The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence

This collection of essays, as Marcela Echeverri and Cristina Soriano explain in their incisive introduction, “highlight[s] key questions” and seeks to “overcome inherited paradigms” in the history of Latin American independence (p. 17). While the recent bicentenary looms in the background, it is innovative engagement with the last two decades of scholarship, marked by an expansive understanding of the political and attention to the diverse social and cultural experiences that archival research has revealed, that drives the contributions. Each chapter traces the historiographies of the questions under consideration and offers an interpretive argument with a view to future inquiries. Previous surveys of Latin American independence have tended to assert a clear chronology, beginning with origins, and to deploy national or subregional frameworks that also stand in for particular paths to independence: an early independence movement in Río de la Plata, conservative independence in imperial Brazil, and so on. In contrast, the essays here attend to regional, transatlantic, and global contexts and connections and to broader transformations that shaped the end of Iberian rule, including revolutions, rivalries, waning and emergent labor regimes, and expanding communication infrastructures.While each chapter can be read separately, throughout the book several key topics surface. To begin with, as Echeverri and Soriano observe, independence movements were born of dynastic, imperial, and political crises. Transformative responses coalesced in “moments,” as Marcela Ternavasio suggests in a chapter on constitutionalism, including one defined by the French invasion of Iberia and, soon after, another defined by the Cádiz Cortes. Yet the book also invites scrutiny of an “unsettled” periodization (p. 13). Writing on eighteenth-century rebellions, Sinclair Thomson argues that well before Napoleon “anticolonial pressures and a proliferating cluster of political crises put imperial legitimacy and sovereignty in dispute in Iberian America” (p. 25). Understanding the trajectories of the public sphere, networks of exchange, and labor regimes also requires a longer chronology. As Echeverri and Roquinaldo Ferreira explain in a chapter entitled “Shades of Unfreedom,” while slavery persisted in some places, coerced labor emerged in new forms, including indentured Chinese workers and debt peonage schemes, “after the breakdown of colonialism” (p. 237). Examining Iberian perspectives, Gabriel Paquette and Álvaro Caso Bello counter that “what transpired in 1808 and thereafter was not only of a different scope and scale, but was qualitatively distinct from what had taken place in final decades of the eighteenth century” (p. 213). The debates that followed at Cádiz drew on Enlightenment thought to produce a “legal revolution,” Ternavasio writes, that foregrounded representation amid quests for unity (p. 60). Yet as the idea of emancipation was transmitted from civil law into political discourse, as José M. Portillo explains in a chapter on early liberalism, historic corporate notions of society and authority were preserved in appeals to citizenship that also confined or “quarantine[d]” the agency of Indigenous and African-descended peoples while excluding enslaved people, servants, and women (p. 283). Indeed, as Sarah Chambers argues in a chapter on gendering independence, women's subordination in nineteenth-century politics cannot be chalked up to legacies of colonial patriarchies. Rather, “women actually lost rights as they went from sharing with men the status of colonial subjects to their exclusion from citizenship” (p. 204).Another line of inquiry pursued here is the importance of social-political practices. Arguing for the intertwined histories of public opinion and militarization, Alejandro Rabinovich and Soriano show the barracks as a site of engagement with ideals of service, debate, and citizenship, where portable printing presses were deployed to disseminate these ideals farther afield. And if, following Chambers's cue, the barracks were a masculinizing space where the citizen-soldier was forged, a more elite counterpart was the Masonic lodge. In “Brothers in Arms,” Karen Racine traces how fraternal bonding within Freemasonry nurtured crucial collaborations and interest in political experimentation. Racine's chapter also attends to the Atlantic geography of exchange that shaped independence movements, a geography that is mapped out as well in a chapter on foreign interactions by Ernesto Bassi and Fabrício Prado. Even as they decenter the British by tracing key Brazilian and Haitian interventions, Bassi and Prado also decenter the state by showing how informal diplomacy, commerce, and private finance shaped the outcomes of conflicts and negotiations over territory and recognition.Finally, this book calls attention to narrative: how the history of Latin American independence has been told. While Chambers notes that earlier typifications of domesticated and sentimental heroines waned, and Thomson observes the fraught representations of Indigenous insurgency, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Neil Safier trace the contrasting politics of memory and science in national histories. If in Brazil imperial patronage was not an issue for a science that served industry in an expanding plantation economy, in Spanish America a new republican sphere refused to recognize scientific knowledge produced under Spanish rule. Illuminating various new perspectives on a complex political-cultural panorama, this book will be an essential reference for the study of Latin American independence

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