R2.3 Independence movements in the Americas (1763–1860)

Between 1776 and 1826 a series of revolutions ended European rule over almost all of the mainland Americas and created some twenty new states, from the United States to Argentina. These were among the first successful anti-colonial movements in the modern world. They spread ideas of popular sovereignty, republican government and written constitutions, but they also showed how hard it was to build stable nations from empires divided by race, class and region.

The overview timeline shows two waves. The first, in British North America, began with a quarrel over taxation in the 1760s and ended with recognition of the United States in 1783. The second, in Spanish and Portuguese America, began only when Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and Portugal in 1807–1808 left the empires without a legitimate ruler, and lasted until the last Spanish armies in South America surrendered in 1824–1826.

The Americas in 1763: empires, colonies and peoples

In 1763 four European powers ruled most of the Americas. Britain held thirteen colonies along the Atlantic coast, together with Canada and Florida, which it took from France and Spain in that year. Spain ruled a vast empire from California and Texas to Chile and the Río de la Plata (the river basin of modern Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay). Portugal ruled Brazil, and France kept its Caribbean sugar islands, the richest of which was Saint-Domingue (later Haiti).

All four empires ran on the economic theory of mercantilism. Colonies existed to supply raw materials and buy manufactured goods from the mother country, and their trade was restricted to ships and ports of the empire. In the British case the Navigation Acts, first passed in the 1650s and 1660s, restricted colonial trade to British or colonial ships and allowed certain goods, such as tobacco, to be shipped only to Britain. In practice smuggling was widespread, and colonial merchants and planters had grown used to loose enforcement.

The colonial societies were also deeply unequal. In Spanish America, people of European descent born in the Americas, called criollos (creoles), resented the privileges of peninsulares, Spaniards born in Spain who held the highest posts in government and the Church. Below both stood mestizos and other mixed-race groups, Indigenous communities that paid tribute, and enslaved Africans. In British North America the distinction between colonists and the British-born mattered much less, but the colonies depended on slavery, and settlers were pressing on Indigenous lands in the west.

Why the Thirteen Colonies broke with Britain, 1763–1776

In 1763 most colonists were proud to be British. Thirteen years later their representatives declared independence. The change came from a chain of disputes over who had the right to tax the colonies and govern them, in which each side’s response made the other more suspicious.

The Seven Years’ War and its costs

The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), known in North America as the French and Indian War, removed France from the mainland. By the Treaty of Paris (10 February 1763) Britain gained Canada and all French land east of the Mississippi, and Spain ceded Florida. Victory came at a high price. The British national debt rose to about £130 million, roughly double its pre-war level, and the government now had to defend a much larger empire in America.

Two decisions of 1763 angered colonists before any new tax was raised. Early in 1763 the government decided to keep about 10,000 soldiers in America in peacetime, and Pontiac’s War, a rising of Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes against British forts (1763–1766), seemed to confirm the need for them. The Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763 then forbade settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, to keep peace with Indigenous nations. Land speculators, including George Washington, and settlers who had fought for that land saw the Proclamation Line as a betrayal.

Taxation and resistance, 1764–1773

The government of George Grenville argued that the colonies should pay part of the cost of their own defence. The Sugar Act (1764) cut the duty on foreign molasses but enforced it strictly, and the Currency Act (1764) banned colonial paper money. The Stamp Act of 22 March 1765 went further. It was the first direct tax Parliament had laid on the colonies, requiring a stamp on newspapers, legal documents, licences and playing cards.

Colonial resistance was rapid and well organised. Nine colonies sent delegates to the Stamp Act Congress in New York (October 1765), which declared that colonists could be taxed only by their own assemblies. Merchants agreed to stop importing British goods, and the Sons of Liberty, groups of artisans, merchants and lawyers, intimidated stamp distributors until almost all of them resigned. Parliament repealed the Act in March 1766 but passed the Declaratory Act, which asserted its right to make laws for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever".

The argument turned on representation. British ministers claimed that the colonists enjoyed virtual representation: Parliament represented the whole empire, just as it represented the many Britons who had no vote. Colonists answered that only representatives they had actually elected could tax them, a principle summed up in the slogan "no taxation without representation".

The timeline of 1763–1776 shows the escalation. The Townshend Acts (1767) taxed imports of glass, paint, paper and tea and used the revenue to pay royal governors and judges, freeing them from colonial assemblies. A new boycott followed, and troops were sent to Boston in 1768. On 5 March 1770 soldiers fired on a crowd and killed five people. Patriot printers called it the Boston Massacre and used it as propaganda against a standing army. All the Townshend duties except the tea duty were repealed in 1770, and the next three years were relatively calm.

Resistance was also becoming organised across colonies. In 1772 Rhode Islanders burned the Gaspee, a British customs schooner that had run aground while chasing smugglers, and the threat to send the suspects to England for trial led Virginia’s assembly in 1773 to propose committees of correspondence between the colonies. Boston had set up its own committee in November 1772, after London announced that Massachusetts judges would be paid by the crown. The committees kept patriots in different towns and colonies in contact. The calm ended with the Tea Act (May 1773), which allowed the struggling East India Company to sell tea directly in America. The tea would be cheaper even with the duty, but colonists saw it as a trick to make them accept Parliament’s right to tax. On 16 December 1773 men disguised as Mohawks dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston harbour, the Boston Tea Party.

The print of the tarred and feathered excise man was made in London for British buyers, and it reflects how the Tea Party looked from there: lawless violence against a royal official. The Patriots described the same events as a defence of liberty. Both views helped push the two sides apart in 1774.

From the Coercive Acts to war, 1774–1775

Lord North’s government decided to punish Boston. The Coercive Acts of 1774, called the "Intolerable Acts" by colonists, closed the port of Boston until the tea was paid for, put Massachusetts under tighter royal control and allowed troops to be quartered in unoccupied buildings. At the same time the Quebec Act (1774) gave the former French colony a government without an elected assembly, recognised the Catholic Church and extended Quebec’s borders into the Ohio valley. Protestant colonists saw it as proof of a plan to impose "popery" and arbitrary rule.

Instead of isolating Massachusetts, the Acts united the colonies. Twelve colonies sent delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September 1774. It denied Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies and created the Continental Association, a boycott of British trade enforced by local committees, which in practice became a new form of government in many towns.

On 19 April 1775 British troops marching to seize militia weapons at Concord, Massachusetts, fought colonial militiamen at Lexington and Concord. The war had begun before independence was declared. At Bunker Hill outside Boston (17 June 1775) the British drove the militia from their positions but lost more than a thousand men killed and wounded, which showed that the colonists could fight. The Second Continental Congress made George Washington commander of the new Continental Army in June 1775, but in July it still sent the Olive Branch Petition asking George III to restore harmony. The king refused to receive it and on 23 August 1775 proclaimed the colonies to be in open rebellion.

Ideas: rights, republics and Common Sense

The colonists’ arguments drew on several traditions. The first was the English constitutional tradition of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689: no tax without consent of the taxpayers’ representatives, trial by jury and no standing army in peacetime. The second was the Enlightenment, above all John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), which taught that people have natural rights to life, liberty and property and that government rests on the consent of the governed. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748) supplied the idea that liberty needs a separation of powers.

A third tradition was the "Country" or radical Whig ideology of English opposition writers such as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, whose Cato’s Letters (1720–1723) warned that ministers always tried to corrupt and enslave free people. This taught colonists to read each new tax as a step in a deliberate plot against liberty. Classical republicanism, admired through Roman authors, added the ideal of virtuous citizens serving the common good.

In January 1776 Thomas Paine, an English immigrant who had arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, published Common Sense. It attacked monarchy itself, called George III a "royal brute" and argued that independence was in America’s economic interest. Written in plain language for ordinary readers, it was reprinted many times. Paine himself claimed sales of over 100,000 copies; some recent historians think the true figure was lower, but the pamphlet was certainly the most widely read of the revolution.

Small islands not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, pamphlet, Philadelphia, January 1776. Paine wrote to persuade ordinary colonists that independence was natural and practical, at a moment when Congress was still divided. The extract shows how he turned a constitutional dispute into an argument from geography and common sense, a style aimed at readers who had not read Locke.

Social and religious factors

Religion shaped the revolution in two ways. The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, a wave of evangelical revivals, had taught many colonists to question established authority in the Church and to make their own moral choices. Protestant fear of Catholicism, sharpened by the Quebec Act, made British policy look like a threat to religious liberty. Many clergy preached resistance as a religious duty.

Social groups had their own reasons. Urban artisans and labourers formed the crowds that enforced boycotts. Virginia tobacco planters owed large debts to British merchants and hoped independence would free them from both the debts and the Proclamation Line. Not all colonists agreed. Loyalists, perhaps 15–20 per cent of the white population, stayed loyal to the king. They included royal officials, many Anglican clergy, merchants dependent on British trade, and recent immigrants and frontier communities who distrusted coastal elites.

Enslaved Africans and Indigenous nations made their own choices, usually for the side that seemed more likely to protect their freedom or land. Most Indigenous nations sided with Britain, which had at least tried to stop settlers crossing the Proclamation Line. In November 1775 the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to enslaved people who would fight for the king.

And I do hereby farther declare all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining his Majesty’s Troops as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty.

John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, Proclamation, issued aboard a ship off Norfolk, Virginia, 7 November 1775. Dunmore offered freedom only to the enslaved people of rebels, and only to those who could fight, because his aim was military. Some 800 to 2,000 people reached his lines. The proclamation drove many hesitant white Virginians towards independence, which shows that the defence of slavery was one motive among the Patriot elite.

The Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776

On 2 July 1776 Congress voted for Richard Henry Lee’s resolution that the colonies "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States". Two days later it adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted mainly by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Its opening set out a general theory of government.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Thomas Jefferson and the Second Continental Congress, Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, 4 July 1776. The document was written for several audiences at once: colonists who still hesitated, and foreign powers, above all France, whose help the new states needed. Most of its text is a list of 27 grievances against George III, among them "imposing Taxes on us without our Consent". Its claim that "all men are created equal" was written by a slaveholder and did not apply to enslaved people, women or Indigenous Americans, a contradiction that later movements used against the new republic.

The diagram of causes groups the factors under four headings. A judgement on their relative weight needs to explain how they interacted. British actions after 1763 were the immediate cause of every crisis, but colonists responded so strongly because ideas of English rights and natural rights led them to read taxes as a threat to liberty, and because their assemblies had long governed themselves. Economic grievances mattered most for particular groups, such as Boston merchants and Virginia planters, more than for the colonies as a whole.

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The War of American Independence, 1775–1783

The Americans faced the strongest navy in the world and a professional army supported by hired German troops. Yet Britain never managed to turn battlefield victories into control of the colonies. The war went through three phases: a war in the north (1775–1778), a world war after France joined in 1778, and a British campaign in the south that ended at Yorktown in 1781.

The war in the north, 1775–1778

After Lexington and Concord, New England militia besieged the British in Boston, who withdrew by sea in March 1776. In the summer of 1776 General William Howe landed the largest British army yet seen in America at New York and drove Washington out of the city. By December the Continental Army had shrunk to a few thousand men and many enlistments were about to expire. Washington then crossed the Delaware River on the night of 25–26 December 1776 and captured a garrison of Hessian (German) soldiers at Trenton, and defeated a British force at Princeton on 3 January 1777. These small victories saved the army and restored morale.

In 1777 the British planned to cut off New England by sending General John Burgoyne south from Canada along the Hudson valley. Howe, instead of moving north to meet him, sailed to capture Philadelphia, the seat of Congress. Burgoyne’s army, slowed by forests and harried by militia, was surrounded and surrendered to Horatio Gates at Saratoga on 17 October 1777. About 6,000 men were lost.

Saratoga and the French alliance

Saratoga was the turning point of the war because of its effect in Europe. France had secretly sent money and arms since 1776, hoping to weaken Britain after its defeat in the Seven Years’ War. Benjamin Franklin, the American envoy in Paris, used the victory to persuade the government of Louis XVI that the Americans could win. On 6 February 1778 France signed a Treaty of Alliance with the United States. Spain entered the war as France’s ally in 1779, and Britain declared war on the Dutch Republic in December 1780. In the same year Russia led a League of Armed Neutrality of European states that resisted British searches of their ships, leaving Britain without a single ally.

The French alliance changed the war in three ways. It provided loans, uniforms, muskets and gunpowder on a large scale. It forced Britain to defend the Caribbean, India, Gibraltar and Britain itself, so fewer ships and soldiers were available for North America. It also gave the Americans a navy able to challenge British control of the sea for the first time.

The southern campaign and Yorktown, 1778–1781

From late 1778 the British turned south, where they believed Loyalists were numerous. They took Savannah (December 1778) and Charleston (May 1780), where about 5,000 American soldiers surrendered, the largest American loss of the war. The campaign then became a brutal partisan war between Patriot and Loyalist militias. Nathanael Greene, Washington’s most trusted general, took command in the south in December 1780. He avoided decisive defeat and wore down Lord Cornwallis’s army through a war of movement. Patriot militia had already destroyed a Loyalist force at Kings Mountain (October 1780), and Greene’s subordinate Daniel Morgan won at Cowpens (January 1781).

In 1781 Cornwallis moved into Virginia and fortified Yorktown on the coast, expecting the Royal Navy to supply him. Washington and the French general Rochambeau marched their armies 450 miles south from New York. A French fleet under the Comte de Grasse defeated a British fleet at the Battle of the Chesapeake (5 September 1781) and blocked the bay. Trapped by about 17,000 French and American troops, Cornwallis surrendered some 8,000 men on 19 October 1781.

Yorktown did not destroy British power in America, as the army still held New York and Charleston. It destroyed the will of Parliament to continue. Lord North’s government fell in March 1782, and the Treaty of Paris (1783), signed on 3 September 1783, recognised the independence of the United States with a western border on the Mississippi.

Why the Americans won

The diagram of reasons for American victory shows three groups of factors. Each group needed the others. The Continental Army rarely won major battles, but by surviving it prevented Britain from claiming victory, while the militia made it impossible for British forces to hold territory once they moved on. French intervention supplied what the Americans lacked most, money and sea power, and Yorktown could not have happened without it. British mistakes and the distance of 3,000 miles, which meant that orders took six to eight weeks to cross the Atlantic, made the war harder to win from the start.

Washington and the other leaders of the American Revolution

Many leaders contributed to independence in different ways. Their roles can be analysed under four headings: intellectual contribution (the ideas that justified independence), political contribution (building institutions and declaring independence), military contribution, and the mobilisation of popular support.

George Washington

George Washington (1732–1799) was a Virginia planter and slaveholder who had fought for Britain in the Seven Years’ War. Congress chose him as commander-in-chief in June 1775, partly because a Virginian would bind the southern colonies to a war that had begun in New England. His main military contribution was to keep the Continental Army in existence for eight years. After the near-disaster at New York in 1776 he adopted a Fabian strategy, avoiding a decisive battle that could destroy his army while striking where the British were weak, as at Trenton.

The winter at Valley Forge (1777–1778) showed Washington’s qualities as an organiser. Perhaps 2,000 soldiers died of disease there, but the army was rebuilt with the help of the Prussian officer Baron von Steuben, who trained it in standard European drill. Washington also managed difficult relations with Congress, which often failed to pay or supply the army, and with the French.

His political contribution was as important as his generalship. In March 1783 some officers at Newburgh, New York, angry at unpaid wages, discussed defying Congress. Washington addressed them in person and persuaded them to remain loyal, which helped to prevent the military coup that later ended several Latin American republics. In December 1783 he resigned his command to Congress and returned to his estate at Mount Vernon. The act established the principle that the army was subordinate to civilian government.

Other leaders

Building the United States, 1781–1860

Winning independence left the thirteen states with the task of building a nation. Their first constitution failed within a decade, and the one that replaced it, the Constitution of 1787, rested on compromises over slavery that later divided the country.

The Articles of Confederation, 1781–1789

The Articles of Confederation, adopted by Congress in 1777 and ratified on 1 March 1781, created a "league of friendship" between sovereign states. Each state had one vote in Congress, and major decisions needed nine of the thirteen. Congress could make war and treaties, but it could not tax, regulate trade or force the states to obey, and amendments needed every state to agree.

The Articles had real achievements. The Land Ordinance of 1785 set up a system for surveying and selling western land, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided for new states to be created north of the Ohio River on equal terms with the old ones, and banned slavery there. Their weaknesses were more visible. Congress could not pay the war debt, the states taxed each other’s trade, and Britain refused to leave its forts in the west.

The crisis came with Shays’ Rebellion (1786–1787), a revolt of indebted farmers in western Massachusetts led by Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain. The farmers closed courts to stop foreclosures on their land. Congress had no army to suppress them, and the state used a militia paid for by Boston merchants. To many leaders the rising showed that the republic could collapse into disorder without a stronger central government. A meeting of five states at Annapolis in September 1786, called to discuss trade, had already proposed a convention to revise the Articles.

The Constitution of 1787

Delegates from twelve states (Rhode Island refused to attend) met in Philadelphia from May to September 1787, with Washington presiding. They went beyond their instructions to amend the Articles and wrote a new constitution, signed on 17 September 1787. Its main architect was James Madison of Virginia.

The diagram of the Constitution shows its two main principles. The separation of powers, taken from Montesquieu, divided the federal government into legislative, executive and judicial branches, with checks and balances so that none could dominate. Federalism divided sovereignty between the federal government and the states. Both principles reflected the fear of concentrated power that had driven the revolution.

The Constitution was a bundle of compromises. The Great (Connecticut) Compromise gave each state two senators but allocated seats in the House of Representatives by population, balancing large and small states. Three compromises dealt with slavery without naming it:

• the Three-Fifths Compromise counted three-fifths of the enslaved population when allocating House seats and direct taxes, which increased the power of the slave states;

• Congress could not ban the import of enslaved Africans before 1808;

• the fugitive slave clause obliged states to return people who escaped from slavery.

Ratification needed nine state conventions and produced a fierce public debate. Federalists, who supported the Constitution, argued their case in 85 newspaper essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, later published as The Federalist (1787–1788). In Federalist No. 10 Madison argued that a large republic would control factions better than a small one. Anti-Federalists feared a distant government that could become a tyranny and demanded a bill of rights. The Constitution came into force in 1789, and the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were ratified in December 1791.

Washington’s presidency and the early republic

As first president (1789–1797), Washington set precedents that shaped the role of the leader in the new state. He formed a cabinet, used the title "Mr President" rather than a royal style, and stepped down after two terms, a limit that every president followed until 1940. His Farewell Address of 1796 warned against party divisions and permanent foreign alliances.

His Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, dealt with the economic legacy of the war. The federal government took over the war debts of the states (assumption, 1790), created a Bank of the United States (1791) and raised revenue from customs duties and an excise on whiskey. The plan restored the credit of the United States but divided its leaders. Jefferson and Madison feared it favoured northern merchants and creditors, and their Democratic-Republican party opposed Hamilton’s Federalists. When Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800, power passed peacefully from one party to another, a test that many of the new republics in Latin America failed.

