The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770-1830

Brian Hamnett, a historian with a long and distinguished career working on late colonial and independence-era Spanish America, has written an important new book that reassesses the breakdown of the Iberian empires in the Americas. This is a topic that has attracted a great deal of scholarly interest over generations, whether one thinks of works on creole patriotism, the legal and intellectual history of constitutionalism and republicanism, or the histories of the insurgencies themselves, including their popular elements. In this crowded field Hamnett takes a slightly different approach, focusing on what he refers to as the “disaggregation” of the empires, rather than, say, the origins of the independence movements or the development of protonational sentiment. While one might question the decision to separate these often overlapping processes, his perspective, which is a glance backward more than forward, places the long-term, structural problems of the two empires in sharp focus. It also draws our attention to the ways that the independence movements grew out of internal conflict within the Americas over the nature and form of the imperial relationship.The book draws on a large secondary literature in English, Spanish, and Portuguese and gracefully integrates archival documents and printed primary sources. Its historiographical breadth is matched by how it ranges widely across time and space, examining disaggregation on the peninsula and throughout Ibero-America. While Hamnett emphasizes the Spanish American experience, he devotes significant attention to the breakdown of the Portuguese empire in the Americas, a combined analysis uncommon in much of the historiography. He also rejects labeling the book an “Atlantic history,” since he pursues the flow of ideas and people not only across the Atlantic but also within the Americas (p. 11). This shuttling back and forth is breathtaking in scope and amounts to a style of analysis that is more synoptic than explicitly comparative, as Hamnett brings many different historical contexts into play in any given chapter. While an intriguing approach, and one that will be of interest to many researchers, it also makes for a challenging and dense text that at times assumes significant prior knowledge. As a result, the book's readership will probably be limited to specialists. Numerous typographical errors also mar the fine scholarship.While the book's many threads are difficult to weave into a tight summary, its three parts provide a useful structure for Hamnett's main ideas. Part 1 establishes some of the challenges that plagued the eighteenth-century Iberian empires, including imperial authorities' inability to respond successfully to ongoing fiscal crises and failure to address the diverging political and economic interests of the American territories. These early chapters also highlight the fragmented politics of eighteenth-century Brazil and their implications for nineteenth-century developments, as well as some of the more radical Andean movements of the eighteenth century, including the Túpac Amaru and Tomás Katari rebellions (primarily contrasted with the later, much more conservative visions of political community emerging from the independence era). Finally, Hamnett surveys attempts by some officials and intellectuals to frame Spain or Portugal as “one sole nation,” not, of course, as a kind of protonationalism but to give coherence and stability to the empires, with their many internal differences and competing interests. Though these initiatives at times received support up to the level of the Spanish monarch, none made it beyond paper. Nonetheless, the very existence of such projects strongly supports Hamnett's deep periodization of imperial breakdown.Part 2, the book's argumentative center, examines the unruly and violent decade unleashed by the imperial crises of 1808–9, including the formation of juntas and the Cádiz Constitution. Hamnett makes a number of aggressively revisionist arguments. As noted above, he places a great deal of explanatory weight on the long-term contradictions in the Iberian imperial systems, giving them primacy over the triggering effect of the French invasion or the particular qualities of the autonomy movements themselves. Above all, he radically recasts the Spanish experiment in constitutionalism. For Hamnett, the Constitution of 1812 was less a forward-looking experiment in liberty and more “a last ditch attempt to hold together the Monarchy already breaking apart” and cobble a political community under the banner of one sole nation (p. 146). As Hamnett notes, the debates at Cádiz took place amid violent conflict already underway in key parts of the American territories, including New Spain and Venezuela.Part 3 serves as a kind of extended denouement, surveying liberalism's collapse in Portugal and Spain in the 1820s and the eventual consummation of independence in most of the Ibero-American territories.Some scholars will no doubt raise objections to Hamnett's methodology and provocative conclusions. Why, for example, does the book focus mostly on elite actors without additional attention to how the actions and motivations of popular sectors might have contributed to disaggregation? Others might question his stark characterization of the Cádiz experiment, which for all its limitations acted as a great catalyst to political mobilization in many parts of the Americas. When a work provokes such debate, it is usually a sign of its significance. Such is the case here. Hamnett's work compels us to rethink some of the standard narratives of change during this important period. That is a major accomplishment indeed

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