Concept

Spanish American wars of independence

Overview

The Spanish American wars of independence (Spanish: Guerras de independencia hispanoamericanas) were a series of conflicts that took place across the Spanish Empire during the early 19th century. The struggles in both hemispheres began shortly after the outbreak of the Peninsular War forming part of the broader context of the Napoleonic Wars. The conflicts were fought between Royalists, who favoured rule from a unitary Spanish monarchy, and Patriots, who supported either autonomous constitutional monarchies or independent republics, separated from Spain and each other. These struggles ultimately led to the independence and secession of most of Spanish America from Spanish rule, which, beyond this conflict, resulted in a process of Balkanization in Hispanic America. If defined strictly in terms of military campaigns, the time period in question ranged from the 1809 Battle of Chacaltaya in present-day Bolivia, to the 1829 Battle of Tampico in Mexico.

These conflicts were fought both as irregular warfare and conventional warfare. Some historians claim that the wars began as localized civil wars, that later spread and expanded as secessionist wars to promote general independence from Spanish rule. This independence led to the development of new national boundaries based on the colonial provinces, which would form the future independent countries that constituted contemporary Hispanic America during the early 19th century. Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish rule until the 1898 Spanish–American War.

The conflict resulted in the dissolution of the Spanish Empire in the region and the creation of new states. The new republics abandoned the formal system of the Inquisition and noble titles, but in most of these new countries, slavery was not immediately abolished. Total abolition did not come until the 1850s in most of the Latin American countries. The Criollos of European descent born in the New World, and mestizos, of mixed Indigenous and European heritage, replaced Spanish-born appointees in most political offices. Criollos remained at the top of a social structure that retained some of its traditional features culturally, if not legally. For almost a century thereafter, conservatives and liberals fought to reverse or to deepen the social and political changes unleashed by those rebellions. The Spanish American independences had as a direct consequence the forced displacement of the royalist Spanish population that suffered a forced emigration during the war and later, due to the laws of Expulsion of the Spaniards from the new states in the Americas with the purpose of consolidating their independence.

Events in Spanish America transpired in the wake of the successful Haitian Revolution and transition to independence in Brazil. Brazil's independence in particular shared a common starting point with that of Spanish America, since both conflicts were triggered by Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, which forced the Portuguese royal family to flee to Brazil in 1807. The process of Hispanic American independence took place in the general political and intellectual climate of popular sovereignty that emerged from the Age of Enlightenment that influenced all of the Atlantic Revolutions, including the earlier revolutions in the United States and France. A more direct cause of the Spanish American Wars of Independence were the unique developments occurring within the Kingdom of Spain triggered by the Cortes of Cadiz, concluding with the emergence of the new Spanish American republics in the post-Napoleonic world.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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For Massachusetts, the prime mover in this enterprise, is the last State in the Union to mean a final separation, as being of all the most dependant on the others. Not raising bread for the sustenance her own inhabitants, not having a stick of timber for the construction of vessels, her principal occupation, nor an article to export in them, where would she be, excluded from the ports of the other States, and thrown…
Thomas Jefferson, Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 4
States what Spanish American wars of independence is.
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But, on the occasion in question, and to the purpose in question, though a distinctive adjunct as above would have done something, it would have done very little. In the field of time,--seven-and-twenty years at least, and we know not how much more, according to the received chronology, was the distance between the event in question, and the report given of it in this history. Neither in Damascus nor yet in…
Jeremy Bentham, Not Paul, but Jesus
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In those two wars, the colonies cost Great Britain much more than double the sum which the national debt amounted to before the commencement of the first of them. Had it not been for those wars, that debt might, and probably would by this time, have been completely paid; and had it not been for the colonies, the former of those wars might not, and the latter certainly would not, have been undertaken. It was because…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Close in meaning to Spanish American wars of independence; the term itself is not named.
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Philosophers who discussed Spanish American wars of independence

Jeremy Bentham

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Liberalism.

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