This is an extract from a working paper that I am presenting to a workshop at the Institute for the Study of the Americas in London on Friday 10th February 2012:
Liberalism, Monarchy and Empire. The full paper uses the relationship between Daniel O'Leary and José María Córdova to explore some of the points made here.
Approaching
Liberalism, Monarchy, Empire and Independence
The debate
over the intellectual origins of independence in Hispanic America has been
revived in recent years, perhaps catalysed by the bicentennial commemorations.
Historians have also become increasingly aware of the international dimensions
of independence, be it the geopolitics of the separation of Iberia’s American
colonies, or the transatlantic or transnational nature of travel, knowledge
transfer and communication technology that shaped the process of independence.
Together,
these factors have created something of a renewed scramble for detecting (or
claiming) the geographical origins of ideas that shaped independence. Karen
Racine has written persuasively of the cultural influence of British ideas upon
Latin American independence leaders, stressing their partiality for systems of
checks and balances, upper houses, the Lancasterian system of monitorial education,
trial by jury and laws to guarantee the freedom of the press.
Other authors have explored the influence of British liberalism, anti-slavery
or anti-colonialism upon Latin American independence.
But the British are far from the only ‘presence’ is this debate. French
influence has generally been considered much stronger than that of the British.
The contribution of French thinkers upon the processes of independence has
often been conflated with ‘Enlightenment’ ideas of liberty, fraternity and nationhood.
A considerable body of work has examined the hold that ideas, arriving in the
Americas from France (sometimes via the U.S.A), had upon those fighting for
(and against) independence.
The
idea of Spanish influence upon the independence of Spain’s own American
colonies has long been relatively absent from discussion. But a new and exiting
strand of this research agenda focuses on the role of Spanish Liberalism, and investigates
the development of that political ideology in the Americas. Much of this research
centres around the Cádiz Convention, and the Constitution of 1812 which it
produced. These publications suggest that Liberalism in nineteenth-century
Hispanic America cannot be understood without tracing its origins to Cádiz and
the seminal debates and proposals that occurred there.
These
intellectual histories have told us a lot about the writers and activists that
Latin Americans looked to as they moved towards and into independence. They
have also caused us to remember the contingent nature of the ways ideas crossed
the Atlantic – not only in printed tracts, or translations of key Francophone
or Anglophone texts, but also in the minds and experiences of migrants in both
directions. Most obviously, the ‘lessons’ of the French revolutionary experience
and subsequent Liberal experiments, were as often used by Latin Americans as
something to be avoided, rather than
emulated, because of their anxieties about social order and, especially,
slavery.
The direct influence of the Cádiz democratic experiment were necessarily
limited to those areas which had not yet thrown off colonial rule. And finally,
any desire to follow or borrow ideas from Great Britain, whether liberal and
democratic or conservative and aristocratic, was always contingent on thinking away
around the problem that the British system was intrinsically monarchical. The at
once friendly and fractious relationship between Liberal ideas of freedom with proposals
to introduce a British model of constitutional monarchy – and the way empire
shaped all these discussions – is the subject of this working paper.
In
my work with Gabriel Paquette and others in recent years I have tended to
stress the significance of social and political change after independence in
Latin America within a comparative perspective, whilst drawing attention to
imperial and geopolitical continuities within the Atlantic world.
This approach allows us to explore in detail the many ‘ambiguous relationships’
between ideologies, parties and individuals that shaped processes of independence.
During the 1820s and 1830s the relationship between Europe and Latin America
was transformed out of all recognition by the rupture of independence and the
warfare that brought it about in many areas. Yet many historians have pointed
to substantial continuities in commerce and political thinking. Brian Hamnett
has provided compelling overviews of the impact of independence upon the
Iberian metropoles, and Natalia Sobrevilla’s work on the trajectories of the
royalist officers from Ayacucho, shows how Spanish liberalism was shaped by the
experience of colonial defeat.
It is clear,
then, that the emergence of liberalism in Latin America, and specifically in
the Andes, occurred somewhere towards the centre of a confluence of currents of
empire, anti-colonialism and political transformation. Liberalism was not
intrinsically republican, as the work on Cádiz and its consequences have shown,
and nor was it naturally national. The existence of national, republican
traditions of Liberalism in later nineteenth-century Colombia, Venezuela and
Peru, for example, was not the obvious or natural culmination of the planting
in American soil of a republican, liberal seed during the process of
independence.
Brown and Paquette, ‘The Persistence
of Mutual Influence: Europe and Latin America in the 1820s’, European History Quarterly (2011), 41:3, 387-396; and Brown and Paquette,
eds., Continuities after Colonialism, Europe
and Latin America in the 1820s, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
forthcoming 2012), esp. our introduction, ‘Between the Age of Atlantic
Revolutions and the Age of Empire: Europe and Latin America in the Axial Decade
of the 1820s’, 1-25.
[7] Brian Hamnett, ‘Spain and Portugal and the Loss of their Continental
American Territories in the 1820s: An Examination of the Issues’, European
History Quarterly July
2011 41: 397-412; Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, “From Europe to the Andes and back: Becoming ‘Los
Ayacuchos’”, European History Quarterly. (2011).
