New views on history
The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence, Marcela Echeverri and Cristina Soriano (eds), reviewed by Gavin O'Toole, 11 May 2023
The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence, Marcela Echeverri and Cristina Soriano (eds), 2023, Cambridge University Press
For non-specialists coming to the study of independence in Latin America it is tempting to consider the revolutionary wave that swept across the sub-continent in isolation as a regional phenomenon confined to this long isolated Spanish- and Portuguese speaking area.
In some ways, that instinct is still reflected in popular attitudes that prevail today, by which “Latin America” understood broadly still represents a self-contained, exotic and opaque world unto itself with little bearing on our day-to-day lives in the Global North.
Yet as Marcela Echeverri and Cristina Soriano demonstrate, the process of independence from 1810-25 must be understood both as the product of but also part of a more trans-Atlantic wave of revolutionary fervour and other 18th century development that were testing the social hierarchies holding together colonial society.
This collection offers a flavour of the changes that have taken place in the historiography of Latin American independence in recent decades, by offering a critical introduction to the current concerns of historians while also exploring the new directions many are going in.
Those directions start with the central notion that independence in Latin America is best understood in an Atlantic context whose revolutionary character was fuelled and informed by broader dynamics within the imperial centres.
In their essay within this collection, Ernesto Bassi and Fabrício Prado explore one dimension of this perspective by examining the interventions of foreign governments in the independence processes.
Foreign powers such as the United States, Britain and Haiti had over decades already and increasingly been interacting with the region for diplomatic and commercial reasons, with one result being the importation of revolutionary ideas.
These contributors write: “As a result, a thorough and deep understanding of the wars of independence requires embracing the maritime, hemispheric, and Atlantic dimensions in which the historical agents lived and acted upon.”
It’s an important point, because it reminds us how our own history in the former empires can never be considered in national isolation post factum, but as an international phenomenon influenced by the distinctive flows and interactions of people, ideas and commerce in a given era.
This point is very evident in Karen Racine’s chapter on the role played by freemasonry in independence, especially in countries that experienced an imperial interregnum in the transition from colony to nation—Haiti, Brazil and Mexico.
Freemasonry was a fundamentally transatlantic institution, but one with huge potency as a harbinger of radical and modern ideas and practices as well as effective secrecy that enabled conspiracy and debate away from the eyes of the authorities.
As Racine shows, Masonic lodges provided practical training in many of the operational aspects of constitutional governance as well as facilitating mercantile exchange and crucial military supply chains.
These contributions and others to this collection demonstrate the importance of Latin America to the revisionist school of independence history that has put the region in the vanguard of the study of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions.
As the editors write, the Companion is an invitation to rethink Latin American independence from multiple thematic perspectives—and ask questions that challenge inherited paradigms.