The new republic expanded rapidly. The Louisiana Purchase from France (1803) doubled its territory for 15 million dollars. The Adams–Onís Treaty with Spain (1819) gave it Florida and a border to the Pacific. Expansion also raised the question of whether new states would allow slavery: the Missouri Compromise (1820) admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free one, and banned slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30′. The sectional conflict this foreshadowed belongs to the history of the US Civil War. Expansion came at the expense of Indigenous nations. The Indian Removal Act (1830) forced some 60,000 people of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations west of the Mississippi; on the Cherokee "Trail of Tears" (1838–1839) about 4,000 people died.

The War of 1812

The War of 1812 was the young republic’s second war with Britain. Its causes lay in the Napoleonic Wars. The Royal Navy stopped American ships and took off sailors it claimed were British deserters, a practice called impressment, and in 1807 a British warship fired on the US frigate Chesapeake to seize four of its crew; British Orders in Council restricted American trade with France; and Americans in the west blamed Britain for supporting the Indigenous confederacy led by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh. A group of congressmen known as the "War Hawks" also hoped to conquer Canada. Congress declared war on 18 June 1812.

American invasions of Canada failed. British regulars, Canadian militia and Indigenous allies captured Detroit (August 1812) and won at Queenston Heights (October 1812), where the British general Isaac Brock was killed. The Americans burned York (now Toronto) in 1813 and killed Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames (October 1813). In August 1814 a British force burned Washington, including the White House. The Treaty of Ghent (24 December 1814) restored the pre-war borders. News travelled slowly, and Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans (8 January 1815) came after the treaty had been signed.

The war’s consequences differed for each side. In the USA it produced a wave of nationalism and destroyed the Federalist party, whose New England leaders had met at the Hartford Convention (1814–1815) to oppose the war. For Indigenous nations east of the Mississippi it was a disaster, since it ended their hope of British support against American expansion. In British North America it created lasting myths of a Canada defended by loyal settlers, such as the story of Laura Secord’s walk to warn British troops in 1813, and it strengthened a sense of identity separate from the USA.

Creating an American national identity

Americans built a national identity around the revolution itself. The Fourth of July became a national festival, Washington became a national hero (the capital was named after him), and Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) promoted American spelling. By the 1840s many believed in Manifest Destiny, a term coined by the journalist John L. O’Sullivan in 1845 for the idea that the United States was destined to spread across the continent. The identity was exclusive. It left out enslaved African Americans, whose numbers grew after independence, and Indigenous nations, whose land it claimed.

Why Spanish America sought independence, 1763–1810

In 1800 the Spanish empire in America was nearly three centuries old and had faced no serious threat from its creole elites. Independence movements emerged only after 1808, and at first most of them did not seek independence at all. Explaining them means separating the long-term grievances that weakened loyalty to Spain from the sudden crisis that made the question of who should govern unavoidable.

The Bourbon reforms

After 1700 a new dynasty, the Bourbons, ruled Spain. Under Charles III (1759–1788), and especially through José de Gálvez, inspector-general of New Spain (1765–1771) and then minister for the Indies (1776–1787), the crown tried to turn its American kingdoms into colonies that produced more revenue and were more tightly controlled. Historians call this programme the Bourbon reforms.

The reforms touched almost every part of colonial life:

• Administration. New viceroyalties were created in New Granada (1739) and the Río de la Plata (1776). From the 1760s intendants, salaried officials usually born in Spain, replaced local officials who had often run their districts as private businesses.

• Offices. The crown stopped selling high offices and appointed far more peninsulares to the audiencias (the high courts) and senior posts in the Church and army, ending a period in which creoles had come to dominate them.

• Taxation. The sales tax (alcabala) was collected more efficiently, and the crown created monopolies on tobacco and other goods. Revenue from New Spain rose sharply.

• Trade. The decree of comercio libre (1778) allowed trade between more Spanish and American ports, which increased trade but chiefly benefited merchants in Spain.

• The Church. In 1767 Charles III expelled the Jesuits, many of them creoles, from the empire, and the crown later seized Church funds.

The most damaging single measure came late. In 1804 the crown, short of money for its wars against Britain, ordered the Consolidación de Vales Reales in New Spain, which forced the Church to call in the loans it had made to landowners and send the money to Spain. Many creole landowners, who had borrowed from the Church against their estates, faced ruin.

The British historian John Lynch described the reforms as amounting to a second conquest of America, because they replaced a negotiated system in which creoles shared power with direct rule from Madrid. Even so, the reforms did not produce independence movements on their own. They provoked protest and revolt, but the revolts of the 1780s were directed against bad government and new taxes, not against the king.

Revolts of the 1780s

The largest revolt broke out in the Andes in November 1780. José Gabriel Condorcanqui, a wealthy mestizo descendant of the Inca rulers who took the name Túpac Amaru II, executed a hated local official and raised a mainly Indigenous army against the abuses of the corregidores (district officials) and the forced sale of goods to Indigenous communities. The rebellion spread across southern Peru and Upper Peru (modern Bolivia). Túpac Amaru was captured and executed in Cuzco in May 1781, but fighting continued until 1783, and tens of thousands of people died.

In the same year the Comunero revolt in New Granada (modern Colombia) brought thousands of people to march on Bogotá against new taxes, before its leaders were tricked into a settlement and later punished. Both revolts showed that creoles had grievances, but the violence of the Andean rising had a lasting effect. It taught many creoles that a breakdown of colonial order could lead to a war of race and class in which they would lose everything.

Society: creoles, castas and the fear of revolution

Spanish American society was organised in a legal hierarchy of birth and ancestry. At the top were the peninsulares, by John Lynch’s estimate only about 30,000 people in the whole empire around 1800. Creoles, nearly 3 million people (about a fifth of the population), owned most of the land, mines and businesses. Below them were the castas, people of mixed descent such as mestizos and pardos, then the Indigenous majority of Mexico and the Andes, and enslaved Africans, who were most numerous in Venezuela, the Caribbean coasts and Peru.

This structure pulled creoles in two directions. They resented peninsulares, who took the best offices and often married into creole families, and many saw themselves as Americans with their own patria (homeland). But they also depended on the colonial order to keep control of the castas, Indigenous communities and the enslaved. Events in Saint-Domingue sharpened this fear. The revolution of the enslaved there from 1791, which created the independent state of Haiti in 1804, was both an inspiration for the enslaved and free people of colour and a warning to every slaveholding elite in the Americas.

Ideas: the Enlightenment and Spanish political theory

Enlightenment ideas reached Spanish America through books, which circulated despite censorship by the Inquisition, through universities and through creoles who travelled to Europe. In Bogotá in 1793 Antonio Nariño printed a Spanish translation of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and was imprisoned for it. The Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who had fought in the French Revolutionary army, spent years in London seeking British support for independence and led a failed invasion of Venezuela in 1806. Most educated creoles read the Enlightenment selectively, using its ideas of reason, economic freedom and good government without accepting its attacks on the Church.

Equally important was an older Spanish tradition. Spanish theologians such as Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) had argued that political power came from God through the people, who entrusted it to the king. If the king could not rule, sovereignty returned to the people, or at least to the kingdoms and their town councils. In 1808 this theory gave creoles a legal, Catholic and loyal justification for governing themselves, without any need to call themselves revolutionaries.

The examples of other revolutions mattered too. The United States showed that colonies could win independence and build a republic. The French Revolution, especially after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 and the Terror, made many creoles associate radical ideas with disorder and attacks on religion.

The crisis of the Spanish monarchy, 1808–1810

The trigger came from Europe. In 1807 Napoleon sent French troops through Spain to attack Portugal, Britain’s ally. In 1808 he forced the Spanish king Charles IV and his son Ferdinand VII to give up the throne at Bayonne in France and made his own brother Joseph Bonaparte king of Spain. For the first time in three centuries the Spanish world had no legitimate king.

The chain of events from 1808 shows how the crisis crossed the Atlantic. In Spain, local juntas rose against the French in the name of the captive "desired" Ferdinand, and a Junta Central in Seville claimed to govern the whole empire. Americans asked why they should obey a junta in Spain rather than create their own, as Spaniards had done. In 1809 the Junta Central declared that the American territories were not colonies but equal parts of the monarchy, yet it offered them only nine representatives against thirty-six for Spain.

When French armies overran Andalusia in early 1810 and the Junta Central dissolved, it seemed that Spain would fall. The town councils (cabildos) of the main American cities formed juntas of their own: Caracas on 19 April, Buenos Aires on 25 May, Bogotá on 20 July and Santiago de Chile on 18 September 1810. In Mexico, where the viceroy and peninsulares had blocked a creole junta by a coup in 1808, the movement took the form of a popular insurrection led by the priest Miguel Hidalgo in September 1810.

The Cortes of Cádiz and the Constitution of 1812

In unoccupied Cádiz a parliament, the Cortes, met from September 1810 with deputies from Spain and America. In 1812 it produced the Constitution of Cádiz, one of the most liberal constitutions of its time. It made the nation sovereign, created a constitutional monarchy, abolished Indigenous tribute and forced labour, and gave the vote to most men of Spanish or Indigenous descent in Spain and America.

Cádiz offered Americans a place in a reformed Spanish nation, and many creole moderates accepted it. Its limits mattered as much as its promises. Men of African descent were excluded from citizenship, so American deputies could not win the equal representation their population deserved, and the Cortes refused freedom of trade for the Americas. In 1814 the restored Ferdinand VII abolished the constitution and tried to reconquer America by force, which closed the path of reform within the monarchy for most creoles.

Bolívar summed up the creole case against Spain in a letter written in exile in Jamaica in 1815, after the defeat of the second Venezuelan republic.

Americans, under the Spanish system now in vigor, have in society no other place than that of serfs fit for work, and, at the most, that of simple consumers; and even this is limited by absurd restrictions, such as prohibition of the cultivation of European products; the monopoly of certain goods in the hands of the king; the prevention of the establishment in America of factories not possessed by Spain.

