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Overview

Contributing to the historiography of transnational and global transmission of ideas, Connections after Colonialism examines relations between Europe and Latin America during the tumultuous 1820s.
 
In the Atlantic World, the 1820s was a decade marked by the rupture of colonial relations, the independence of Latin America, and the ever-widening chasm between the Old World and the New. Connections after Colonialism, edited by Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette, builds upon recent advances in the history of colonialism and imperialism by studying former colonies and metropoles through the same analytical lens, as part of an attempt to understand the complex connections—political, economic, intellectual, and cultural—between Europe and Latin America that survived the demise of empire.

 
Historians are increasingly aware of the persistence of robust links between Europe and the new Latin American nations. This book focuses on connections both during the events culminating with independence and in subsequent years, a period strangely neglected in European and Latin American scholarship. Bringing together distinguished historians of both Europe and America, the volume reveals a new cast of characters and relationships ranging from unrepentant American monarchists, compromise seeking liberals in Lisbon and Madrid who envisioned transatlantic federations, and British merchants in the River Plate who saw opportunity where others saw risk to public moralists whose audiences spanned from Paris to Santiago de Chile and plantation owners in eastern Cuba who feared that slave rebellions elsewhere in the Caribbean would spread to their island.
Contributors
Matthew Brown / Will Fowler / Josep M.
Fradera / Carrie Gibson / Brian Hamnett /
Maurizio Isabella / Iona Macintyre / Scarlett
O’Phelan Godoy / Gabriel Paquette / David
Rock / Christopher Schmidt-Nowara / Jay
Sexton / Reuben Zahler

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780817317768
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Publication date: 01/15/2013
Series: Atlantic Crossings
Edition description: First Edition, First Edition
Pages: 344
Product dimensions: 9.10(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Matthew Brown is a reader in Latin American studies at the University of Bristol. He is writing a short history of Latin America’s relationship with global empires since Independence.



Gabriel Paquette is an assistant professor in history at the Johns Hopkins University. He was previously a research fellow in history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a lecturer at Harvard University. He is the author of Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in SpainandIts Empire, 1759-1808 and the editor of Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750-1830.

Read an Excerpt

Connections after Colonialism

Europe and Latin America in the 1820s

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1776-8


Chapter One

Themes and Tensions in a Contradictory Decade

Ibero-America as a Multiplicity of States Brian Hamnett

The 1820s are as alive as tomorrow. —Neill Macaulay, Dom Pedro

The most striking feature of the 1820s is the formation of independent Ibero-American states. This represented a lasting blow to the counter-revolutionary structures put in place at the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815. Despite counterrevolutionary interventions in Italy and Spain in 1822 and 1823, the continental European monarchies would never be able to reverse this, not least because of British naval supremacy in the Atlantic Ocean. Republican forms of government superseded the Bourbon monarchy in all the newly independent, Spanish American states, despite an early and unsuccessful experiment in monarchy in Mexico in 1822 and 1823. The Braganza monarchy in Brazil was independent of the Portuguese branch of the same dynasty and ruled a separate sovereign state. Issues that would become overridingly important during the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth had their origin in the new political structures of the 1820s. Foremost of these were the questions of the distribution of power within the sovereign states, the fiscal relationship between their component parts, and the distribution of wealth within their territories. Once sovereignty had been asserted as a bastion of defense against the former imperial powers and the European states in general, this doctrine had to be put into practical effect by the assertion of control over territory.

The feasibility and durability of all the great projects of the 1820s—monarchy, republicanism, constitutionalism, federalism, nationalism, continentalism—would be harshly put to the test thereafter. Somehow the Catholic Church, integral part of the Old Regime, defender of the Iberian monarchies, and, at the same time, an international institution, had to come to grips with the new realities and assess its position. Tensions between projects and processes ran continuously through this decade, which combined astonishing transformation of political forms with less ambitious tasks of renovation, innovation, and conservation.

Unitarism or Separatism?

Two key developments defined Iberian relations with Ibero-America in the early years of the 1820s. They made the old unitary monarchies no longer a practicable proposition and opened the way to the assertion of independence and separate sovereign status.

