Spain and the Independence of Colombia, 1810-1825 (review)

Spain and the Independence of Colombia, 1810-1825. By REBECCA A. EARLE. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000. Maps. Table. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. ix, 254 pp. Cloth.

Rebecca Earle's central theme is how Spain lost its American territories. Timothy Anna (1983) and Michael P. Costeloe (1986) concentrated on metropolitan Spain's contribution to this process, through missed political opportunities, miscalculations, or inactivity at the center of decision-making, and a misconceived political economy at a time of changed patterns of trade. Their focus turned discussion away from why the "patriots" won and shifted attention from the traditional preoccupation with how new Latin American states came into being in terms of separate national histories. For Anna and Costeloe, the perspective was imperial and their specific vantage point was metropolitan Spain. The present book continues the imperial perspective but focuses on the particular case of New Granada, throwing light on the perceptions and conduct of its royalist military and civil officials. This is not a study of Spain's policymaking (or lack of it) but an acute examination of how a particular royalist regime collapsed in an important Spanish American territory. As such, Earle's study falls into the historiographical context of Anna's studies of how royalism fell in Mexico (1978) and Peru (1979). The two most striking cases of royalist retention of power in the Americas were New Spain and Peru, where the capital cities were not lost until 1821. By contrast, the main Spanish South American capitals were lost in 1810, though all except Buenos Aires Aires were temporarily retaken. Earle's real starting point is the disintegration of the former Viceroyalty of New Granada under the impact of rival revolutionary movements and generalized fragmentation from 1810 onwards. The most immediate historiographical influences are Anthony McFarlane's studies (1984-98) of late colonial conflict in New Granada and the transition from viceroyalty to Republic of Colombia.

The core of the book deals with the years 1815-20, the period of royalist reconquest in New Granada and Venezuela. Earle asks to what extent royalist divisions and abuses swung opinion back to a republican cause discredited by the failures of 1810-15. The clear message is that royalist reconquest did not bring peace. On the contrary, the case is successfully argued that endemic tensions between Europeans and Americans deepened in those years. Furthermore, Spain's inability to finance an effective and permanent reoccupation explained the irksome fiscal pressures on local authorities and individuals. The Crown was unable either to pay its officials or contain their abuses. In short, Spain no longer had the capacity to become an American imperial power once again, in spite of impressive actions in the short-term. History, as Simón Bolívar remarked in August 1820, had passed Spain by. The former metropolis was broken and divided against itself.

Earle correctly emphasizes the divisions within the royalist camp in the Americas. These were particularly severe at all levels between 1815 and 1820. The present reviewer would certainly endorse her comment that "the origins of Spanish American royalism need explanation as much as the origins of republicanism" (p. 15). The author makes telling points concerning these royalist divisions, which she refers to as the "destructive dynamics within New Granada's royalist camp"(pp. 4-5). They took the form of mutual distrust between audiencia and military officials, high-level leadership splinters, shortage of funds and forced loans, disease and adverse physical conditions, popular hostility to recruitment and road construction, and the dichotomies between absolutism and liberalism, conciliation and repression. Earle identifies the years 1816-17 as the turning point. Spanish authorities had as much difficulty defining what treason (infidencia) meant as defining appropriate methods of punishing it. A council of purification from June 1816 sought to determine who among officeholders could be reinstated. Guidelines in July 1817 attempted a partial restoration of civil jurisdiction, and a clear distinction was made in...