Liberation from Colonial Rule: Latin America

Liberation from Colonial Rule: Latin America

History Optional Notes {PDF}

Complete Notes Package (Paper I & II) | 4500+ Pages | Instant Download

Discounted Price | Buy Now @ ₹1,180 →

The colonisation and subsequent liberation of Latin America from Spanish and Portuguese rule is an important theme in the UPSC History Optional syllabus, particularly within the study of World History and the age of imperialism, revolutions, and decolonization. This article traces the European colonisation of the Americas from Columbus’s voyages through the establishment of Spanish and Portuguese empires, and then examines the causes, course, and outcome of the Latin American wars of independence — including the movements led by Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín in Spanish America, and the comparatively bloodless emergence of an independent Brazil under Dom Pedro. Understanding these processes is essential for tracing the broader Age of Revolutions and the emergence of new nation-states in the 19th century.

Colonisation of Latin America

• Extensive European colonization began in 1492, when a Spanish expedition headed by the Genoese Christopher Columbus sailed west to find a new trade route to the Far East (India) but inadvertently found the Americas.
  • Columbus’s first two voyages (1492–93) reached the Bahamas and various Caribbean islands, including Puerto Rico and Cuba.
  • As the sponsor of Columbus’s voyages, Spain was the first European power to settle and colonize the largest areas, from North America and the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America; Spanish cities were founded as early as 1496, with Santo Domingo in today’s Dominican Republic.
• France founded colonies in eastern North America, a number of Caribbean islands, and small coastal parts of South America.
• Portugal colonized Brazil, and also attempted early (since 1499) colonization of the coasts of present-day Canada.
• Europe had been preoccupied with internal wars and was only slowly recovering from the population loss caused by the bubonic plague; thus, the rapid rate at which it grew in wealth and power was unforeseeable in the early 1400s.
• Eventually, the entire Western Hemisphere came under the ostensible control of European governments, leading to profound changes to its landscape, population, and plant and animal life; in the 19th century alone, over 50 million people left Europe for the Americas.
• The post-1492 era is known as the period of the Columbian Exchange — a dramatically widespread exchange of animals, plants, culture, human populations (including slaves), communicable disease, and ideas between the American and Afro-Eurasian hemispheres following Columbus’s voyages.

Early European Explorations and Conquests

• Early explorations and conquests were made by the Spanish and the Portuguese immediately following their own final reconquest of Iberia in 1492.
• In the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, ratified by the Pope following Columbus’s return, Spain and Portugal divided the entire non-European world into two areas of exploration and colonization, with a north-to-south boundary cutting through the Atlantic Ocean along the eastern part of Brazil.
  • Based on this treaty, and on early claims by the Spanish explorer Balboa (discoverer of the Pacific Ocean in 1513), the Spanish conquered large territories in North, Central, and South America.
  • By the mid-16th century, the Spanish Crown had gained control of much of western South America, Central America, and southern North America, in addition to its earlier Caribbean territories.
  • Over the same period, Portugal claimed lands in North America (Canada) and colonized much of eastern South America, naming it Santa Cruz and Brazil.
• Other European nations soon disputed the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas.
  • England and France attempted to plant colonies in the Americas in the 16th century, but these failed; England, France, and the Dutch Republic succeeded in establishing permanent colonies in the following century.
    • Some of these were on Caribbean islands already conquered by the Spanish or depopulated by disease, while others were in eastern North America, which Spain had not colonized north of Florida.
  • As more nations gained interest in colonizing the Americas, competition for territory became increasingly fierce, and colonists often faced the threat of attacks from neighbouring colonies, indigenous tribes, and pirates.

