The Conceptual History of Independence and the Colonial Question in Spanish America (original) (raw)

The Political and Institutional History of Colonial Spanish America

This essay argues for a need to develop a new political history of colonial Spanish America in order to bring up to date the old institutional history of the Spanish empire. In recent decades, historians of colonial Spanish America have not shown much interest in the study of political and institutional history. Originally, this constituted a welcome reaction against the previous emphasis on the institutional and legal aspects of the Spanish empire. But one effect of this historiographical development has been that, while our knowledge of the social history of colonial Spanish America has progressed in an impressive way, our knowledge of the mechanisms of imperial rule has made very little progress in the last 50 years. As a result, colonial historians have to rely on antiquated or inadequate notions regarding the political and institutional nature of Spanish colonialism. However, the new political history of colonial Spanish America should not focus on the study of the colonial state, but rather on the political culture of the Spanish empire.

« The French Revolution and Spanish America »

in Wim Klooster (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: Volume 2: France, Europe, and Haiti, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, vol.2, p. 172‑194., 2023

 Gabriel Entin, ed., Rousseau en Iberoamérica: Del reformismo borbónico a las revoluciones de independencia (Mexico City: UNAM, ).

"An Atlantic Counter-Revolutionary Identity? Between the Euro-American Space and New Spain/Mexico (1810-1823)", Contemporanea, XXIV, 3 (2021), pp. 413-436

2021

This paper analyzes the discourses and strategies of the counter-revolution in New Spain/Mexico between 1810 and 1823. I study the ideological evolution operated by the anti-liberals, from the rejection of the first proposals for independence until their acceptance. This change has not had a completely satisfactory explanation for historiography. My interpretative proposal supports the need of inserting that problem within a broader dynamic that encompasses the Euro-American space and its experiences. In this work I develop the concept of Atlantic Counter-Revolutionary Identity. It refers to the diffusion and exchange of ideas, books, doctrines, and imaginaries between both sides of the ocean. From the intellectual field, the articulation of an early sort of International of the Anti-Liberalism contributed to the symbolic union of opponents of the Revolution. The anti-enlightened and reactionary theories of the European authors were adapted to the historical circumstances of the Americas, becoming part of a new interpretative tradition that was constantly renewed.

Changing of the Guard: The End of Spanish Empire and the Ascent of American Neo-Colonialism

2015

Cuba was the last bastion of the Spanish empire in Latin America. By the mid-1800’s, Spain had lost most of its vast holdings in the Caribbean, Middle, and South America. Their New World Empire had been reduced to Cuba, often referred to in Spain as the “ever faithful isle” , and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. The Cuban Wars of Independence, especially the last conflict that became known as the Spanish American War, mark a real turning point in history – the final death knell of the old colonial order that had reigned over much of the New World for almost four hundred years and the birth of a new neo-colonial order led by the still young, upstart (in the eyes of most Europeans) United States. The United States’ interest in Cuba stretches all the way back to the earliest decades of the American Republic when men like Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and James Monroe expressed interest in the island for its strategic and economic importance to the region. The perception of the island’s importance to the interests of the United States would shape and guide American foreign policy towards Cuba throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and greatly influence the decision by the United States to interfere in Cuba’s Second War for Independence in 1898 and impose a new neo-colonial, imperialist order in Cuba in the first half of the twentieth century. The experiences of the thirty year long struggle by Cuban revolutionaries against Spanish colonialism during the second half of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Ten Years’ War of 1868-78 and culminating in the conveniently misnamed Spanish American War in 1898, would see many Cubans develop a new sense of national and cultural identity which was antithesis to the interests of the United States. The ideas of Cuban revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, especially those of the Cuban writer, activist, and national hero Jose Marti, would re-emerge in the mid-twentieth century as the backlash against American style imperialism reached its boiling point in the nineteen fifties, culminating in the Castro led Cuban Revolution. The American response to Castro’s Revolution would push Cuba directly into the arms of the Soviet Union and redefine the Cold War dynamic between the United States and the Soviet Union until the Soviet regime finally crumbled in the nineteen nineties. The Cuban Wars of Independence thus became the seed of a ripple effect that reverberates across world events even to this day.