Simón Bolívar, Letter from Jamaica ("Reply of a South American to a Gentleman of this Island"), Kingston, 6 September 1815, adapted from the translation printed by Guillermo A. Sherwell, Simón Bolívar (the Liberator) (1921). Bolívar wrote in English-speaking Jamaica to win British sympathy and support, so he stressed the economic restrictions that a trading nation would understand. His "Americans" are the creole elite. Elsewhere in the letter he describes them as neither Indians nor Europeans but "a mixture of the legitimate owners of the country and the usurping Spaniards", which shows how creoles claimed an American identity while keeping their place above the Indigenous majority.

The diagram of causes shows why historians disagree about their relative weight. The long-term grievances explain why creoles were open to self-government. The crisis of 1808 explains why movements began in 1810 and not earlier, and why they started as loyal juntas. Spanish policy after 1814, which offered repression instead of reform, explains why many moderates came to support full independence by the late 1810s.

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Venezuela, New Granada and Bolívar’s wars, 1810–1826

Northern South America saw the longest and most destructive wars of independence. Their central figure was Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), a wealthy creole from Caracas whose family owned cacao estates and enslaved workers. Educated partly by the radical tutor Simón Rodríguez and in Europe, he had read Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau, and in 1805 in Rome he swore to free his country from Spain.

The First and Second Republics, 1810–1814

The Caracas junta of April 1810 was led by the creole elite. Under the influence of radicals such as Bolívar and the returned Francisco de Miranda, a congress declared Venezuela independent on 5 July 1811. The First Republic restricted the vote to property owners and kept slavery, so it offered little to the pardos, the largest group in the population, or to the enslaved. Royalist forces raised in the provinces, many of them pardos, advanced on Caracas, and a severe earthquake on 26 March 1812, which struck on Holy Thursday, was preached by royalist clergy as God’s judgement. Miranda capitulated in July 1812 and died in a Spanish prison.

Bolívar escaped to Cartagena in New Granada. In his Cartagena Manifesto (December 1812) he blamed the republic’s fall on weak federal government and leniency towards enemies. In 1813 he led the "Admirable Campaign" back into Venezuela and issued the decree of War to the Death (15 June 1813), which threatened death to Spaniards who did not actively support independence and spared Americans even if they had fought for Spain. The decree aimed to turn a civil war among Americans into a national war against Spaniards.

The Second Republic lasted barely a year. José Tomás Boves, a Spanish-born royalist leader, raised the llaneros, the mixed-race cowboys of the Orinoco plains, with promises of plunder and attacks on the white creole elite. His cavalry destroyed the republic in 1814 in a war of extreme violence. In 1815 Spain sent its largest expedition of the wars, about 10,000 troops under General Pablo Morillo, which reconquered Venezuela and New Granada.

Haiti and the turning of the war, 1815–1819

In exile, Bolívar wrote the Letter from Jamaica (September 1815), which analysed why the revolutions had failed and predicted the future of each region. He found real help in Haiti. President Alexandre Pétion supplied ships, weapons, money and men for expeditions in 1816, asking in return that Bolívar free the enslaved in the lands he liberated. Bolívar issued emancipation decrees in 1816, though they applied mainly to men who joined his army and were only partly carried out.

Bolívar changed his strategy. Instead of trying to hold Caracas, he made his base at Angostura on the Orinoco, far from Spanish strength, and in 1817–1818 won the allegiance of José Antonio Páez, a llanero leader whose horsemen now fought for independence. Some 5,000–7,000 volunteers from Britain and Ireland, many of them veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, formed the British Legions. Bolívar also enforced his authority over rival patriot leaders, in 1817 having General Manuel Piar, a pardo commander, tried and shot for insubordination.

In February 1819 Bolívar opened the Congress of Angostura. In his address he argued that the new republics needed a strong executive and a hereditary senate, because their peoples were not ready for the federalism of the USA. Then, in the rainy season of 1819, he led his army across the flooded llanos and over the Andes into New Granada, where the royalists did not expect him. The victory at Boyacá (7 August 1819) gave him Bogotá. In December 1819 Venezuela and New Granada were united as the Republic of Colombia, usually called Gran Colombia, with Bolívar as president.

Carabobo, Ecuador and Peru, 1821–1826

After a six-month armistice in 1820, during which Morillo returned to Spain, Bolívar and Páez won the decisive battle of Carabobo (24 June 1821), which freed Venezuela. Bolívar’s best general, Antonio José de Sucre, then liberated Quito at Pichincha (24 May 1822). In July 1822 Bolívar met San Martín at Guayaquil. What they said is not recorded, but San Martín withdrew from public life soon afterwards and left the liberation of Peru to Bolívar.

Peru, the centre of royalist power, was the hardest task. Its creole elite was conservative, Lima had a large Spanish garrison, and the memory of Túpac Amaru made landowners fear any popular rising. Bolívar arrived in 1823, was made dictator in 1824, and defeated the royalists at Junín (6 August 1824). Sucre destroyed the last Spanish army in South America at Ayacucho on 9 December 1824. Upper Peru became an independent republic named Bolivia in 1825, and the last Spanish garrison, in the fortress of Callao, surrendered in January 1826.

Río de la Plata, Chile and San Martín, 1806–1822

The movement in the south followed a different path. Buenos Aires was never reconquered by Spain, and its independence came from a local creole government that existed from 1810.

The British invasions and the May Revolution

In 1806 and 1807 British forces captured and then lost Buenos Aires. They were defeated not by the Spanish viceroy, who fled, but by local militias raised among creoles, Spaniards and the urban poor. The episode showed creoles that they could defend themselves, gave them armed units of their own, and led the city to depose the viceroy and choose its own leader, Santiago de Liniers.

When news arrived in May 1810 that Andalusia had fallen to the French, an open meeting of the cabildo replaced the viceroy with a junta on 25 May 1810, the May Revolution. The junta ruled in Ferdinand VII’s name, but it soon faced the problems that would mark Argentina’s history: the interior provinces resented Buenos Aires, Paraguay broke away in 1811, and the Banda Oriental (modern Uruguay) followed its own leader, José Artigas. Three expeditions to Upper Peru were defeated by royalist armies from Peru. Formal independence was declared only on 9 July 1816, by the Congress of Tucumán.

San Martín and the Army of the Andes

José de San Martín (1778–1850), born in the Río de la Plata, had served in the Spanish army for more than twenty years and fought against Napoleon in Spain before returning to Buenos Aires in 1812. He concluded that the revolution could never be safe while royalists held Peru, and that the route to Lima ran through Chile and the Pacific, not through the mountains of Upper Peru.

As governor of Cuyo from 1814, San Martín spent three years building a professional Army of the Andes at Mendoza. He trained it, raised taxes and supplies from the province, recruited Chilean exiles under Bernardo O’Higgins, and freed enslaved men who enlisted, who made up a large share of the infantry. In January and February 1817 about 5,000 men crossed the Andes by several passes at altitudes of over 3,500 metres, a feat of logistics and planning.

The army defeated the royalists at Chacabuco (12 February 1817) and took Santiago. O’Higgins became Supreme Director of Chile, which declared its independence on 12 February 1818. After a defeat at Cancha Rayada, San Martín won the decisive battle of Maipú (5 April 1818). Chile then built a navy under the British admiral Lord Cochrane, which carried San Martín’s army to Peru in 1820. San Martín entered Lima and declared Peru independent on 28 July 1821, taking the title of Protector. He lacked the strength to defeat the royalist army in the highlands, and after the Guayaquil meeting he resigned in September 1822 and left for Europe, where he died in 1850.

The map of Latin America in 1823 shows the result of the two great campaigns. San Martín’s forces moved from the Río de la Plata across the Andes to Chile and by sea to Peru; Bolívar’s moved from Venezuela to New Granada, Ecuador and finally Peru, where the two movements met. Brazil, which became independent without a war of this kind, stretched across the east of the continent.

Mexico: from popular insurgency to conservative independence, 1810–1823

New Spain was the richest part of the Spanish empire and produced most of the world’s silver. Its independence movement went through two phases with almost opposite aims. The first was a mass rising of the rural poor, which failed. The second, eleven years later, was a conservative movement of the creole elite and the army, which succeeded.

Hidalgo and the Grito de Dolores, 1810–1811

In 1808 the viceroy José de Iturrigaray had seemed ready to accept a creole junta; peninsular merchants overthrew him in a coup in September 1808. Creoles who still wanted autonomy began to conspire. When their plot was discovered, one of them, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the creole parish priest of the town of Dolores, called his parishioners to rise on 16 September 1810. This call, the Grito de Dolores, was made against bad government and the peninsulares, in the name of Ferdinand VII and the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint.

Hidalgo’s movement grew into a mass army of perhaps 80,000 Indigenous and mestizo peasants and mine workers, driven by hunger after poor harvests and by anger at landowners and Spaniards. On 28 September 1810 it stormed the granary of Guanajuato, the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, and massacred the Spaniards and creoles who had taken refuge there. The violence turned most creoles against Hidalgo. They saw a war of race and class like the one they feared, and joined the royalist army of Félix Calleja. Hidalgo was defeated at the Bridge of Calderón (January 1811), captured, and executed in July 1811.

Morelos and the programme of the insurgency, 1811–1815

Leadership passed to José María Morelos, a mestizo priest and a more able general. Morelos organised disciplined guerrilla forces in the south and gave the movement a clear programme. In 1813 he called a congress at Chilpancingo and presented his Sentiments of the Nation, which demanded independence, the Catholic religion as the only faith, the abolition of slavery and of distinctions of caste, and a government based on popular sovereignty. The congress declared independence in November 1813, and the Constitution of Apatzingán (1814) set up a republic. Morelos was captured and executed in December 1815, and the insurgency shrank to guerrilla bands led by Vicente Guerrero and Guadalupe Victoria.

