Armies, Politics and Revolution: Chile, 1808–1826 by Juan Luis Ossa Santa Cruz (review)

Spanish America’s bicentennial decade has produced a profusion of new historical studies of the region’s wars of independence and the political changes that accompanied them. Many of these studies focus on the extent to which the lives of oppressed populations were affected by the changes brought about by the end of colonial rule and the messy transition to republican government. In Chile, for example, Julio Pinto and Verónica Valdivia’s 2009 book ¿Chilenos todos? La construcción social de la nación (1810–1840), became and remains a classic of the genre, but it is far from the only major study of Chilean independence to be published in recent years.

Juan Luis Ossa Santa Cruz’s new book fits squarely within this wave of new scholarship on the historical meanings of independence. But rather than investigate the experiences of a subaltern group, Ossa’s work takes a new look at the participation of military men in the political struggles of independence. In so doing, he offers a detailed, well-informed, and compelling argument about the “political role of the Chilean military” in the era of independence (1).

The central argument of the book is that the Chilean struggle for independence was a political revolution. Early in the book, Ossa carefully explains that independence and revolution were not synonymous—that it was possible for Spanish American creoles to seek independence without implementing a political revolution. But that, he argues, was not the case in Chile, where the overthrow of the colonial governor and the establishment of the Santiago Junta in 1810 set in motion a revolutionary process that was never undone, even when the royalists regained control of the territory’s central government from 1814 to 1817. According to Ossa, the removal of the colonial governor “caused a peaceful yet decisive break with the authorities that governed Spain after Napoleon’s invasion” (11). This event was followed by the formation of the first Santiago Junta, the establishment of which was “an irreversible blow to the colonial regime” (11).

I learned a great deal from the book about the way Chile’s fluid military situation affected the day-to-day political thinking of patriot generals such as José Miguel Carrera, Bernardo O’Higgins, José de San Martín, and Francisco Antonio Pinto. Ossa does well to assist the reader in navigating the extremely complex path of the political revolution, which he sees as being continuously reshaped by events on the battlefield and consciously led by the officers of the revolutionary armed forces. In addition, Ossa reveals the views of high-ranking royalist officials, foreign diplomatic observers, and occasionally (when the sources so yield) those of ordinary soldiers and citizens. He has pulled together a large collection of letters, proclamations, and instructions from archives in five countries. This wide-ranging source base allows him to keep the reader aware of the many ways that the war in Chile was affected by events transpiring in Europe and the Americas.

In terms of secondary sources, Ossa turns to the work of Anthony McFarlane to support his decision “to emphasize the very considerable changes which affected monarchical societies” as a result of the wars of independence (11). On the other hand, Ossa takes issue with the argument put forward in Jeremy Adelman’s Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic that the juntas that sprang up throughout Spanish America in 1810 were more counter-revolutionary than revolutionary. I was persuaded by Ossa’s argument, but I also felt that the book’s introduction and conclusion chapters needed to develop these and other historiographical arguments further.

Overall, the outlines of the story Ossa tells will be familiar to those who have read the work of John Lynch and Simon Collier on independence. What Ossa does that is new is provide us with a closely contextualized reading of the shifting political alignments among army officers that gave birth to the highly...