An age of imperial revolutions

American Historical Review

Volumn 113, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 319-340

  Adelman, Jeremy ^a,b  

^a Department of Spanish Civilization ^*

^b PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 46849101498     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.2.319     Document Type: Review

References (119)

1. Archivo General de Indias (Seville) [hereafter AGI], Gobierno, Caracas, Legajo 458, September 13, 1806, Manuel de Guevara Vasconcelos to Principe de la Paz; September 5, 1806, Francisco Cavallero Sarmiento to Principe de la Plaz; Estado/Caracas, 71/9, November 8, 1808, "Informe de Secretaría á S.M. sobre el asunto de Miranda"; Francisco de Miranda, "Todo pende de nuestra voluntad," in Miranda, América espera (Caracas, 1982), 356;
2. Karen Racine, Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (Wilmington, Del., 2003).
3. An important intervention is Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), esp. 156-157.
4. On the notion of inverted sequences, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven, Conn., 1958), esp. chap. 4 and the discussion of the "chain of disequilibria."
5. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1959), 1: 4;
6. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 24-30.
7. For a neo-Palmerian take, see Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850 (New Haven, Conn., 1996).
8. This, of course, created a problem for liberals who wanted theirs to be a universal creed to transcend history, culture, and race, to be the ideology of a concert of interest-swapping nations, giving rise to an imperial liberalism that could cover its own exclusionary tracks by making judgments about the conditions for people to enjoy rights. See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999).
9. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988);
10. Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004). Some may argue that privilege and inequality were not unique to emporia, and reproduced themselves within nations. The argument here is simply that empires defined legal hierarchies in spatial terms in ways that nations did not.
11. David Armitage, "The Concepts of Atlantic History," in Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (London, 2002), 15-24;
12. Jack P. Green, "The American Revolution," American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (February 2000): 93-102;
13. Franklin W. Knight, "The Haitian Revolution," ibid., 103-115;
14. Virginia Guedea, "The Process of Mexican Independence," ibid., 116-130;
15. Jaime E. Rodriguez O., "The Emancipation of America," ibid., 131-153. There is little inter-visibility between these case studies.
16. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York, 2000);
17. Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderlands of the American Revolution (New York, 2006);
18. David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2001).
19. John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven, Conn., 2006);
20. Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713-1826 (Baltimore, 1983).
21. This is most intriguingly argued by Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
22. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York, 2000), xxvii as cited in introduction by David Womersley.
23. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1988);
24. Alexander J. Motyl, Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (New York, 2001);
25. David B. Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980 (New Haven, Conn., 2000).
26. More generally, on how regimes ossify, see Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, Conn., 1982).
27. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (New York, 2002);
28. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 197.
29. Robert Jackson, Sovereignty: The Evolution of an Idea (Cambridge, 2007);
30. James J. Sheehan, "The Problem of Sovereignty in European History," American Historical Review 111, no. 1 (February 2006): 1-15;
31. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, N.J., 2006). Most work on sovereignty has been done by political scientists, mainly concerned with international relations.
32. See Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton, N.J., 2001);
33. and on sovereignty as resting on contradictory principles and practices, see Stephen D. Krasner, ed., Problematic Sovereignty: Contested Rules and Political Possibilities (New York, 2001).
34. Christopher J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe, and Alexander Gourevitch, eds., Politics without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations (London, 2007).
35. On sovereignty and imperium, see Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (New York, 2001), xvi-xxv.
36. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History," American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 814-841;
37. for a view of territorializing sovereignty from one side, see Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago, 1996),