Iturbide and the Plan of Iguala, 1820–1821

The movement revived because of events in Spain. In January 1820 army units waiting at Cádiz to sail for America, led by Colonel Rafael del Riego, mutinied and forced Ferdinand VII to restore the liberal Constitution of 1812. The new liberal government in Madrid attacked Church privileges, restricted the special legal rights (fueros) of the clergy and threatened those of the army. For conservative creoles, senior clergy and officers in Mexico, independence now seemed the best way to protect their position against Spanish liberalism.

Agustín de Iturbide, a creole royalist officer who had fought the insurgents for a decade, was sent to destroy Guerrero. Instead, he negotiated with him. On 24 February 1821 he issued the Plan of Iguala, which united royalists and insurgents behind three guarantees.

1. The Roman Catholic Apostolic religion, without toleration of any other. 2. Absolute independence of this kingdom. 3. Monarchical government, tempered by a constitution suited to the country. … 12. All the inhabitants of it, with no distinction other than their merit and virtues, are citizens suitable to hold any employment.

Agustín de Iturbide, Plan of Iguala, 24 February 1821, articles 1–3 and 12 (English translation of the Spanish text). The plan was a political compromise written to win over every powerful group at once. Religion and monarchy reassured the clergy, conservatives and Spaniards; independence satisfied the insurgents; and the promise of equal citizenship attracted castas and Indigenous people without threatening anyone’s property. Article 14 also guaranteed the clergy all their privileges and property, which shows whose support Iturbide most needed.

The Army of the Three Guarantees grew quickly as royalist garrisons changed sides. The new Spanish captain-general, Juan O’Donojú, recognised that he could not resist and signed the Treaty of Córdoba (24 August 1821). Iturbide entered Mexico City on 27 September 1821, and independence was declared the next day. When no European prince would accept the throne, Iturbide had himself proclaimed Emperor Agustín I in May 1822. His rule lasted less than a year. He dissolved Congress, could not pay the army, and was overthrown in 1823 by a revolt led by the young officer Antonio López de Santa Anna. Mexico became a federal republic under the Constitution of 1824.

Brazil: independence through monarchy, 1808–1825

Brazil became independent in a way that had no parallel in Spanish America. In November 1807, as French troops approached Lisbon, the Portuguese royal family and court, perhaps 10,000 people, sailed for Brazil under the escort of the Royal Navy. They arrived in Rio de Janeiro in March 1808. For thirteen years Rio was the capital of the Portuguese empire.

The court’s presence transformed Brazil. Its ports were opened to the trade of friendly nations in 1808, which in practice meant Britain, and a treaty of 1810 gave British goods lower tariffs than Portuguese ones. Rio gained a bank, a printing press, schools and a royal library. In 1815 Brazil was raised to a kingdom equal to Portugal within the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves. Brazil therefore did not suffer the crisis of legitimacy that hit Spanish America in 1808: it had its king living in its capital.

The break with Portugal, 1820–1822

The crisis came from Portugal. A liberal revolution in Porto in August 1820 created a Cortes in Lisbon that demanded the king’s return. João VI went back in April 1821 and left his son Pedro as regent in Brazil. The Portuguese Cortes then tried to reduce Brazil to its old colonial status and ordered Pedro home. Brazilian elites, led by the statesman José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, urged him to stay. On 9 January 1822, the Dia do Fico ("Day of I Will Stay"), Pedro announced that he would remain. On 7 September 1822, on the banks of the Ipiranga stream near São Paulo, he declared Brazil independent, and he was crowned Emperor Pedro I on 1 December 1822.

Brazil’s war of independence was short. Portuguese garrisons held out in Bahia, Maranhão, Pará and the southern province of Cisplatina, and were expelled by Brazilian forces and a navy commanded by Lord Cochrane, who had served Chile. Salvador, the capital of Bahia, fell on 2 July 1823. Portugal recognised independence in 1825 through British mediation, and Brazil agreed to pay Portugal £2 million in compensation.

Why Brazil’s independence was different

Brazil’s path kept three things that Spanish America lost. It kept a monarchy, which gave the new state a legitimate ruler accepted by most of the elite. It kept its territorial unity, despite regional revolts, while Spanish America split into many states. And it kept slavery. The landowners who backed Pedro wanted independence precisely to protect the plantation economy, and Brazil remained one of the largest slave societies in the Americas and the last to abolish slavery, in 1888.

Haiti in comparison

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) is a focused study of its own. In a study of independence movements in the Americas it matters as the most radical case and as the one that shaped how the others were fought. In Saint-Domingue the enslaved majority rose in 1791, won the abolition of slavery in 1793–1794, defeated the expedition Napoleon sent to restore French control in 1802–1803, and declared the independent state of Haiti on 1 January 1804.

The table comparing the four paths shows why Haiti alarmed other elites. It was the only case in which the enslaved overthrew the colonial social order as well as colonial rule. The USA refused to recognise Haiti until 1862, and Haiti was not invited to the Congress of Panama in 1826, even though Pétion had helped Bolívar a decade earlier.

Why the revolutionary wars ended as they did

The wars of independence ended in victory for the independence movements everywhere on the mainland, but at very different speeds and costs. Their outcome can be explained by four groups of factors: military organisation, strategy and tactics, foreign support and regional collaboration, and the weaknesses of the colonial power. The same four headings that explain American victory in 1775–1783 can be used to compare the USA with Spanish America.

Military organisation

The early independence armies were militias, enthusiastic but poorly trained and unwilling to serve far from home. Victory came when leaders built armies that could fight and stay together. Washington’s Continental Army, trained at Valley Forge, and San Martín’s Army of the Andes, trained for three years at Mendoza, are the clearest examples. Bolívar’s armies were less formal but combined the llanero cavalry, the most effective mounted troops of the wars, with infantry stiffened by the British Legions. Naval power mattered at decisive moments: de Grasse’s fleet at Yorktown, Cochrane’s Chilean squadron in the Pacific, and his later service for Brazil against the Portuguese garrisons.

Strategies and tactics

Successful strategies avoided fighting the colonial power where it was strongest. Washington kept his army in being rather than risk it in a single battle. San Martín went round the royalist stronghold of Upper Peru by crossing the Andes to Chile and then attacking Lima from the sea. Bolívar moved his base to the Orinoco plains and in 1819 surprised the royalists in New Granada by crossing the Andes in the rainy season. In Mexico, after 1815, the insurgents survived through guerrilla warfare in the mountains of the south, but could not win until the royalist army itself changed sides in 1821.

Foreign support and regional collaboration

Foreign help was decisive in the USA, where French money, troops and ships made Yorktown possible. In Spanish America no foreign state openly intervened. Britain, at peace with Spain after 1808 because they were allies against Napoleon, stayed officially neutral, but British merchants sold arms, London bankers lent money to the new governments, and thousands of British volunteers fought for Bolívar. The Royal Navy’s control of the Atlantic also made it impossible for other European powers to help Spain. Haiti’s aid in 1816 came at the lowest point of Bolívar’s fortunes.

Regional collaboration was more important than foreign help in South America. Argentine and Chilean resources built the Army of the Andes and the fleet that took it to Peru; Colombian armies under Bolívar and Sucre finished the war in Peru and Upper Peru. Peru, the royalist stronghold, was liberated mainly by armies from other parts of South America.

Weaknesses of the colonial power

The weaknesses of Spain were the most important single explanation for its defeat. Its navy had been largely destroyed at Trafalgar in 1805, its treasury was bankrupt, and from 1808 to 1814 it was itself occupied by France. After 1815 it sent only one large expedition, Morillo’s, and in 1820 the army gathered at Cádiz to reconquer the Río de la Plata mutinied instead, beginning three years of liberal rule in Spain. The divisions between Spanish liberals and absolutists then weakened the royalist cause in America: in Peru, royalist commanders even fought among themselves in 1824. Britain’s weaknesses in 1775–1783 were of a different kind. It had the resources but not the political will to fight a long war 3,000 miles away against France, Spain and the Dutch at the same time.

The contributions of leaders: Washington, Bolívar, San Martín and others

Independence movements are often told as stories of great men, and their leaders have been turned into national heroes. A historical judgement asks what each leader actually contributed, and how far the outcome depended on them rather than on wider forces.

The comparison of leaders shows that different contributions mattered in different places. In the USA, where the colonies already had working assemblies and a Congress, Washington’s greatest contribution was to keep the army in being and under civilian control. In Venezuela, where there were no such institutions and the elite was divided, Bolívar had to supply ideas, institutions, military command and popular appeal at once. His success depended on his ability to change course after defeats, but his political projects, Gran Colombia and the Bolivian constitution, failed. San Martín was the most effective military planner of the wars, but he deliberately avoided politics.

Bolívar’s Angostura Address (1819) shows his political thinking. He argued that the new republics should not copy the federal constitution of the USA, which suited a people with long experience of self-government, but needed a strong central executive and an educated, hereditary senate. This view, which grew more authoritarian over time, was a reasoned answer to the problems of divided and inexperienced societies, but it also alienated liberals who had fought for a republic.

Establishing new nation states

Winning independence created states in law but not yet nations in fact. The new governments had to decide what kind of political system to adopt, where their borders lay, how to win recognition from other states, and how to persuade very different peoples that they belonged to one nation.

Constitutions and political systems

Almost every new state adopted a written constitution, and most chose republican government. They copied features from the US Constitution (a president, a congress, federalism) and from the Spanish Constitution of 1812 (sovereignty of the nation, the Catholic religion as the state religion). In practice constitutions were replaced often. Spanish American leaders disagreed about two questions in particular: whether the state should be federal or centralised, and how much power the Church and the army should keep.

