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Hispanic American Historical Review 83.1 (2003) 156-158



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Latin America between Colony and Nation: Selected Essays. By John Lynch. Institute of Latin American Studies. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001. Table. Notes. Index. viii, 256 pp. Cloth, $68.00.

Students of Latin America's late colonial and early national periods—especially those interested in the so-called Middle Period or Age of Revolution—should welcome this new work by John Lynch, a major scholar of both periods and Emeritus Professor of Latin American History at the University of London. Lynch's anthology includes six essays originally published in books and journals, two unpublished papers, and a speech delivered at the University of Seville. Most of these writings date from the early 1990s, although some have been revised for the present work; the speech and two of the essays have been translated into English for the first time. Overall, the anthology exhibits the broad range of Lynch's interests as a historian. Besides covering topics for which Lynch is known, it offers some surprises: a piece on the Spanish Conquest, and another on popular religion and millenarian [End Page 156] movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More important, this work highlights Lynch's contributions to our understanding of a dynamic and complex era in Latin American history, one he characterizes as "a time of transition when colony yielded slowly to nation and the nation retained much of the colony" (p. viii).

The anthology reflects certain themes long associated with its author. One is the idea that the roots of Latin American, especially Spanish American, independence lie in the eighteenth century, when an increasingly uncompromising, if "enlightened," colonial regime triggered the breakdown of the "colonial consensus" and the growth of an aggrieved creole sense of identity (or patriotism). First developed in Lynch's classic The Spanish American Revolutions 1808-1826 (1973), this idea runs through several chapters of the present work, including chapter 3, "The Colonial State in Latin America," and above all in chapter 5, "The Colonial Roots of Latin American Independence" (both previously published). Another of Lynch's trademark themes is the impact of social and racial tensions in both the late colonial and independence era. Chapter 4, "Spanish America's Poor Whites: Canarian Immigrants in Venezuela, 1700-1830," sketches a vivid portrait of such tensions in Venezuela. A translated and revised version of the 1991 Spanish-language original, "Poor Whites" examines the role of Canarian immigrants in eighteenth-century Venezuela's increasingly volatile economy and stratified society. It highlights the slippery position that Canarians and their descendants came to occupy within a society that was ever-more obsessed with matters of race and class, and within the minds of a creole elite who, in their desire to maintain exclusion, tagged their ambitious, white-skinned social inferiors as "pardos" (p. 66). "Poor Whites" also offers insight on the popular movements with which Canarians became involved, and on the political struggle that emerged after 1810 between creole patriots and royalists—a struggle in which Canarians tended to align with the latter.

Awareness of the social and racial tensions that marked late colonial life has long shaped Lynch's interpretation of the Spanish American revolutions and independence movements. This can be seen not only in the analysis of the roots of independence in chapter 5 but also in the two chapters addressing the role of Simón Bolívar. Chapters 7 and 8 epitomize the third trademark theme to be found in the anthology, namely, the nature of the independence struggles, and especially the Bolívarian. Lynch stresses the uniqueness of these struggles within the context of the North Atlantic "Age of Revolution"—that tidal wave launched by the French and North American upheavals. In chapter 7, "Simón Bolívar and the Age of Revolution," Lynch states that "the concept of a single revolution inspired by democracy and nurtured on the Enlightenment does not do justice to the complexity of the period" (p. 136). Many scholars today would agree (see, for example, the [End Page 157...

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