Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825 by Marcela Echeverri (review)

Most of us who are interested in the Latin American Wars of Independence have probably asked, Why did some African-descended slaves and indigenous peoples not join the Creole revolutionaries? They were led, after all, by such charismatic leaders as Simón Bolívar, who championed freedom, independence, equality, rights, and many other benefits in overthrowing the tyrannical Spanish monarchy. Would it not have been in everyone’s benefit—Creoles, slaves, and Indians—to join hands in declaring independence, just as occurred in North America during the American Revolution? Not all English descendants, however, were enamored with overthrowing king and Parliament, and many of the Indians—Cherokees and others—threw in their lot with the English. The question of sides becomes even messier in the Latin American Wars of Independence simply because of the multitude of peoples, stretched from New Spain to Tierra del Fuego, who were players in this gigantic chess game of revolution and war.

Echeverri’s new book addresses the question of how diverse loyalties were established between the African slave communities mining gold on the Pacific coast of New Granada (sections of modern Colombia and Ecuador) and the indigenous peoples of the Highlands (centered around Popayan but extending north into Colombia and south into Ecuador) and the royalists. She then proceeds to show how these loyalties played out during the Wars of Independence, roughly 1809–1826.

Judging from the length of the footnotes alone, this is certainly one of the most thoroughly researched new books in Latin American history. Not only was Echeverri’s excavation of the immense literature—traditional and new—thorough; she also performed it with an adroitness and erudition that not even the prolix vapors of citizenship, agency, and other tropes that mark much of the modus operandi of Echeverri’s generation could blunt.

Basically, the indigenous, free black, and slave communities did not trust that Bolívar and his fellow Creoles would be able to deliver on their promises. The story of their evolution as a political, social, and economic community is complex but not unapproachable. Echeverri thanks dozens of modern studies that probed deeply into the complex relationship between these non-Creole peoples of Latin America and the Spanish monarchy. The age of revolution was not marked necessarily by a simple choice between tyranny or freedom. As Echeverri frames it, “This study of royalism is thus not . . . a genealogy of conservatism in Colombia, or, more broadly speaking, in Latin America as a whole. . . . I have avoided dichotomist classifications such as liberal/conservative or progressive/backward, and thus countered the tendency to view royalism as a conservative (or backward) choice for Indians and slaves. . . . [A] proper understanding of the context and process whereby indigenous and enslaved people defended Spanish rule can revise our traditional view. . . . Royalism allowed Indians and slaves to align their diverse and particular struggles for inclusion within the evolving imperial political landscape during the first decades of the nineteenth century” (233).

As for the Creoles, they “espoused independence but not necessarily social change . . . economic pressures and fear of racial conflict narrowed down the possibilities of the integration of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples into the newly founded nations” (224). Simply put, Indians and slaves did not necessarily align with the patriots; they sometimes leaned on their relationship with crown officials to further their self-interests. “[T]he Indians’ alliance with the royalist elites in southwestern New Granada was part of a long process of negotiation in which the Spanish elites, far from assuming Indian loyalty to the crown, transformed the terms of the relationship between the Indians and the monarchy to be able to guarantee Indian support tor their political and military cause” (226).

Abolition is one of the many other subjects and themes in this study about which Echeverri...