The table of constitutions shows a pattern. The stable cases, the USA, Chile after 1833 and imperial Brazil, either had institutions that elites already accepted or gave great power to a strong central authority. Where constitutions tried to settle disputes that were still being fought out by arms, as in Mexico and Argentina, they rarely survived.

Borders and relations with neighbouring states

The new states generally claimed the borders of the colonial units they replaced, a principle later called uti possidetis. Since colonial boundaries had often been vague, especially in the Amazon, the Andes and the Chaco, this produced many disputes. Spanish America did not stay united, as Bolívar had hoped. It fragmented into states based on the old viceroyalties, captaincies-general and audiencias:

• The United Provinces of Central America left Mexico in 1823 and broke up into five states between 1838 and 1840.

• Gran Colombia split into Venezuela, Ecuador and New Granada (modern Colombia, with Panama) in 1830–1831.

• Paraguay broke away from Buenos Aires in 1811, and under José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1814–1840) it cut itself off from its neighbours.

• Uruguay was created in 1828 as a buffer state after a war between Brazil and Argentina over the Banda Oriental (1825–1828), with British mediation.

• Chile destroyed the Peru–Bolivian Confederation of Andrés de Santa Cruz in the War of the Confederation (1836–1839), to prevent a powerful rival on its northern border.

• Texas, settled largely by Americans, broke away from Mexico in 1836 and joined the USA in 1845.

The chain of events in Gran Colombia shows why the largest of Bolívar’s creations failed. Its three regions had separate economies, and travel between Caracas, Bogotá and Quito took weeks. Venezuelan leaders, above all Páez, resented government by New Granadan lawyers under the vice-president Francisco de Paula Santander, while Santander and the liberals distrusted Bolívar’s plans for a strong presidency. Gran Colombia had been held together by Bolívar’s armies and prestige, and it fell apart as both declined.

Diplomatic recognition

Recognition by other states gave the new governments legitimacy, access to loans and protection against reconquest. The USA was the first to recognise them, with Gran Colombia and Mexico in 1822, followed by Chile and the Río de la Plata in 1823. Britain followed when the foreign secretary George Canning decided in December 1824 to recognise Buenos Aires, Gran Colombia and Mexico through commercial treaties, signed in 1825–1826. Spain refused for much longer: it recognised Mexico only in 1836, after the death of Ferdinand VII, and most of the other republics between the 1840s and 1890s. The papacy was also slow, which created difficult disputes over who should appoint bishops.

Creating national identities

Independence leaders had appealed to "Americans" against Spaniards. After independence each state needed its own identity. Governments used flags, anthems, coins, holidays and the names of streets and towns. Mexico’s flag placed at its centre the eagle on a cactus from the legend of the founding of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, claiming the Indigenous past as Mexico’s own, while the Virgin of Guadalupe remained a symbol of the nation. Argentina adopted its anthem in 1813 and celebrated 25 May. Heroes were essential: in 1842 Venezuela brought Bolívar’s remains to Caracas, the start of a cult of the Liberator that later governments used for their own purposes.

These identities were built by small elites, usually in the capital, and many people did not share them for decades. Peasants in the Andes or the Mexican countryside often identified more with their village, region or ethnic group than with the nation. The national myths also excluded or romanticised groups: Brazilian writers of the 1850s celebrated Indigenous people of the past as noble ancestors while living Indigenous peoples were losing their land.

The role of leaders in the new states

The leaders who had won independence found it much harder to govern. Washington’s two terms and voluntary retirement became a model that the USA followed. In Spanish America, most of the liberators lost power or left. O’Higgins was forced to resign in Chile in 1823 and went into exile in Peru. San Martín left for Europe. Iturbide was overthrown in 1823 and shot when he returned in 1824. In Brazil, Pedro I quarrelled with the Brazilian elite and abdicated in 1831 in favour of his five-year-old son, who ruled as Pedro II from 1840 to 1889.

Bolívar’s own path shows the difficulty. He believed that only a strong executive could hold the new states together and wrote a constitution for Bolivia (1826) with a president for life. When Gran Colombia began to fall apart, he made himself dictator in 1828. An attempt to assassinate him in Bogotá on 25 September 1828 was linked to liberal opponents, and his authority never recovered. He resigned in 1830 and died near Santa Marta on 17 December 1830. A few weeks earlier he wrote to Juan José Flores, the Venezuelan-born general who had become president of the new state of Ecuador.

1. America is ungovernable for us. 2. He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea. 3. The only thing one can do in America is emigrate. 4. This country will fall without fail into the hands of the unbridled multitude, and then pass to petty tyrants, almost unnoticeable, of every colour and race.

Simón Bolívar, letter to General Juan José Flores, Barranquilla, 9 November 1830 (English translation of the Spanish text). Bolívar was ill, out of power and watching his union collapse, so the letter reflects personal bitterness as well as political analysis. As evidence it shows how even the most important leader of Spanish American independence judged its political results, and it is often quoted by historians who stress the instability that followed. His prediction of rule by "petty tyrants" describes the caudillos who dominated much of Spanish America in the following decades.

Post-independence challenges for the new nation states

The new states faced four main kinds of challenge: economic problems, many of them caused by the wars; threats from foreign powers; disputes over who should lead the state; and the demands of groups who had fought for independence but gained little from it. The USA dealt with them more successfully than most of Spanish America, for reasons that help to explain the different histories of the two halves of the continent.

Economic challenges and the costs of war

The wars of independence in Spanish America lasted up to fifteen years and destroyed much of the colonial economy. Armies seized cattle, crops and labourers. Mexico’s silver mines, the most important source of wealth in the empire, were flooded or abandoned, and silver production fell by more than half during the 1810s. In Venezuela the herds of the llanos were largely destroyed. Many Spanish merchants left with their capital, and the trade networks that had linked the colonies broke down.

Governments had to pay large armies and had few reliable taxes, since colonial taxes such as Indigenous tribute and the alcabala were unpopular and often abolished. They borrowed abroad. Between 1822 and 1825 Latin American governments raised about £20 million on the London market. By 1828 almost all of them had stopped paying interest. The defaults closed European capital markets to most of the region for decades and left debts that foreign powers later used as a reason for intervention.

British merchants quickly replaced Spanish ones. Britain became the main supplier of manufactured goods, especially cotton textiles, and the main buyer of Latin American exports. British power in the region, based on trade, loans and naval strength rather than colonies, is often described as informal empire. Historians debate how far it limited the independence of the new states: Latin American governments set their own tariffs and sometimes defied Britain, but their economies depended heavily on British markets and credit.

The United States faced war debts too, but solved the problem through Hamilton’s financial plan and growing trade. Its economy had been less damaged by the war, its institutions could raise taxes, and expansion westward provided land and new exports, above all cotton grown by enslaved workers.

External military threats

The new states remained vulnerable to outside powers. Spain refused to accept the loss of its empire, and in 1829 an expedition of about 3,000 men under Isidro Barradas landed at Tampico to reconquer Mexico; it was defeated by disease and by Mexican forces led by Santa Anna. France attacked Mexico in 1838 in the so-called Pastry War, which began over the claims of French citizens, including a pastry cook, for damages. A French fleet blockaded Mexican ports, captured the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa off Veracruz and raided the city until Mexico agreed to pay 600,000 pesos in March 1839. Britain occupied the Falkland Islands (Malvinas), claimed by Buenos Aires, in 1833. Britain and France blockaded the Río de la Plata in 1845–1850 during their conflicts with Rosas.

The greatest threat to Mexico came from the north. After Texas won independence in 1836 and joined the USA in 1845, the two states disagreed about the Texas border: Mexico claimed the Nueces River, the USA the Rio Grande further south. President James K. Polk, an expansionist who wanted California, sent troops into the disputed zone in 1846, and fighting there gave him the reason to ask Congress for war. In the Mexican–American War (1846–1848) US forces occupied Mexico City. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (2 February 1848) Mexico accepted the loss of Texas and ceded California and New Mexico, together about half of its territory, in return for 15 million dollars.

Disputes over leadership: the caudillos

The most serious challenge in Spanish America was political instability. In its first forty years of independence Mexico had dozens of presidents, most of whom took or lost power through military revolts. Power often belonged to caudillos, military strongmen who led personal followings of armed men and ruled through force and patronage.

Historians explain the rise of caudillos by the conditions independence left behind. The wars had militarised society and created many officers and armed bands with no other source of income. The collapse of the colonial state left a power vacuum, with no king and no accepted rules for transferring power. Regions were isolated from one another and from the capital, and weak economies meant that control of the state, its offices and its customs revenue, was the surest route to wealth. In the study by John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800–1850 (1992), the caudillos appear as products of war and of these conditions, and as defenders of the property and order that landowners wanted.

The diagram of caudillo networks shows why caudillo rule was both strong and unstable. A caudillo who could reward his followers kept their loyalty; when the rewards ran out, or a rival offered more, they changed sides. Three examples show the variety of caudillo rule:

• Juan Manuel de Rosas (Argentina) was a wealthy cattle rancher who led gaucho militias. As governor of Buenos Aires (1829–1832 and 1835–1852) with extraordinary powers, he dominated the Argentine Confederation. He claimed to defend the Federalists against the centralising Unitarians, used a political police called the Mazorca to terrorise opponents, and made everyone wear the red Federalist colour. He was overthrown in 1852 by Justo José de Urquiza, a rival caudillo, at the battle of Caseros.

• Antonio López de Santa Anna (Mexico) held the presidency on eleven separate occasions between 1833 and 1855, switching between liberal and conservative causes. He lost Texas in 1836 and commanded the armies defeated by the USA in 1847, but kept returning because he could raise troops and the elite had no alternative. He was finally overthrown by the liberal Revolution of Ayutla in 1855.

