Spanish American Royalism in the Age of Revolution

Until recently, most historiography on the independence period in Spanish America has focused on the forces in favor of separation from Spain. Less attention has been devoted to the colonial populations who sided with the Bourbon monarchy. Two factors contributed to this omission. First, the victorious liberators needed to forge an intelligible historical mythology for the emerging nations born of those conflicts. Second, the royalists, or realistas, of Spanish America were the enemy and, more important, they lost. Early Latin American historians neglected royalist versions of events or framed royalist activities as incidental to independence, while Spanish counterparts did little to probe the various shades of what in effect had been a national disaster. Consequently, the king’s advocates in America suffered the added indignity of passing into virtual oblivion for the better part of two centuries. In essence, those who favored the royalist cause lost twice: they were first historically defeated then historiographically vanquished in the selective and forgetful void of subsequent accounts. Historians typically depicted the triumphant independence struggles as a battle between patriotic nationals against oppressive foreigners, when campaigns were in fact often civil wars between autochthonous forces.¹ Fortunately, scholars of Spanish America are now vigorously pursuing the nuances of realismo. The five recently published works reviewed here underscore the nature of fidelity to the crown during the Age of Revolution. In particular, they bring to light the volatility and regional variability of the independence process, the significance of loyalty, the participation of subalterns, and the present state of the historiography.

The collection of essays edited by Haroldo Calvo Stevenson and Adolfo Meisel Roca, Cartagena de Indias en la independencia, provides a useful starting point. The work is part of a series on Cartagena from its earliest days through the present, with a separate volume devoted to each century of the port’s development. The much briefer independence period has been allocated a tome of its own because of the era’s overriding significance for Colombia’s Caribbean coast. This edition examines the struggle for self-rule and is divided into five sections encompassing the international and national contexts, local antecedents, relations with other provinces and audiencias (judicial districts), the consequences of independence, and cultural aspects such as literature, architecture, iconography, and the press. In total, the essays impart an acute sense of the stages of an exceedingly chaotic conflict. Thus, the Caribbean coastline is seen as engulfed in deep turmoil, rebel or royal in varying degrees, times, and places.

The essay by Adolfo Meisel Roca is perhaps the best barometer of the volatility of the period. Using the economy as a compass, Meisel examines fiscal patterns in Cartagena from the 1808 Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, which triggered instability in Spanish America, to the surrender of the city by royalist forces in 1821. His graphs detailing customs collections, taxation mechanisms, governmental expenses, import duties, and the influence of specific merchants form part of a broader analysis that includes factors such as the issuance of paper currency, private loans to government, international trade, the role of privateers, property confiscations, Indian tribute, and the dwindling situado—a grant whereby fiscal resources originating in other...