Early State-Sponsored Colonists

• The first phase of well-financed European activity in the Americas began with the Atlantic crossings of Christopher Columbus (1492–1504), sponsored by Spain, whose original goal was to find a new route to India and China, known as “the Indies.”
  • Cabral reached Brazil and claimed it for Portugal.
  • Amerigo Vespucci, working for Portugal in voyages from 1497 to 1513, established that Columbus had reached a new set of continents; a Latinized version of his first name, America, was used to name the two continents.
  • In 1513, Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and led the first European expedition to see the Pacific Ocean from the west coast of the New World, claiming the Pacific Ocean and all adjoining lands for the Spanish Crown.
  • It was not until 1517 that another expedition, from Cuba, visited Central America in search of slaves.
• These explorations were followed, notably in Spain’s case, by a phase of conquest:
  • The Spaniards, having just completed the Reconquest of Spain from Muslim rule, were the first to colonize the Americas.
  • Ten years after Columbus’s discovery, the administration of Hispaniola was given to Nicolás de Ovando, a Spanish soldier from a noble family.
  • Progressively, the encomienda system — a legal system used by the Spanish crown to regulate Native Americans and reward individual Spaniards for services to the crown, granting tribute (access to indigenous labour and taxation) to European settlers — was set in place.
  • Over the first century and a half after Columbus’s voyages, the native population of the Americas plummeted by an estimated 80%, mostly through outbreaks of Old World diseases.
• In 1532, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor of the Spanish Empire, sent a vice-king to Mexico to prevent Hernán Cortés’s independentist drives — Cortés being part of the generation of Spanish colonizers who began the first phase of Spanish colonization in the Americas.
  • Two years later, Charles V signed the New Laws, prohibiting slavery and the forced labour system, while also claiming as his own all American lands and all indigenous people as his subjects.
• When, in May 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull granting the new lands to the Kingdom of Spain, he requested in exchange the evangelization of the people; thus, many priests accompanied Columbus during his second voyage.
  • In 1537, the papal bull promulgated by Pope Paul III recognized that Native Americans possessed souls, thereby prohibiting their enslavement — though some claimed a native who had rebelled and then been captured could still be enslaved.
  • The process of Christianization was at first violent: when the first Franciscans arrived in Mexico in 1524, they burned the places dedicated to pagan cults, alienating much of the local population; in the 1530s, they began instead to adapt Christian practices to local customs, including building new churches on the sites of ancient places of worship.

Colonisation by Spain

• Colonial expansion was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores and developed by the Monarchy of Spain through its administrators and missionaries; the motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Catholic faith through indigenous conversions.
• Beginning with Columbus’s arrival in 1492 and continuing for over three centuries, the Spanish Empire expanded across half of South America, most of Central America and the Caribbean Islands, and much of North America.
• In the early 19th century, the Spanish American wars of independence resulted in the emancipation of most Spanish colonies in the Americas, except for Cuba and Puerto Rico, which were finally given up in 1898 following the Spanish-American War, together with Guam and the Philippines in the Pacific — marking the political end of Spanish colonization in the Americas.

Demographic Impact

• It is estimated that in the 16th century about 240,000 Spaniards emigrated to the Americas, and in the 17th century about 500,000, predominantly to Mexico and Ecuador.
• In Hispaniola, the indigenous population of several hundred thousand declined to sixty thousand by 1509.
• The Native Amerindian population of Mexico declined by an estimated 90% by the early 17th century.
• In Peru, the indigenous Amerindian population of around 6.5 million declined to 1 million by the early 17th century.
• The indigenous Californian population at first contact, in 1769, was about 310,000, and had dropped to 25,000 by 1910 — though the vast majority of this decline occurred after the Spanish period, during the Mexican and American periods of Californian history (1821–1910).

Cultural Impact

• The Spaniards were committed, by royal decree, to convert their New World indigenous subjects to Catholicism; however, initial efforts were often only questionably successful, as indigenous people incorporated Catholicism into their long-standing traditional ceremonies and beliefs.
• Many native expressions, forms, practices, and items of art were considered idolatry, and were prohibited or destroyed by Spanish missionaries, military, and civilians.
• Though the Spanish did not force their language on indigenous peoples to the same extent as their religion, some indigenous languages of the Americas were eventually replaced by Spanish.

Liberation from Colonial Rule of Latin America

• After three centuries of colonial rule, independence came rather suddenly to most of Spanish and Portuguese America.
• Between 1808 and 1826, all of Latin America except the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico slipped out of the hands of the Iberian powers that had ruled the region since the conquest.
• The rapidity and timing of this dramatic change resulted from a combination of long-building tensions in colonial rule and a series of external events.

