Chapter 01 Summary

CHAPTER 1

Latin American independence was part of a global "age of revolutions" in which Enlightenment ideas about liberty, constitutionalism, and popular sovereignty clashed with the established order and with monarchs claiming a divine right to rule.

A crisis of political legitimacy arose in 1808 when French forces occupied the Iberian Peninsula, imprisoning the Spanish king and driving the Portuguese court into exile. Awaiting this crisis, however, were the colonial subjects' frustrations built up during the eighteenth century. Criollo elites and middle classes chafed at mercantilism and their lack of participation in government. The indigenous masses struggled against burdensome taxation, forced labor, and land grabs by expanding haciendas. People of African descent in Spanish America, Brazil, and French Saint Domingue alike yearned for emancipation and racial equality.

Geography, demography, personality, and chance produced a range of outcomes from this shared crisis. In the Caribbean, French Revolutionary ideals helped turn a slave revolt in Saint Domingue into a revolution for independence and racial equality; newly independent Haiti abolished slavery, but faced a devastated economy and divisions between a mulatto elite and the black majority. The destruction of white supremacy on nearby Saint Domingue helped keep Cuban and Puerto Rican creoles loyal to Spain. The Brazilian elite, meanwhile, preserved both slavery and monarchy, negotiating independence peacefully and keeping a Portuguese royal on the new Brazilian throne. After over a decade of violent struggle, elite creole patriots on mainland Spanish America won independence only by making concessions, often ambivalently, across class and racial lines for greater inclusion and equality. Competing political visions and unresolved social tensions would persist into the post-independence era.