Independence and Revolution in Spanish America: Perspectives and Problems (review)

The pace of new research and publication on the Spanish American Independence era will continue to quicken as we approach the 2010 bicentennials that will mark the outbreak of these great struggles. The present bilingual volume originated from the 1996 Third Annual Nineteenth-Century History Workshop at the Universities of London and Warwick. Introduced by Anthony McFarlane, the eight chapters by different historians are divided into two sections: "Historiography and Interpretation," and "Conflicts, Citizenship, Culture and Nationhood." There are two overarching influences that recur in the book, first the scholarly impact of John Lynch, the senior dean of Spanish American Independence Studies in English, and second, Volume III of the Cambridge History of Latin America: From Independence to c. 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Lynch's chapter, "Spanish American Independence in Recent Historiography," sets the scene and poses significant questions concerning the nature and complexities of the Independence epoch and the state of ongoing historical research. Lynch, David Bushnell, and Timothy E. Anna who contribute chapters in this volume wrote major sections in the Cambridge History. While there is a strong "Lynchian" influence in terms of overview and interpretation upon some of the contributors, the presence of chapters by François-Xavier Guerra and other international scholars adds quite different perspectives and specialized regional studies.

Lynch and McFarlane consider whether the Independence Period was a watershed in itself or simply part of a much broader epoch roughly from 1750 to 1850 that better explains the origins and outcomes of the wars. Guerra's chapter, "De lo uno a múltiple: Dimensiones y lógicas de la Independencia," is a tour de force that captures the essence of the early years of the struggles, the multitude of different movements, and the interventions of the different actors. In many regions, the conflicts between Indians, blacks, mestizos, castas, criollos, and peninsulares became a veritable cacophony of social and political commotion. Contemporary observers failed to comprehend the causes of the violence--falling back on terms such as anarchy and banditry to describe the state of confusion and the intense verbal conflicts that accompanied the civil wars. In his synthesis of causative factors, Guerra notes the dangers of making generalizations from one region to another. David Busnell's chapter, "Independence Compared: the Americas North and South," examines broad regional identities and outlines common themes such as the expansion by the eighteenth century imperial powers to tighten controls and to increase taxation.

In Part two, each historian focuses upon a specific region and in some cases follow developments up to the 1830s. In a fine chapter based upon detailed archival research, Rebecca Earle examines how after 1816 the Spanish expeditionary forces of General Pablo Morillo alienated the support of New Granadans. She concludes that arbitrary behavior and excessive demands by haughty commanders eroded royalist popularity. Forced recruitment of replacements, extortion of funds in "contribuciones patrióticas," and a variety of other abuses eventually produced general revulsion by the populace and outright war exhaustion. Klaus Gallo examines political instability in Argentina, Véronique Hebrard studies the problems of citizenship and political participation in Venezuela, and Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt Letellier explores the evolution of Chilean political culture. Timothy Anna concludes the book with an essay on the "disorderly and messy" process in post-independence Mexico that many historians perceived as a period of disintegration and chronic ideological divisions. Although Anna's view of regional fragmentation dating from pre-Hispanic times requires a bit of a mental reach, his argument is that the noisy post-independence fray obscured strenuous efforts by political leaders to solve deeply entrenched disputes between the regions and the center. Rather than engaging in self-serving power struggles, their goals were to create a workable system of governance.

Although this book has the outward appearance and length of a problems...