38. and for another side, see Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, Calif., 1989).
39. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London, 2003), esp. chap. 8.
40. Josep M. Fradera, Colonias para después de un imperio (Barcelona, 2005);
41. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, esp. chaps. 10-11.
42. David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn., 2005), chap. 5;
43. John Fisher, Commercial Relations between Spain and Spanish America in the Era of Free Trade, 1778-1796 (Liverpool, 1985);
44. Jorge M. Pedreira, "From Growth to Collapse: Portugal, Brazil, and the Breakdown of the Old Colonial System (1760-1830)," Hispanic American Historical Review 80, no. 4 (2000): 839-864;
45. Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995);
46. Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759-1789 (Baltimore, 2003).
47. Kenneth R. Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750-1808 (Cambridge, 1973), 23-28, 67-71;
48. Anthony McFarlane, "Rebellions in Late Colonial Spanish America: A Comparative Perspective," Bulletin of Latin American Research 14, no. 3 (1983): 313-338;
49. Eric Van Young, "The Age of Paradox: Mexican Agriculture at the End of the Colonial Period, 1750-1810," in Nils Jacobsen and Hans-Jürgen Puhle, eds., The Economies of Mexico and Peru during the Late Colonial Period, 1760-1810 (Berlin, 1986), 64-90.
50. David Eltis, Economie Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), 247.
51. Jorge Gelman, Campesinos y estancieros: Una región del Rio de la Plata a fines de la época colonial (Buenos Aires, 1998). Once upon a time, this pattern reinforced the view of persistent feudality of Iberian America, that this double transformation was simply a veil over patrimonial property.
52. Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, Neb., 1988);
53. Richard L. Garner, "Long-Term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America: A Comparative Analysis of Peru and Mexico," American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (October 1988): 898-935;
54. Matilde Souto Mantecón, Mar abierto: La política y el comercio del consulado de Veracruz en el ocaso del sistema imperial (México, 2001);
55. Fisher, Commercial Relations, 61-77;
56. John Fisher, Trade, War, and Revolution: Exports from Spain to Spanish America, 1797-1820 (Liverpool, 1992), 54-62;
57. Sheila de Castro Faria, A colônia em movimento: Fortuna e família no cotidiano colonial (Rio de Janeiro, 1998);
58. Manolo Garcia Florentino, Em costas negras: Uma história do tráfico atlântico de escravos entre a Africa e o Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1993).
59. As Carlos Sempat Assadourian has observed about an earlier conjuncture, it was possible to reconcile multiple pressures within the social and economic "spaces" of empire - and a juxtaposition of spatial responses within empires to the same conjuncture. Assadourian, El sistema de la economía colonial: El mercado interior, regiones y espacio económico (México, 1983), 15-16.
60. P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750-1783 (New York, 2005), 5;
61. Carlos Marichal, La bancarrota del virreinato: Nueva España y las finanzas del imperio español, 1780-1810 (México, 1999);
62. Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, N.J., 2007), chap. 3.
63. Cited in José Alvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa: La idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid, 2001), 120-121.
64. Laurent Dubois, "The Promise of Revolution: Saint-Domingue and the Struggle for Autonomy in Guadelupe, 1797-1802," in Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution, 112-133;
65. David A. Bell, The First Total War. Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It (Boston, 2007).
66. José Ignacio de Pombo, Comercio y contrabando en Cartagena de Indias (1800; repr., Bogotá, 1986);
67. José da Silva Lisboa, Observações sobre a prosperidade do estado pelos liberaes principios da nova legislaçã o (Rio de Janeiro, 1810);
68. Gabriel B. Paquette, "State-Civil Society Cooperation and Conflict in the Spanish Empire: The Intellectual and Political Activities of the Ultramarine Consulados and Economic Societies, c. 1780-1810," Journal of Latin American Studies 39, no. 2 (2007): 263-298.
69. John Lynch, "The Origins of Spanish Independence," in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 3: From Independence to c. 1870 (Cambridge, 1985);
70. David Brading, Los orígenes del nacionalismo mexicano (México, 1983).
71. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), esp. chap. 4;
72. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York, 1990).
73. On the formation of national identities more generally in colonial societies, see Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1987), where identity precedes independence, and national identity emerges from colonial resistance to empire.
74. José Manuel Restrepo, Historia de la revolución de la República de Colombia, 6 vols. (1827; repr., Medellín, 1969);
75. Bartolomé Mitre, Historia de Belgrano y de la independencia argentina, 4 vols. (1857; epr., Buenos Aires, 1947);
