The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires by Josep M. Fradera (review)

Focused on Britain, France, Spain, and the United States, The Imperial Nation is a book about how Atlantic empires were made, unmade, and remade during the Age of Revolutions. More specifically, Josép M. Fradera endeavors to explain how polities that experienced political revolutions that enshrined equality and the rights of man also managed to maintain, even expand, colonial dominance abroad. In a nutshell, Fradera suggests that this process was accomplished by the creation of "imperial nations," which were polities that constructed a liberal regime of rights in the metropole and exclusionary laws for the colonies.

To explain the emergence of imperial nations, Fradera first describes their predecessors, namely "monarchic empires." At the most basic level, monarchic empires did not have citizens with equal rights, but rather subjects with different privileges or obligations, depending on the territory, kingdom, or status to which he/she (mostly he) belonged. Hence, Fradera's notion of monarchic empire closely corresponds with what John H. Elliott has called "composite monarchies," polities that were born by way of dynastic politics and the aggregation of kingdoms with distinct constitutions and legal traditions. In this context, legal pluralism and territorial autonomy was the rule.

As Fradera recounts, when these aggregated monarchies colonized other parts of the world, they also exported this regime of legal pluralism. In the Spanish case, the workings of legal pluralism were most clearly evident in the municipal councils (cabildos) and the high courts (audiencias). In Britain and France, this pluralistic legal regime was evident in the colonial assemblies, which Britain allowed from a very early period but which France formally recognized only 1787. Nonetheless, the French colonial assemblies, like their British counterparts and the Spanish American cabildos and audiencias, were built on the notion that, as in the case of the historical kingdoms in Europe (e.g. Aragón and Scotland), the colonies were entitled to a certain degree of autonomy and selfrule.

This pluralistic system, which balanced the monarch's needs with the demands for autonomy from colonial elites, began to crack by the everincreasing pressures of warfare, especially during and after the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). Britain emerged victorious, acquiring from France large North American territories and exposing Spanish weakness during the temporary invasions of Havana and Manila in 1762. Nonetheless, Britain, like the rest, also began to make increasingly burdensome demands on its colonies to contribute towards the costs of imperial defense, a process that upset the center/periphery political balance upon which monarchic empires were built.

As a consequence of these fiscal pressures in conjunction with the rise of new ideas about natural rights and equality, the Atlantic world witnessed a revolutionary cycle that culminated with the independence of the United States, Haiti, and much of Spanish America. And yet, despite this imperial collapse, European empires managed to survive, even expand, over the course of the revolutionary period. Britain, as is well known, maintained colonies in North America and the Caribbean, but it also experienced a "swing to the east" with the vast South Asian territorial acquisitions of the East India Company. France, continued to hold on to its Caribbean colonies (with the exception of Haiti), but it also experienced an imperial renaissance with the acquisition of territories in Africa, especially Senegal and Algeria. Finally, though Spain remained a shadow of its formal self, it continued to hold on to profitable colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

As Fradera would have it, the key factor that explains this imperial renaissance amidst a period of revolutionary upheaval is the emergence of colonial specialite, that is to say the notion that colonies were to be excluded from the rights that the new national constitutions guaranteed to their citizens. The clearest example of this regime appeared in the French constitution of 1799, which established that the colonies were to...