• José Antonio Páez (Venezuela), the llanero commander of the independence wars, led Venezuela’s secession from Gran Colombia and dominated its politics from 1830 to 1848, in alliance with the merchants and planters of Caracas. His rule was relatively orderly, which shows that caudillos could also bring stability.

Other cases include Dr José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who ruled Paraguay as "Supreme Dictator" from 1814 to 1840 and isolated it from the world; Rafael Carrera, an Indigenous-supported conservative who dominated Guatemala from 1839 to 1865; and Juan José Flores in Ecuador. The Argentine writer and later president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento attacked caudillo rule in Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845), a study of the provincial caudillo Facundo Quiroga written in exile from Rosas. He presented the caudillos as the barbarism of the countryside opposed to the civilisation of the cities, a view that shaped liberal thinking for decades but also reflected the prejudices of the urban elite.

Liberals and conservatives: the case of Mexico

Behind the struggles of the caudillos lay a real conflict of ideas. Liberals wanted a federal republic, equality before the law, the sale of Church and communal lands to create a class of small owners, and an end to the special legal privileges (fueros) of the clergy and army. Conservatives wanted a centralised state, the protection of the Church and the army, and, some of them, a monarchy. In Mexico the conflict produced the federal Constitution of 1824, the centralist Seven Laws of 1836 and, after Santa Anna’s fall, the Liberal Reform: the Ley Juárez (1855) abolished the fueros, the Ley Lerdo (1856) forced the Church and Indigenous communities to sell their corporate lands, and the Constitution of 1857 brought these together. Conservatives rejected it, and the War of the Reform (1858–1861) followed. The French intervention that came after it belongs to the next period of Mexican history.

Chile is the main exception to the pattern of instability. After a short civil war in 1829–1830, a conservative government led in practice by the minister Diego Portales built a strong central state, with the Constitution of 1833, a disciplined army, controlled elections and presidents who served two five-year terms. Chile’s small, compact territory and united landowning elite made this easier than in Mexico or Argentina.

Marginalised groups after independence

Independence leaders had promised liberty and equality, and many poor and non-white Americans fought in the wars. The results for them varied by group and by country.

Indigenous peoples

For Indigenous peoples independence often brought losses. In the USA it removed the British government, which had tried to limit settlement in the west, and opened the way to expansion and to removal policies such as the Indian Removal Act (1830). In Spanish America the new constitutions made Indigenous people citizens and abolished tribute and forced labour. In practice equality before the law meant the loss of the separate legal protections of the colonial period, and liberal reforms attacked the communal lands on which Indigenous villages depended. Several Andean states restored tribute under other names because they could not do without the revenue: Peru collected an "Indigenous contribution" until 1854 and Bolivia for much longer. In Yucatán the Maya rose in the Caste War (from 1847), one of the largest Indigenous rebellions of the century.

Enslaved people and African Americans

Slavery was the clearest test of revolutionary promises. In the USA the northern states abolished it, usually gradually, between 1777 (Vermont) and 1804 (New Jersey), and Congress banned the import of enslaved Africans from 1808. But in the south slavery expanded with cotton, and the enslaved population grew rapidly.

The census figures for the enslaved population show that independence strengthened slavery in the USA rather than weakening it. Free African Americans in the north faced discrimination and in most states lost or never gained the vote. Conflict over whether slavery should expand into the new western territories became the central issue of US politics after 1840.

In Spanish America the wars weakened slavery. Both sides recruited enslaved men with promises of freedom, and slavery mattered less to the economy of most regions than in the USA or Brazil. Most republics first passed free-womb laws and then abolished slavery completely. Brazil and the Spanish colony of Cuba, the two largest slave economies left, kept it much longer.

Dates of abolition in the table are the dates of the main laws; enforcement and the treatment of freed people often lagged behind.

Creoles and women

Creoles were the main winners of independence: they took the offices that peninsulares had held, and many Spaniards were expelled, as from Mexico in 1827–1829. But creoles were divided by region and ideology, and the wars, debts and civil conflicts ruined many families. Mestizos and pardos gained more than before, especially through the army, where men such as Páez and Piar rose to high command; but the property and literacy requirements in most constitutions kept the poor majority out of formal politics.

Women took part in the wars as soldiers, spies, nurses, supporters and organisers. Juana Azurduy led guerrilla forces in Upper Peru, Policarpa Salavarrieta was executed as a patriot spy in Bogotá in 1817, and Manuela Sáenz, Bolívar’s companion, saved his life during the assassination attempt of 1828. In the USA women organised boycotts of British goods, ran farms and businesses while men fought, and some served in the army in disguise. Independence brought them almost no political rights. Apart from New Jersey, where some property-owning women voted between 1776 and 1807, no new state gave women the vote, married women remained legally dependent on their husbands, and the new republics expected them to serve the nation as "republican mothers" raising virtuous citizens.

British North America: the colonies that did not break away

Not every colony sought independence. Quebec, Nova Scotia and the other colonies that later formed Canada stayed in the British Empire, and their history shows why some colonial societies did not follow the Thirteen Colonies.

Why Canada stayed British

Several factors kept the northern colonies loyal. The Quebec Act (1774), which had angered the Thirteen Colonies, secured the loyalty of Quebec’s French-speaking Catholic clergy and landowners by protecting their religion and laws. An American invasion of Quebec in 1775–1776 failed, and its attack on Quebec City on 31 December 1775 was defeated. After 1783 tens of thousands of American Loyalists, perhaps 40,000–50,000 people, settled in Nova Scotia, the new colony of New Brunswick (1784) and the western part of Quebec. They were hostile to the USA by experience. The Constitutional Act of 1791 divided Quebec into Upper Canada (English-speaking, later Ontario) and Lower Canada (French-speaking, later Quebec), each with an elected assembly. The failure of US invasions in the War of 1812 strengthened this loyalty.

The rebellions of 1837–1838

By the 1830s the political system of both Canadas was in crisis. Elected assemblies could pass laws, but real power lay with governors and appointed councils dominated by small elites, called the Family Compact in Upper Canada and the Château Clique in Lower Canada. In Lower Canada the conflict also ran along national lines: the French-speaking majority, led by Louis-Joseph Papineau and his Patriote party, opposed an English-speaking commercial elite. In 1837 the British government rejected the assembly’s demands for elected councils and control of revenue.

Rebellions broke out in both colonies late in 1837. The Patriotes won a skirmish at Saint-Denis but were defeated at Saint-Charles and Saint-Eustache, and a second rising in 1838 was also crushed; twelve rebels were hanged and 58 were transported to Australia. In Upper Canada William Lyon Mackenzie led a smaller rising near Toronto in December 1837, which was quickly dispersed. Both movements drew on American republican ideas, but they lacked the broad support, the leadership and the foreign help of the American Revolution.

Lord Durham and responsible government

Britain sent Lord Durham, a leading reformer, as governor general in 1838 to investigate. His Report on the Affairs of British North America (1839) made two recommendations. The first was to unite the two Canadas so that the English-speaking population would become a majority and the French Canadians would be assimilated. The second was to grant responsible government, under which the governor would choose ministers who had the support of the elected assembly.

I expected to find a contest between a government and a people: I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state: I found a struggle, not of principles, but of races.

John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, Report on the Affairs of British North America, presented to Parliament in 1839. Durham wrote as a British liberal who believed that English institutions and culture were more advanced, and the report elsewhere calls French Canadians a people "with no history, and no literature". It is valuable evidence of British thinking about colonial self-government, and it explains why French Canadians remembered the report as an attack on their nationality.

The Act of Union of 1840 created a single Province of Canada in 1841, but the attempt to assimilate French Canadians failed. Reformers from both language groups, led by Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, worked together and won responsible government in 1848. Canada thus gained self-government through gradual reform rather than revolution. The confederation of the British North American colonies in 1867 belongs to the later history of nation-building in the Americas.

The United States and independent Latin America

The USA was the first independent state in the Americas, and Latin American leaders often looked to it as a model. Its relations with the new states, however, were shaped more by its own interests than by revolutionary solidarity.

US support for independence movements

Many Americans sympathised with the Spanish American revolutions, which seemed to follow their own example, and Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, urged recognition from 1818. The government was more cautious. It declared neutrality, passed the Neutrality Act of 1818 against expeditions organised on US soil, and delayed recognition while it negotiated with Spain for Florida. Once Spain had ratified the Adams–Onís Treaty (1819, in force 1821), President James Monroe asked Congress to recognise the new states, and in 1822 the USA became the first country to recognise Gran Colombia and Mexico. US merchants traded with the insurgents and some US privateers sailed under their flags, but the USA gave little direct material help, much less than Britain’s volunteers, loans and arms.

The Monroe Doctrine, 1823

In 1823 a French army invaded Spain to restore Ferdinand VII’s absolute power, acting for the Holy Alliance of the conservative European monarchies (Russia, Austria and Prussia). Many in Washington and London feared that the alliance would next help Spain to recover its American colonies. At the same time, a Russian decree of 1821 claimed the Pacific coast of North America down to the 51st parallel.

In August 1823 the British foreign secretary George Canning proposed that Britain and the USA issue a joint declaration against intervention. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams persuaded Monroe to act alone, so that the USA would not appear to be following Britain and would not have to promise never to take territory itself. In his annual message to Congress on 2 December 1823, Monroe set out what was later called the Monroe Doctrine.

The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. … We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.

James Monroe, Annual Message to Congress, 2 December 1823. The message contained three principles: no new European colonies in the Americas, no European intervention in the independent American states, and no US involvement in European affairs. It was a statement of policy, not a law or a treaty, and was addressed as much to Americans as to Europe. Its claim to speak for the whole hemisphere shows a confident new power; its promise that the USA would not interfere with "existing colonies" left Cuba, Puerto Rico and Canada untouched.

