AMERICANOS. Latin America's struggle for independence. By John Charles Chasteen. 219pp. Oxford University Press. $28. 978 0 19 517881 4.
The year 1808 was a cataclysmic one in Spain and its American Empire. French troops overran the Iberian Peninsula. Two Bourbon monarchs, Charles IV and his son Ferdinand VII, abdicated clumsily in rapid succession, permitting Napoleon to install his brother, Joseph, on the throne. The ensuing tumult was captured by Goya in his painting "The Third of May" and described by Byron in the stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage devoted to Spain. The years between 1808 and 1814 witnessed the expulsion, with the Duke of Wellington's assistance, of the French army and the restoration of Ferdinand VII. But the price of victory was high. In addition to the social chaos - particularly mass impoverishment and widespread displacement - wrought by war, the decade after 1808 was marked by unprecedented political instability and the eclipse of Spain as a geopolitical force. The events of 1808 sparked a chain reaction which eventually led, by the mid-1820s, to the independence of Spain's colonies in the New World.
The bicentenary of the dissolution of Spain's American Empire has prompted enormous interest, and an array of academic conferences across the globe. Yet renewed curiosity about Latin American independence is not confined to scholars, as John Charles Chasteen's lively, popular history attests.
Americanos: Latin America's struggle for independence rejects the older view that the collapse of the Spanish Empire was the inexorable climax of a long simmering resentment harboured by American-born Creoles towards Spain, which exploded into full-blown hostility when the Peninsula was engulfed by the French army. Instead, Chasteen argues, a separate American identity emerged slowly and steadily, incubated by the wars sparked by the crisis of political authority in Spain from 1808. A new dynamic, pitting americano against European, shaped the conflict in the various provinces of the Spanish Empire.
Spain's military efforts to reconquer America, particularly after 1815, instigated further polarization. A string of rebel victories, culminating with the rout at Ayacucho in 1824, drove the Spanish army from America and laid the groundwork for the creation of new nation-states, whose borders largely reflected the territorial demarcations of the former colonial viceroyalties.
Chasteen consciously plays up the drama of the events he recounts. He even includes a dramatis personae, with all too brief biographies and a gallery of portraits, in the preliminaries of his book. Each of the six chapters is further subdivided into a series of "scenes" or episodes, which track the movements of the major protagonists. With some justification, the figures of Bolivar, San Martin and Hidalgo tower above the rest, but Chasteen rightly acknowledges the significant, undervalued, contributions made by women, mestizos, former slaves, the rural poor and indigenous people to the independence struggle.
Chasteen's focus on individuals succeeds marvellously insofar as it enables him to tell a brisk, entertaining story, jumping effortlessly between continents and highly disparate contexts. But Americanos is incomplete as an account of Latin America's path to independence. The reasons for this include Chasteen's neglect of the fierce loyalty of many Americans to the Spanish Crown, his dismissive attitude towards economic and international dimensions of the conflict, his one-dimensional portraits of the defenders of the Old Regime, and his Whiggish tendency to depict the independence era as the inevitable, victorious march of liberty over despotism. The reader whose interest has been roused, but not sated, by Americanos would profit more from John Lynch's classic The Spanish American Revolutions 1808-1826 (1973), or Jeremy Adelman's recent Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (2006).
Marx's observation - "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past" - has particular relevance for Latin America. Independence did not prove a panacea for the ills which the nascent nations inherited from three centuries of colonialism. The euphoria that accompanied separation from Spain soon died.
Pre-existing patterns and latent forces, residues of the colonial era, reasserted themselves. They undermined the stability of the fledgling states for much of the nineteenth century. Centralists vied with federalists for political primacy. The state's capacity to reshape society was undercut by entrenched local interests. Promises of effective citizenship for Indians, mestizos and people of African descent went largely unfulfilled. Purportedly liberal regimes confiscated Indian land, with paltry compensation, in the name of progress and economic development. Republican institutions often remained legal fictions under the heel of caudillo rule. Large swathes of the former Spanish Empire endured protracted economic stagnation. Where growth occurred, foreign economic interests were ubiquitous and, in some cases, neo-colonial relations were established.
To catalogue Latin America's troubles after its separation from Spain, however, is not to deny the contemporary resonance chronicled in Americanos. John Chasteen astutely notes that Latin America's decolonization would "ensure that the currency of the constitutional, republican template in the new African and Asian nations proliferated in the second half of the twentieth century". The durability of republican ideals and liberal institutions, surviving both a long series of heavy-handed dictatorships and repeated interference from the United States, testifies to the potency of the vision underlying the struggle for Latin America's independence.