Long-Building Tensions: The Bourbon Reforms

• The reforms imposed by the Spanish Bourbons in the 18th century provoked great instability in relations between the rulers and their colonial subjects in the Americas.
  • In an effort to better control the administration and economy of the overseas possessions, the Crown reintroduced the practice of appointing outsiders to the various royal offices throughout the empire — meaning Spanish Americans lost the gains they had made in holding local offices through the sale of offices over the previous century and a half.
  • In some areas — such as Cuba — the reforms had positive effects, improving the local economy and the efficiency of government; in others, changes in the crown’s economic and administrative policies led to tensions with locals that at times erupted into open revolts, such as the Revolt in New Granada and the Rebellion in Peru.
• Many Creoles (those of Spanish parentage but born in America) felt Bourbon policy to be an unfair attack on their wealth, political power, and social status.
  • Others did not suffer during the second half of the 18th century — indeed, the gradual loosening of trade restrictions actually benefited some Creoles in Venezuela and certain other areas — but these profits merely whetted their appetite for even greater free trade than the Bourbons were willing to grant.
  • More generally, Creoles reacted angrily against the crown’s preference for peninsulars in administrative positions and its declining support for the caste system and the Creoles’ privileged status within it; after hundreds of years of proven service to Spain, the American-born elites felt the Bourbons were now treating them like a recently conquered nation.
• These factors were not the direct causes of the wars of independence, which took place decades later, but they formed an important part of the political background against which the wars took place; a more direct cause lay in the unique developments occurring within the Kingdom of Spain and its monarchy during this period.

The Influence of the Enlightenment

• In cities throughout the region, Creole frustrations increasingly found expression in ideas derived from the Enlightenment; imperial prohibitions proved unable to stop the flow of potentially subversive English, French, and North American works into the colonies of Latin America.
  • Creole participants in conspiracies against Portugal and Spain at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries showed familiarity with European Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
  • The Enlightenment clearly informed the aims of dissident Creoles and inspired some of the later, great leaders of the independence movements across Latin America, who were influenced by the examples of the Atlantic Revolutions; it also spurred the desire for social and economic reform to spread throughout Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, with ideas about free trade and physiocratic economics being raised in Spain itself.
  • The political reforms implemented, and the many constitutions written both in Spain and throughout the Spanish world during the wars of independence, were influenced by these factors.
• Still, these ideas were not, strictly speaking, causes of independence:
  • Creoles selectively adapted rather than simply embraced the thought that had informed revolutions in North America and France, and leaders in Latin America tended to shy away from the more socially radical European doctrines.
  • The influence of these ideologies was also sharply restricted, with few exceptions — only small circles of educated, urban elites had access to Enlightenment thought.
  • At most, foreign ideas helped foster a more questioning attitude toward traditional institutions and authority.

European Diplomatic and Military Events as Catalyst

• European diplomatic and military events provided the final catalyst that turned Creole discontent into full-fledged movements for Latin American independence.
  • When the Spanish crown entered into an alliance with France in 1795, it set off a series of developments that opened up economic and political distance between the Iberian countries and their American colonies.
  • By siding with France, Spain pitted itself against England, the dominant sea power of the period, which used its naval forces to reduce and eventually cut communications between Spain and the Americas.
  • Unable to preserve any monopoly on trade, the Spanish crown was forced to loosen restrictions on its colonies’ commerce; Spanish Americans now found themselves able to trade legally with other colonies and with neutral countries such as the United States, and this wartime liberalization of colonial trade sharpened Creoles’ desires for greater economic self-determination.
• Occurrences in Europe in the early 19th century created a deep political divide between Spain and its American colonies.
  • In 1807, the Spanish king, Charles IV, granted passage through Spanish territory to Napoleon’s forces on their way to invade Portugal; the immediate effect of this concession was to send the Portuguese ruler, Prince Regent John, fleeing in British ships to Brazil, arriving in Rio de Janeiro with some 15,000 officials, nobles, and other members of his court, and transforming the Brazilian colony into the administrative centre of his empire.
  • When Napoleon turned on his Spanish allies in 1808, events took a disastrous turn for Spain: shortly after Charles had abdicated in favour of his son Ferdinand, Napoleon had them both imprisoned, setting off a political crisis across both Spain and its possessions. Since the Spanish political tradition centred on the figure of the monarch, the removal of Charles and Ferdinand left the hub of all political authority missing.
• In 1810, a Cortes (Parliament) emerged in Cádiz to represent both Spain and Spanish America.
  • Two years later, it produced a new, liberal constitution proclaiming Spain’s American possessions to be full members of the kingdom and not mere colonies; yet the Creoles who participated in the new Cortes were denied equal representation, and the Cortes would not concede permanent free trade to the Americans, obstinately refusing to grant any meaningful autonomy to the overseas dominions.
  • Having had a taste of freedom during their political and economic isolation from the mother country, Spanish Americans did not easily consent to a reduction of their power and autonomy.
• Two further European developments dashed the hopes of Creoles, pushing them more decisively toward independence:
  • 1814 saw the restoration of Ferdinand to the throne, along with an energetic attempt to reestablish Spanish imperial power in the Americas; rejecting compromise and reform, Ferdinand resorted to military force to bring wayward Spanish-American regions back into the empire as colonies, an effort that only hardened the position of Creole rebels.
  • In 1820, troops waiting in Cádiz to be sent as part of the crown’s military campaigns revolted, forcing Ferdinand to agree to a series of liberal measures — a concession that divided and weakened loyalist opposition to independence in the Americas, as many supporters of the crown now had doubts about the monarchy for which they were fighting.