The doctrine had little practical effect at first. The USA had no navy able to enforce it, and the real barrier to European intervention was the Royal Navy, since Britain wanted the new states open to its trade. In October 1823, before Monroe spoke, France had already assured Canning in the Polignac Memorandum that it would not intervene in Spanish America. When Britain occupied the Falklands (1833) and France attacked Mexico (1838) and blockaded Buenos Aires, the USA did nothing. Latin American governments welcomed the message, but when Gran Colombia and Brazil asked for alliances in 1824–1825, the USA declined. President Polk revived the doctrine in 1845, this time to justify US expansion and warn Britain away from Oregon and California.

Plans for cooperation and American integration

Bolívar hoped to unite the new Spanish American republics in a confederation strong enough to defend them against Spain and the Holy Alliance. In his Letter from Jamaica he had imagined a congress of American states meeting at the Isthmus of Panama. In 1824 he invited the governments of the former Spanish colonies to such a meeting. The Congress of Panama met from 22 June to 15 July 1826, with delegates from Gran Colombia, Peru, Mexico and the United Provinces of Central America, and a British observer.

The Congress produced a Treaty of Perpetual Union, League and Confederation, but only Gran Colombia ratified it. Argentina, Chile and Brazil did not attend, the Spanish threat was fading, and the republics were absorbed in their own conflicts. The USA was invited at Santander’s insistence, against Bolívar’s wishes. President John Quincy Adams appointed two delegates after a long fight in Congress, where southern members objected to meeting delegates of mixed race and discussing the slave trade and the recognition of Haiti; one delegate died on the way and the other arrived after the Congress had ended. Later conferences at Lima (1847–1848, against a Spanish-led expedition planned by Juan José Flores) and Santiago (1856, against William Walker’s filibusters) also failed to create lasting unions.

Intra-American trade relations

Britain, not the USA, dominated the trade of independent Latin America before 1860. It supplied most manufactured goods and capital, and British merchant houses were established in every major port. US trade grew in particular areas: with Cuba, still a Spanish colony, whose sugar went increasingly to the USA; with Brazil, whose coffee found its largest market in the USA by mid-century; and with northern Mexico, through the Santa Fe Trail opened in 1821. US interest also turned to a canal or railway across Central America, which became urgent after the California gold rush of 1848–1849. The Clayton–Bulwer Treaty (1850) with Britain agreed that neither power would control such a canal alone.

By the 1850s US relations with Latin America had become expansionist. After the war with Mexico, the USA bought a further strip of northern Mexico in the Gadsden Purchase (1853). In the Ostend Manifesto (1854) three US diplomats argued that the USA would be justified in seizing Cuba if Spain refused to sell it, a proposal backed by southerners who wanted another slave state. Private adventurers called filibusters led armed expeditions into Latin America. The most notorious, William Walker of Tennessee, made himself president of Nicaragua in 1856 and restored slavery there, until Central American armies drove him out in 1857; he was executed in Honduras in 1860.

By 1860 many Latin Americans saw the USA less as a model of republican liberty than as the main threat to their independence. Mexico had lost half its territory to it, and Central America had faced US filibusters. The Monroe Doctrine, at first a statement against European intervention, was becoming a claim to US leadership of the hemisphere.

Perspectives and debates

Independence movements were contested at the time, and historians still disagree about their causes, their leaders and their results. Each debate reflects both new evidence and the concerns of the period in which historians wrote.

Contemporary perspectives

People at the time saw the revolutions very differently. For Patriots such as Paine and Jefferson, the American Revolution was a defence of natural rights against tyranny; for Loyalists it was a rebellion by ambitious men that put liberty at the mercy of mobs, as the London print of the tarred and feathered customs officer suggests. Enslaved people judged both sides by which offered freedom. In Spanish America royalists, many of them Americans, saw the insurgents as traitors to a legitimate king and a threat to religion, while Indigenous communities often stayed loyal to a crown that had protected their land and legal status. Bolívar’s own writings move from confidence in 1815 to despair in 1830.

The American Revolution: ideas or interests?

Early twentieth-century "Progressive" historians stressed economic interests. Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) argued that the Constitution was written by men who held public debt and commercial property, to protect their interests against debtors and popular majorities. From the 1960s the ideological school answered with ideas. Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), based on hundreds of revolutionary pamphlets, argued that colonists genuinely believed, through radical Whig ideas, that British ministers were plotting to destroy their liberty. Gordon Wood, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), argued that the revolution transformed a hierarchical society of patrons and dependants into a democratic and commercial one.

Since the 1990s, social historians have looked at the revolution from below. Gary Nash’s The Unknown American Revolution (2005) stresses the actions of artisans, farmers, women, enslaved people and Indigenous nations, many of whom pursued their own revolutions within the larger one. Woody Holton’s Forced Founders (1999) argues that Virginia’s gentry were pushed towards independence by pressure from Indigenous nations, enslaved people, small farmers and British merchants, so that the elite’s decision was partly a response to pressure from below.

Spanish American independence: long-term causes or the crisis of 1808?

The older national histories written in the nineteenth century presented independence as the awakening of nations oppressed for three centuries. John Lynch, in The Spanish American Revolutions 1808–1826 (1973), gave this a firmer basis by presenting the Bourbon reforms as a second conquest of America that alienated creoles and created an incipient creole nationalism before 1808. Brian Hamnett’s Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750–1824 (1986) showed how regional and agrarian grievances shaped who joined the Mexican insurgency.

A later group of historians placed the cause in Spain. François-Xavier Guerra, in Modernidad e independencias (1992), argued that the collapse of the monarchy in 1808 created a new political culture of sovereignty and representation across the whole Hispanic world. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., in The Independence of Spanish America (1998), argued that independence grew out of a single political revolution of the Spanish monarchy, in which Americans first sought autonomy and representation within the monarchy, especially under the Cádiz Constitution, and turned to independence only when that failed. Jeremy Adelman’s Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (2006) similarly argues that empire collapsed before nations were formed.

The interpretations can be combined. The long-term causes explain why creoles were ready to govern themselves, and the crisis of 1808 explains when and how the movements began. The weight given to each depends partly on the country: the 1808 crisis is central for Buenos Aires and Caracas, while the Mexican insurgency of 1810 cannot be understood without its agrarian and regional roots.

Bolívar: liberator or authoritarian?

Bolívar has been interpreted more than any other figure of the period. In the nineteenth century Venezuelan governments built a cult of the Liberator as the father of the nation. Karl Marx, writing an entry on Bolívar for the New American Cyclopaedia in 1858, portrayed him as a vain and cowardly dictator, a hostile view based on the memoirs of disaffected European officers. John Lynch’s Simón Bolívar: A Life (2006) presents a liberator committed to independence and the abolition of slavery whose constitutional ideas became more authoritarian as he confronted the disorder of the new states. Since 1999 the Venezuelan government has called its own revolution "Bolivarian", using Bolívar as a symbol of anti-imperialism and Latin American unity, which shows how his reputation continues to be used in present-day politics.

The Monroe Doctrine: defence or empire?

Dexter Perkins, in The Monroe Doctrine, 1823–1826 (1927), saw the doctrine as a defensive response to the threats of the Holy Alliance and Russia. Ernest May, in The Making of the Monroe Doctrine (1975), argued that it was shaped mainly by domestic politics, as Adams and other candidates manoeuvred for the presidential election of 1824. Jay Sexton, in The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (2011), shows how the doctrine was reinterpreted over the century into a flexible tool for US expansion and hegemony. Latin American writers have long pointed out that it was a unilateral statement made without consulting the states it claimed to protect.

Why caudillos?

Contemporaries such as Sarmiento blamed the caudillos on the "barbarism" of the countryside. Eric Wolf and Edward Hansen, in "Caudillo Politics: A Structural Analysis" (1967), explained caudillismo through economic structure: in societies with few opportunities for wealth, armed bands competed for control of the state to distribute its resources to their followers. Lynch’s Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800–1850 (1992) stresses the wars of independence and the collapse of colonial institutions, and presents caudillos as defenders of the interests of landowners who wanted order. Both structural explanations move away from seeing caudillos simply as personal tyrants.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: the emergence of an independence movement

Paper 3: the outcome of the revolutionary wars

The second question is a factor claim about the outcome of a war rather than its causes.

Paper 3: post-independence challenges

Questions on the period after independence often name one challenge and ask whether it was the greatest.

Paper 3: US relations with Latin America

Effect and characterisation claims, such as the next question, test the claim across groups, countries and time.

Paper 3: marginalised groups

A final question tests a claim about change and continuity for groups outside the creole elite.

Self-check

• To do:

  I can describe the empires and colonial societies of the Americas in 1763, including the difference between criollos and peninsulares.

• To do:

  I can explain the political, economic, social, religious and intellectual causes of the American Revolution and the role of British actions from 1763 to 1776.

• To do:

  I can analyse the Declaration of Independence and Common Sense as sources.

• To do:

  I can explain the main events of the War of American Independence and why the Americans won, including the role of France.

• To do:

  I can assess the contributions of Washington and other leaders of the American Revolution.

• To do:

  I can explain the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation and the main features and compromises of the Constitution of 1787.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes and effects of the War of 1812 for the USA and British North America.

• To do:

  I can explain the Bourbon reforms and weigh them against the crisis of 1808 as causes of Spanish American independence.

• To do:

  I can explain the role of ideas (the Enlightenment, Spanish political theory, the US and Haitian examples) in Spanish America.

• To do:

  I can narrate and explain the independence wars in Venezuela and Gran Colombia, the Río de la Plata and Chile, Peru and Mexico.

• To do:

  I can explain how and why Brazil became independent as a monarchy, and compare its path with Spanish America and Haiti.