Latin American Independence

By 1800, Spain's American empire was the oldest European colonial project on the planet. It stretched from California to Patagonia, encompassing deserts, jungles, mountain ranges that could kill you in an afternoon, and some of the richest silver deposits on earth. Three centuries of extraction had made Madrid wealthy and its colonies restless. Portugal held Brazil, a territory larger than all of Spanish America's individual viceroyalties, governed with a lighter hand but the same basic logic: the colony exists to feed the metropole.

The system had a problem built into its foundations. Spain and Portugal had created elaborate colonial societies with universities, cathedrals, printing presses, legal codes, and a landed aristocracy that owned haciendas the size of European countries. They had, in short, built functioning civilizations and then told the people running them that they could never govern themselves. The contradiction was sustainable for centuries. It was not sustainable forever.

What cracked the system open was not ideology alone. The Enlightenment mattered, the examples of the American and French revolutions mattered, but what turned discontent into revolution was a specific geopolitical event: Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 1807-1808, deposed the Spanish king Ferdinand VII, and placed his brother Joseph on the throne. Suddenly the question of who ruled Spanish America had no clear answer. The colonies had sworn loyalty to the Spanish crown. What happened when the crown was sitting on a Frenchman's head?