The first of these was the inability of the Cortes of Madrid (1820–23) to transform what survived of the Hispanic monarchy on the American continent into one "Hispanic nation" in any form acceptable to either the American deputies or the power groups within the Americas. The unilateral declaration of self-government by the Mexican elites, tactically aligned with the remnants of the insurgency of the 1810s, under the terms of the Plan of Iguala of February 24, 1821, thwarted any such attempt. Although the plan shied away from outright separatism, maintaining the Bourbon monarch as the ruler of a "Mexican Empire," it repudiated the authority of the Spanish metropolitan government within the territory of New Spain. The Cortes's rejection of this project led to a separate Mexican monarchy in June 1822 under Emperor Agustín I.

The second was the decision of the Cortes Gerais of the United Kingdoms of Portugal, the Algarves, and Brazil in Lisbon to reduce the Kingdom of Brazil, proclaimed by João VI in Rio de Janeiro in 1815, to a series of separate provinces directly dependant on the metropolitan government. This opened the way for the proclamation of a Brazilian Empire as a constitutional state under Pedro I (1822–31) by the provinces governed from Rio de Janeiro and their secession in September 1822 from what had been the Luso-Brazilian monarchy.

The idea of "federalizing" the entire Hispanic monarchy had been since 1810 anathema to Spanish liberals, who were dedicated to the preservation of a unitary, though constitutional, state. They similarly resisted American autonomy within the empire as the slippery slope to separatism. Discussion in the Madrid Cortes on the "American question" continued that of 1810–1814 but in graver circumstances. The liberal regime's intransigence, not even prepared to make concessions on the number of American deputies in the Cortes, confirmed the disintegration of the American sector of old monarchy into a multiplicity of weak sovereign states. The Spanish liberals and their Lisbon counterparts of 1821–1823 failed to understand the dimension of the disputed relationship between the American territories and the home countries.

Within South America, the final achievement of independence produced a more coherent Brazil than the disparate provinces of the Portuguese era and contrasted with an even more divided Spanish America. Nevertheless, the imperial government in Rio discovered that it had to coerce the northern and northeastern provinces, which had closer maritime communications with Lisbon, into the empire in the years 1823–1825. Bahia, center of resistance by Portuguese merchants and army officers loyal to the Portuguese Constitution of September 23, 1822, was occupied by Rio's Pacification Army in July 1823. When Pernambuco and Ceará formed the Confederation of the Equator in July 1824, they, too, had to be reduced and the ringleaders punished. These conflicts in the north and northeast were not resolved in 1823 or 1824, but formed the context for further outbreaks between 1832 and 1848. The Brazilian Empire inherited the expansionist aspirations of its Portuguese past, especially in the far south. The war with Argentina for control of the Banda Oriental (Uruguay) from 1825 to 1828 testified to this. Even so, the origins of modern Brazil are less in the Portuguese era than in these events of the 1820s.

The final collapse of any solution based on the integration of American continental and European territories signified the end of the two historic empires, which had joined these two parts of their monarchies since the early sixteenth century. This removed two once powerful units from the international structure of power, leaving an array of weak, divided, successor states in both Europe and America.

The political and military situation, however, had changed radically in Ibero-America in the years 1817–1824). The debt of the viceroyalty of Peru, core of the military counter-revolution, increased from 8 million pesos in 1812 to 20 million pesos in 1820, crippling the royal government's further resistance. The collapse of the Miraflores negotiations between Viceroy Joaquin de la Pezuela's government and the liberator José de San Martín in September 1820 ensured that no solution would be found on the basis of reconciliation under the 1812 Cádiz Constitution and recognition of the dynastic rights of the Bourbon monarchy. San Martín, despite instinctive monarchist sentiments, insisted on the absolute independence of Peru and the elimination of the Bourbon monarchy and the imperial Cortes from its political life. The Cortes's commissioners were sent to Venezuela and the viceroyalty of New Granada, reached the former only to find that the Royalist commander Pablo Morillo had already arranged an armistice with Simón Bolívar. Those destined for New Granada never arrived.

In effect, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the greater part of the lower clergy across Spanish America changed sides during the years 1821–1824, abandoning the Spanish monarchy as their principal line of defense and opting, instead, for independent American states. This course resulted not simply from suspicion of the Madrid Cortes's ecclesiastical policies but also from Ferdinand VII's failure, during the period of the restored absolutism (1814–1820), to address the reasons for insurrection in Spanish America. The basic issue among Mexican bishops was the necessity for different laws in America than those applicable in Spain. In other words, they had abandoned, along with leading figures in civil society, their former belief that America and Spain could subsist together within the same state. Clerical support for the 1812 constitution, which still remained in force in Mexico until March 1823, however, was conditional on maintenance of the Catholic establishment under Article 12, regarded as the basis for the construction of a Catholic Mexican nation.

