Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic

Ambitious yet curiously circumscribed, Jeremy Adelman’s study of the breakdown of the Spanish and Portuguese empires along the Caribbean and Atlantic seaboards falls squarely within the increasingly established consensus. Independence was not inevitable and the empires contained no budding nations striving to emancipate themselves; rather, the crises of 1808 (themselves the product of intensifying imperial rivalries that had strained imperial orders since the eighteenth century) set in motion a complex process of imperial breakdown that eventually forced redefinitions of sovereignty. The revolution of independence in Spanish America only came in response to Fernando VII’s clumsy counterrevolution after his 1814 restoration, while Portuguese America went through analogous processes slightly later.For Adelman, sovereignty is characterized by “the notion that people who live in a civil society abide by rules to which all subjects are bound,” and these rules “extend to the defensible territorial boundaries of their political communities” (pp. 1 – 2). In the accompanying footnote, he further insists that “sovereignty was always contested, unstable, and equivocal” (p. 2 n. 2). His discussion of revolution relies heavily on Albert O. Hirschman’s largely descriptive model of loyalty, voice, and exit as responses to declining institutions. These frameworks structure an analysis that does not fully address the contestation over the “rules” of the newly emerging civil societies, for Adelman has relatively little to say about the debates set off by the Spanish monarchy’s fall and the establishment of constitutional regimes in 1812 and in 1820 – 21, and still less about the postindependence struggles over the creation of new nations. The discussion of Brazilian independence, for example, focuses strongly on Rio de Janeiro and does not acknowledge the forcible incorporation of the provinces north of Bahia, while generally downplaying the many critics of the model of sovereignty espoused (and imposed) by Pedro I.The best parts of the book deal only indirectly with sovereignty and revolution. Adelman effectively summarizes recent scholarship on the strengthening of colonial merchant elites in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Caracas and the pact of “rents” in exchange for revenues that characterized the Iberian Atlantic. Monarchs guaranteed merchants privileged places in regulated trade (“rents” in economic jargon) and, in return, mercantile profits secured royal revenue. The booming slave trade, increasingly controlled by Americans (especially in the case of Rio de Janeiro), and the export of plantation staples paradoxically laid the foundation for greater economic freedom from metropoles on the backs of slave laborers. He traces the collapse of this portion of the Iberian Atlantic system (or in the Brazilian case, its reorientation) amid the disruptions of these years. Despite their de facto autonomy within the imperial orders, merchants were among the last to opt for exit from empires.The exclusion of New Spain and Cuba (and the very limited attention to Peru), never fully explained, circumscribes Adelman’s discussion of the Spanish Empire. To the extent that the Spanish monarchy’s principal problem was obtaining revenue from its far-flung domains, the greatest prospects lay in the silver mines of the old Mesoamerican and Andean imperial centers, not in the booming South American peripheries. Excluding the empire’s most populous areas means missing a chance to discuss the intense debates over sovereignty there. Even less justifiable within the terms of Adel-man’s narrower focus on the slave-based Iberian Atlantic is the exclusion of Cuba. The island’s sugar plantation economy was surely as important to this Atlantic economy as the regions on which he focuses, and an examination of how the stresses of these years played themselves out in Spain’s most faithful colony would no doubt provide insights into the dynamics elsewhere.Errors of fact or incomplete summaries of complex issues abound. Among other things, Brazilianists will be surprised to see the Inconfidência Mineira characterized as a failed “insurgency” (p. 51) and to read about soaring coffee exports between 1790 and 1807 (p. 84). Brazil’s 1824 constitution did not bar freedmen from voting (p. 370); rather, it prevented them from serving as electors in the second tier of elections and barred them from running for certain offices. The lack of attention to the different rules for accents in Spanish and Portuguese is annoying. The inclusion of footnotes at the bottom of the page is most welcome, but the lack of a bibliography makes them difficult to use. English-language readers will be put off by the significant number of quotations left in their original archaic Spanish and Portuguese

Economic history · Independence (probability theory) · Monarchy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Portuguese · Sociology · Sovereignty · State (computer science) · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Law · Philosophy

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