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3 include and rule The Limits of Liberal Colonial Policy, 1810–1837 Josep M. fradera the central aim of these pages is to understand the meaning and the limits of the efforts, made by spanish liberals in the years 1810–1814 and 1820– 1823, to give new life to an exhausted empire. Although in the end it was incapable of this, spanish liberalism attempted to halt the unstoppable progress of the third great decolonization process in the Atlantic space after the separation of the thirteen British colonies and french saint Domingue. in less than two decades, between 1808 and 1824, two of the largest and oldest European empires entered a profound crisis that they came through weakened, reduced, and with a position clearly subordinate to the reconstructed British and french Empires.1 nonetheless, the Portuguese Empire retained important positions in Asia and a presence in the form of enclaves on the indian subcontinent, southeast Asia, and china; meanwhile, the spanish took refuge in three insular possessions: cuba and Puerto rico in the caribbean and the Philippine archipelago in the south china sea, as well as a tenuous position on the west coast of Africa. for this reason, because the imperial crisis did not lead to the elimination of the iberian presence from the colonial world, what happened between the ancien régime empire and the colonialism characteristic of the nineteenth century needs to be read in two ways: as the time when the old empire was liquidated and as the moment of the beginning of new realities that, in the spanish case, would last until 1898 and, in Portugal ’s case, until 1974. the spanish Empire’s crisis cannot be understood exclusively as the breakdown of the colonial system, of the link between colony and metropolis. the limits of liberal colonial Policy / 65 disintegration of the empire constitutes part of a greater crisis, that of the entire monarchy on both sides of the Atlantic. for this reason, a consideration exclusively from the American world’s perspective will always be a partial one. the french invasion inevitably caused the downfall of the monarchical state, a crisis whose foundations had already been revealed in previous events in the metropolitan space itself. the Aranjuez uprising with the fall of the royal favorite , Minister Manuel godoy, and ferdinand vii’s coup d’état against his father in March 1808 were indications of the ancien régime’s political breakdown within the framework of significant social violence.2 As had happened in france in 1789, the system’s failure began in the metropolis itself and its consequences extended throughout the vast imperial space later on. while the spanish army collapsed and the Junta central, the state’s highest representation , sought refuge in the south of the country, the municipal authorities and representatives in the Americas rose up to defend ferdinand vii’s rights and decisively reject napoleonic efforts to construct a new imperial legitimacy embodied in the constitution of Bayonne.3 in this context, faced with the spanish internal crisis and the growing political autonomy of the Americans, the Junta central, after much vacillation, convoked the cortes and published the first rules for the election of representatives to the constituent assembly. only with the dissolution of the Junta central—which had emphatically promised the Americans treatment in accordance with the principles of political equality—and the constitution of the regency at the end of January 1810 did the Americans begin to be suspicious of the spanish leaders’ aims. they organized juntas (between April and July 1810) and some of them gently moved down the path of political secession. with the opening of the cortes, in september 1810, the dissensions between spaniards and Americans were resolved through both a merciless struggle throughout the vast imperial space and the ideological debate in the legislative assembly that was to prepare the new constitution .4 with its approval, in March 1812, the hereditary monarchy of the ancien régime was transformed into a liberal nation, without renouncing its sovereignty over the American and Philippine dominions. the first liberal spanish constitution was, in fact, a genuinely imperial constitution built on the idea of equality among the territories and former subjects , now also elevated to the position of citizens of the new political entity reborn from the ashes of a crisis of transatlantic proportions. however, both in the process of discussing the constitution and later on, the Americans could see for themselves that the mandate of equality promised in 1808 and...

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