The departure of Primate Pedro Fonte in 1821 left the Mexican Catholic Church weakened at a time when the country was in the process of establishing new institutions. The extinction of the episcopate by 1829 became a matter sufficiently alarming for the papacy to allow the nomination of six new bishops in 1831, although the Holy See did not recognize the existence of the Mexican state until 1838. Even so, clerical influence proved sufficiently strong to ensure that the Federal Constitution of October 1824 preserved the Catholic establishment, as would its successors in 1836 and 1843.

The Spanish constitutionalism of 1812 had a profound impact throughout Spanish America, especially in the older territories, where its application led to far-reaching changes in the structure and distribution of political power. Nevertheless, the gathering together of the forces of provincial opposition to central power in the summer of 1823 ensured the success of federalism and, with it, the demise of the Spanish constitution. Similarly, the 1812 constitution remained in force in the fluctuating territories of Royalist-held Peru between 1820 and 1823.

Interrupted Continuities

The transitional authorities attempted to preserve as much as they could of the territorial extent of the viceroyalties and captaincies general, which they superseded. Despite nationalist ex post facto rhetoric and the nineteenth-century tendency to write "national histories" under the assumption that nations existed before history and were the natural goal of human social experience, the independence movements were not the nationalist movements of particular territories. The liberators initially intended to preserve what they could of the territorial structure of Spanish America, while transforming the institutions. They had no intention of sponsoring the formation of more than twenty separate sovereign states. This was clear from the time of Simón Bolivar's Jamaica letter of 1815. There were, however, problems in this. Bolívar's "Republic of Colombia" included three territories, Venezuela, New Granada, and Quito, which had been moving away from one another politically during the eighteenth century. The Spanish Crown had, in fact, established Venezuela as a distinct captaincy general in 1786. After 1819, Bolívar incorporated it into the new state, where power would be centered (at least theoretically) in Bogotá, not Caracas; and in 1822, he forcibly incorporated the autonomy-seeking port of Guayaquil into the same state. He was unable, however, to prevent Antonio Sucre's recognition of a separate Republic of Bolivia in 1825 and 1826, which meant that Buenos Aires, capital of the former viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, lost control of Upper Peru, which it had ruled since 1776 but effectively lost after 1810.

One might say, then, that Bolívar was a "continental nationalist," if that is not a contradiction in terms. In this sense, his goal, achieved by 1825 and 1826, was independence, that is, the destruction of the Spanish political order in South America. This entailed the formation of sovereign states out of the territories of the Spanish Empire, clearly a distinct process, but one in which twenty-five years of warfare ensured that there would be no necessary continuity between the territorial structure of the old order and the new. Conflict, and the degree of violence involved, brought to the surface the diversity of ethnicities and races within these territories and corresponding disparities of wealth, status, and culture.

These, more than anything else, accounted for the failure of what we may describe as "continentalism" in the period 1822–1826. As a result, no supranational organization, however tenuous, replaced the European empires on the American continent in the 1820s. The inconclusive meeting of Bolívar and San Martin in Guayaquil in July 1822 marked the first discussion of a project of cooperation between liberators. The second stage came with Bolívar's letters to the new governments, proposing a conference in Panama to discuss the future of Spanish America. He envisaged cooperation on foreign policy issues, the promotion of collective security, and the establishment of a permanent body for those objectives. He even suggested that Great Britain might act as the guarantor or informal protector. The liberator of five countries, however, received little support for his proposal from the other governments. Only representatives from Mexico, the Central American Federation, Colombia, and Peru, and a British observer, attended the Panama Congress of 1826. Only Colombia ratified the decisions. Similarly, Bolivar's idea of an Andean federation of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia came to nothing. With the collapse of Colombia in 1830 and the disintegration of the Central American Federation, fragmentation became the rule of the day. It is best to speak of "successor states" to the two great empires, rather than of new "nationstates," since they came into being after a chain of political and military circumstances rather than as the result of any common national consciousness on the part of their ethnically and culturally diverse peoples.

