyalty, and local and provincial institutions and politics served as midwives of independence. Groups familiar to historians of Spanish American independence—white landowning elites, for example, angered by increasing economic demands and diminishing consultation—are presented to challenge exceptionalist treatment of the Anglo-American revolution which Greene characterizes as “provincializing” (p. 34) but common among U.S. historians. João Paulo Pimenta also argues against treating Brasil’s revolution as an exception because of its long-lasting monarchy, and revisits parallels from Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal in 1807 to comparable revision of definitions of sovereignty and colonial relations with a metropolis. Yet, the volume also recognizes limits to broad comparisons; Graciela Soriano offers a thought piece on “coincidences and dissidences” in revolutions, and Anthony MacFarlane’s chapter on the wars of independence emphasizes that some differences, such as Spain’s arming and training of not only local but mixed-race militias as part of a late imperial defense strategy, contributed to distinct dynamics in areas such as the connection between military service and citizenship.

Sophisticated analyses of transitions from old to new political systems test assumptions about pre-existing nations and national identities. Bernard Gainot argues that the usual linear analysis of the Haitian Revolution as a process leading directly from abolition to independence should be recast to consider actors including “free people of color” who sought not political sovereignty but a “reorganization” (p. 40) of their ties with the metropolis, an argument that resonates with recent scholarship of autonomist movements in Spanish America. In this case, Gainot underlines that racial prejudice (or, in his words, “the racial question” [p. 53]) was an important element all former ancien régime societies addressed, and suggests that independence in the case of Haiti, and perhaps other regions, was more “racial” than “national.” José Carlos Chiaramonte argues against a preformed nation or set of agreed upon national ideals from which independence leaders in Rio de la Plata could draw, but...