Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Revolución, independencia y las nuevas naciones de América

2008; Duke University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2007-081

1527-1900

David Bushnell,

Political Theory and Democracy

The essays that make up this volume had their origin in a symposium held at the University of California, Irvine, in 2003. Some have been revised minimally or not at all for publication, others are significantly expanded; Jaime Rodríguez’s own contribution is a solid 45-page monograph on Guayaquil from 1808 to 1820. All have been equipped with the appropriate reference notes, and at the end there is a 48-page bibliography for the volume as a whole. As indicated by the volume title, the topical coverage is broad enough to encompass almost anything, at least of a political nature, that occurred in the Hispanic world between 1808 and the 1830s (although as Rodríguez notes in his introduction, mere próceres are de-emphasized). The first two essays treat the French and Haitian revolutions as background for subsequent developments in the Hispanic world rather than expressly analyzing connections and parallels.The volume forms part of a series published in Spain in anticipation of the bicentennials of both the beginning of the end of Spain’s American empire and of Spain’s own struggle against French occupation. The essays thus deal with events on either side of the Atlantic (Portugal and Brazil as well as Spain and Spanish America), with frequent reference to themes common to the entire Iberian world and to the often unintended and undesired consequences in America of decisions adopted in Iberia. The common theme most in evidence is the liberal experiment that led to adoption of Spain’s Constitution of 1812, later revived following the Riego revolt of 1820. Hence a pervasive subtheme is the introduction of full-fledged electoral politics and, as precondition, the process of defining prerequisites for active citizenship and for the exercise of suffrage. Discussion of the latter tends to be rather dry and legalistic, but at least the holding of elections — which easily overshadows everything else in, say, Rodríguez’s discussion of Guayaquil — is a reminder that Spanish constitutionalism did have an impact in America. It is worth noting that Víctor Peralta Ruiz, in his treatment of the last years of Spanish rule in Peru, portrays the penultimate viceroy, Joaquín de la Pezuela, as more faithful to the restored constitution than he has commonly been given credit for. Similarly Carl Almer, on the basis of dissertation research in Venezuelan archives, shows the vitality of liberal institutions during their ephemeral restoration in a Venezuela already falling irretrievably into patriot hands.Military struggles are treated for the most part only in passing. One exception is an essay by Christon Archer whose title speaks of “demonization” of the gachupín and therefore suggests an examination of Mexican patriot opinion, but which actually is more an informed analysis of royalist strategy and tactics, in particular the use of repression. Another is the essay by French scholar Clément Thibaud on the war in Venezuela and New Granada, perhaps the most original and provocative entry in the entire volume. Thibaud’s argument that “forms of war” or dynamics of conflict largely determined political changes may well be overstated, since political outcomes were on the whole more similar from one ex-colony to another than was the nature of the preceding armed struggle, but it certainly deserves to be studied, and anyone who lacks the occasion to read his Repúblicas en armas: Los ejércitos bolivarianos en la guerra de independencia en Colombia y Venezuela (Bogotá, 2003) can find the essence of his thesis here.Of the twenty essays in the collection, five are devoted to Mexico, or six if we count all the Viceroyalty of New Spain, including Central America. These range chronologically from Manuel Miño Grijalva’s detailed reconstruction of late-colonial economic and political networks as prefiguring the territorial organization of independent Mexico, to Manuel Chust’s article on the Milicia Cívica, which he takes to the 1830s while demonstrating how a lack of pensions for the wounded and families of deceased members undermined support for the institution. No other region receives this amount of attention, though Spain itself comes close and there is something on all of Ibero-America except the Southern Cone and Spanish Antilles. The Luso-Brazilian contingent consists of an article by Márcia Regina Berbel on debates in the Cortes of 1821 about the relationship between Brazil and Portugal (which inevitably bring to mind those on American representation in the Spanish Cortes examined in this volume by Ivana Frasquet); and one by Kirsten Schultz on the surprising (at least to non-Brazilianists) extent of questioning of slavery in the Brazilian constituent assembly of 1823. Space does not permit mention of all the other articles, and this is not a book that students of the independence period should immediately rush to check out from their libraries. But they should recommend that the library acquire it for future reference and hope that the different essays contained in it will be listed in the appropriate bibliographies, so that they know when to consult it.