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After two and a half centuries of relative isolation, the Kingdom of Guatemala spent the second half of the eighteenth century transforming itself into a model colony of the newly energized Spanish empire. Within a generation of the start of the indigo boom in the 1760s, Central America had a viable commercial link to the Atlantic economy that brought wealth to the colonial elite and expectations for more signi¤cant economic development. On the political level, Guatemala found itself governed by a reformist monarchy that seemed intent on institutionalizing the latest in administrative philosophy. Culturally, the isthmian elite now had access to the great body of Enlightenment science, technology, and literature produced during the century and began to put it to practical use. Even a catastrophic series of earthquakes that hit the region in 1773 and destroyed the great capital city of Santiago de Guatemala (now Antigua Guatemala) appeared to many not as an obstacle to progress but rather as an opportunity to build a modern capital that might symbolize the dawning of a new age. Though profound, such rapid transitions did not appear to destabilize the well-entrenched Central American society. Peninsular and creole elites continued their domination of local political, economic, and social institutions, at times competing with but most often sustaining each other. No self-conscious urban middle class existed to challenge this symbiotic relationship, and rural groups, both Indian and ladino, 3 The Imperial Crisis and Colonial Defense, 1798–1811 remained particularly insulated from the new ideas of the time. Thus, the Kingdom of Guatemala approached the last decade of the eighteenth century more prosperous and tranquil than at any time in its history. Nevertheless, neither this recent experience with precipitous economic and political change nor the underlying stability of Central American society prepared the colony for the ¤rst decade of the nineteenth century . This period began with the collapse of the indigo market, thereby threatening the region’s economic stability, and ended with the collapse of the Spanish monarchy, resulting in a more serious challenge to Guatemala ’s political order. In very short order, the kingdom was forced into a prolonged state of emergency that would severely tax the resources, infrastructure, and imagination of the imperial bureaucracy charged with its administration. The crisis that hit the Kingdom of Guatemala at the turn of the century resulted in large part from the dislocations that developed in the Western world as a consequence of the wars of the French Revolution. This epic struggle pitted a society that had rejected the institutions and values of the Old Regime against the defenders of the established order, including Spain. Instead of the much more familiar wars over commerce , colonial hegemony, dynastic issues, or religion, the Atlantic world for the ¤rst time faced a predominantly ideological con®ict. More than most inhabitants of the Atlantic world during the wars of the French Revolution, the subjects of the Spanish monarchy had strong reasons to fear the goals and designs of revolutionary and imperial France. Defeated almost immediately after entering the war against the French Republic in 1793, Spain spent the next twenty-¤ve years struggling to overcome the devastating consequences. First, a ruinous alliance with its former enemy resulted in a crippling British blockade of Spanish ports that cut communications and trade between Madrid and its American possessions for more than four years. To pay the war reparations demanded by France, Spain then risked the ire of its American subjects by initiating in 1802 the massive con¤scation of church wealth known as the Consolidación de vales reales. One year later, Charles IV returned the colony of Louisiana to France. And in 1805 the Spanish navy was annihilated while ¤ghting alongside the French at the Battle of Trafalgar. Unfortunately, this decade of repeated disasters and Imperial Crisis and Colonial Defense 43 failed leadership was only a prelude to the events of 1808 when Napoleon decided to overthrow the Spanish Bourbons. As the Spanish population rose up against the French occupation in a brutal six-year war of liberation , the political bonds that held together the Spanish empire began to unravel. By the 1810s the political, social, and economic crises that had reverberated across Spain and its American possessions over the previous two decades brought the Spanish empire to the verge of extinction. Considering the fate of Spain as both an enemy and ally of France, anti-French sentiment was an early, ubiquitous, and enduring development in the Hispanic world during this...

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