76. Carlos Maria de Bustamante, Resumen histórico de la revolución de los Estados Unidos Mejicanos (London, 1828).
77. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 19, 34.
78. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995).
79. And for this reason, current neoliberals often claim that they are the harbingers of a modern Latin America. See, for instance, Claudio Veliz, The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).
80. For more on circularity, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (London, 1995), esp. 146-180.
81. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge Mass., 1970), 126.
82. José da Silva Lisboa, Principios de economia política (Lisboa, 1\804), 112-116;
83. for more details, see Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution, chap. 4;
84. Kenneth Maxwell, "The Generation of the 1790s and the Idea of Luso-Brazilian Empire," in Dauril Alden, ed., Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil: Papers of the Newberry Library Conference (Berkeley, Calif., 1973), 107-144.
85. Brian R. Hamnett, La política española en una época revolucionaria, 1790-1820 (México, 1985), 57-67;
86. Valentim Alexandre, Os sentidos do império: Questão nacional e questão colonial na crise do Antigo Regime português (Lisbon, 1993).
87. François-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lempérière, "Introducción," in Guerra and Lempérière, eds., Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica: Ambigüedades y problemas, siglos XVIII-XIX (México, 1998), 5-21;
88. Victor Uribe-Uran, "The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America during the Age of Revolution," Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (2000): 425-457;
89. on elections in Mexico, see Guedea, "The Process of Mexican Independence"; Victor Peralta Ruiz, En defensa de la autoridad: Política y cultura bajo el gobierno del virrey Abascal - Peru, 1806-1816 (Madrid, 2002).
90. For a pioneering study of the late colonial press, see Renán Silva, Prensa y revolución a finales del siglo XVIlI: Contribución a un análisis de la formación de la ideología de independencia nacional (Bogotá, 1988).
91. El Argos Americano, November 18, 1811;
92. Hamnett, La política española, 73-101;
93. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (New York, 1998), 82-91.
94. Rodríguez, The Independence of Spanish America, chap. 3;
95. Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution, chap. 5;
96. Roderick J. Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798-1852 (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 43-55.
97. John Charles Chasteen, Americanos: Latin America's Struggle for Independence (New York, 2008);
98. Margaret Woodward, "The Spanish Army and the Loss of America, 1810-1824," Hispanic American Historical Review 48, no. 4 (1968): 586-590;
99. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808-1826 (New York, 1986), 212-214;
100. Timothy E. Anna, Spain and the Loss of America (Lincoln, Neb., 1983);
101. Isabel Lustosa, Insultos impressos: A guerra dos jornalistas na independência, 1821-1823 (São Paulo, 2000);
102. Barman, Brazil, 70-71;
103. Márcia Regina Berbel, A nação como artefato: Deputados do Brasil nas cortes portuguesas, 1821-1822 (São Paulo, 1999).
104. On the self-sustaining mechanisms of civil war, see Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York, 2006), esp. 81-83, 88 on endogeneity.
105. Brendan McConville, The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006);
106. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires;
107. Knight, "The Haitian Revolution"; Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 349-374.
108. Rodriguez, The Independence of Spanish America;
109. José Carlos Chiaramonte, "Modificaciones del Pacto Imperial," in Antonio Annino, Luis Castro Leiva, and François-Xavier Guerra, eds., De los imperios a las naciones: Iberoamérica (Zaragoza, 1994), esp. 108-111.
110. José Murilo de Carvalho, A construção da ordem (Rio de Janeiro, 1996).
111. Peter Blanchard, "The Slave Soldiers of Spanish South America: From Independence to Abolition," in Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn., 2006), 261-266;
112. Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia, 1795-1831 (Pittsburgh, 2007);
113. Peter Guardino, The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850 (Durham, N.C., 2005).
114. Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007).
115. This recasting is explored in Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000);
116. Daniel J. Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005);
117. Peter S. Onuf, "'The Strongest Government on Earth': Jefferson's Republicanism, the Expansion of the Union, and the New Nation's Destiny," in Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew Sparrow, eds., The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, 1803-1898 (New York, 2005), 41-68; T.
118. lexander Aleinikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).
119. See, for instance, C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London, 1989).