In geopolitical terms, the problem of the separation of Upper and Lower Peru remained a political issue from 1826 until 1841. The military success of the Army of Upper Peru, created by Viceroy José Fernando Abascal in 1810 and under José Manuel de Goyeneche's command until 1813, had ensured that Buenos Aires would never again rule in Upper Peru. Not even the final defeat of this army at Junín and Ayacucho in 1824 could reverse that. Even so, Upper Peru, formerly the territory of the pre-1825 Audiencia of Charcas, had never functioned as a distinct political entity. Abascal had re-annexed it in 1810 to the viceroyalty of Peru, from which the Bourbon ministers had separated it in 1776. This raised the question of the future reunion of the Perus. The two principal military politicians of both territories, Agustín Gamarra and Andrés Santa Cruz, came from the Andean zone, and each at some stage promoted reunification.

Given New Spain's position as creditor to Old Spain, it is not difficult to build a case for independence based on the principle of keeping metropolitan Spain's hands off Mexican resources. Spanish and international pressure on the mining sector accentuated the imbalance of the Mexican economy. Instead, New Spain's resources might have been devoted not to Spanish imperial needs but to internal needs, such as the defense of the northern frontier from raids by the indios bárbaros, the preservation of the far north (within the United States from 1848), and the more effective distribution of power within the viceroyalty. All these issues became urgent from 1821 onward in the early history of the Mexican state, but they were alive before that and insufficiently attended to within the imperial state. The origins of independent Mexico's economic and financial problems lay in the late colonial era: the imbalance of the arable and mining sectors at a time of population recovery in the eighteenth century; international and metropolitan pressure on the silver sector of the economy, which, by the 1780s was buckling under the strain; and metropolitan fiscal pressures, especially after 1795. It could be argued that Spain, in terminal decline as an American continental power, dragged its richest colony and creditor down with it, even before the insurrection of 1810 had begun. The full consequences only became visible during the 1820s, when the Mexicans undertook the construction of a sovereign state of their own.

Independence in the 1820s exposed the precarious nature of the finances of the new American states. Mexico, the former creditor of imperial Spain, faced independence with enormous debts. In September 1822, the debt inherited from the viceroyalty was estimated at 76.0 million pesos, in contrast to 31.1 million pesos in 1810 and 3.0 million in 1770. In November 1824, the republican government recognized a debt of 44.7 million. Mexico rapidly acquired an external debt, as well as an internal debt, as a result of the two British loans of 1824, but by 1827 it had defaulted on payments to British bondholders. Although payments would be sporadically resumed afterwards, the country would no longer be eligible for credit on the European financial markets; and few capital owners would want to invest in the economy, as the seven joint-venture mining companies, established in 1824 and 1825, ran into difficulties one after the other as the decade ended. Deprived of internal sources of credit, the Mexican state fell into the hands of domestic creditors, known as agiotistas.

(Continues...)



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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Between the Age of Atlantic Revolutions and the Age of Empire Matthew Brown Gabriel Paquette 1

1 Themes and Tensions in a Contradictory Decade: Ibero-America as a Multiplicity of States Brian Hamnett 29

2 Rafael del Riego and the Spanish Origins of the Nineteenth-Century Mexican Pronunciamiento Will Fowler 46

3 Include and Rule: The Limits of Liberal Colonial Policy, 1810-1837 Josep M. Fradera 64

4 Entangled Patriotisms: Italian Liberals and Spanish America in the 1820s Maurizio Isabella 87

5 The Brazilian Origins of the 1826 Portuguese Constitution Gabriel Paquette 108

6 An American System: The North American Union and Latin America in the 1820s Jay Sexton 139

7 The Chilean Irishman Bernardo O'Higgins and the Independence of Peru Scarlett O'Phelan Godoy 160

8 Corinne in the Andes: European Advice for Women in 1820s Argentina and Chile Iona Macintyre 179

9 Heretics, Cadavers, and Capitalists: European Foreigners in Venezuela during the 1820s Reuben Zahler 191

10 Porteño Liberals and Imperialist Emissaries in the Rio de la Plata: Rivadavia and the British David Rock 207

11 "There Is No Doubt That We Are under Threat by the Negroes of Santo Domingo": The Specter of Haiti in the Spanish Caribbean in the 1820s Carrie Gibson 223

12 Bartolomé de las Casas and the Slave Trade to Cuba circa 1820 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara 236

13 The 1820s in Perspective: The Bolivarian Decade Matthew Brown 250

Bibliography 275

Contributors 321

Index 323

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