The Wars of Independence, 1808–26

• The final victory of Latin American patriots over Spain and the fading loyalist factions began in 1808 with the political crisis in Spain.
  • With the Spanish king and his son Ferdinand taken hostage by Napoleon, Creoles and peninsulars began to jockey for power across Spanish America; during 1808–10, juntas emerged to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII.
  • In Mexico City and Montevideo, caretaker governments were the work of loyal peninsular Spaniards eager to head off Creole threats; in Santiago, Caracas, Bogotá, and other cities, by contrast, it was Creoles who controlled the provisional juntas.
  • Not all of these governments lasted very long — loyalist troops quickly put down Creole-dominated juntas in La Paz and Quito.
• By 1810, however, the trend was clear: without denouncing Ferdinand, Creoles throughout most of the region were moving toward establishing their own autonomous governments.
  • Transforming these early initiatives into a break with Spanish control required tremendous sacrifice — over the next decade and a half, Spanish Americans had to defend their movement toward independence with arms.

Spanish America

The Southern Movement in South America

• From the north came the movement led most famously by Simón Bolívar, a dynamic figure known as the Liberator; from the south proceeded another powerful force, directed by the more circumspect José de San Martín.
  • After difficult conquests of their home regions, the two movements spread the cause of independence through other territories, finally meeting on the central Pacific coast; from there, troops under northern generals stamped out the last vestiges of loyalist resistance in Peru and Bolivia by 1826.
• The struggles that produced independence in the south began even before Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal and Spain.
  • In 1806, a British expeditionary force captured Buenos Aires; when Spanish colonial officials proved ineffective against the invasion, a volunteer militia of Creoles and peninsulars organized resistance and pushed the British out.
  • In May 1810, prominent Creoles in Buenos Aires, having vied with peninsulars for power in the intervening years, forced the last Spanish viceroy there to consent to a cabildo abierto — an extraordinary open meeting of the municipal council and local notables.
    • Although shielding itself with a pretense of loyalty to Ferdinand, the junta produced by that session marked the end of Spanish rule in Buenos Aires and its hinterland; after its revolution of May 1810, this region was the only one to resist reconquest by loyalist troops throughout the period of the independence wars.
• Independence in the former Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, however, encountered grave difficulties in the years after 1810.
  • Central authority proved unstable in the capital city of Buenos Aires — an early radical liberal government dominated by Mariano Moreno gave way to a series of triumvirates and supreme directors, and more troubling still were the bitter rivalries emerging between Buenos Aires and other provinces.
    • From the start, Buenos Aires’ intention of bringing all the former viceregal territories under its control set off waves of discord in the outlying provinces; at stake was not only political autonomy but also economic interest, as the Creole merchants of Buenos Aires — who initially sought the liberalization of colonial restraints on commerce — subsequently tried to maintain their own economic dominance over the interior.
  • A constituent assembly meeting in 1813 adopted a flag, anthem, and other symbols of national identity, but the apparent unity soon disintegrated, as seen in the assembly that finally proclaimed independence in 1816, which received no delegates from several provinces even though it was held outside Buenos Aires.
  • Distinct interests and long-standing resentment of the capital led different regions in the south to pursue separate destinies:
    • Across the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires, Montevideo and its surroundings became the separate “Eastern State” (later Uruguay); caught between the loyalism of Spanish officers and the imperialist intentions of Buenos Aires and Portuguese Brazil, the regional leader José Gervasio Artigas formed an army of thousands of gauchos, and by 1815 dominated Uruguay while allying with other provinces to oppose Buenos Aires.
    • Paraguay resisted Buenos Aires’ military and set out on a path of relative isolation from the outside world.
    • Other expeditions took the cause to Upper Peru (the region that would become Bolivia); after initial victories, the forces from Buenos Aires retreated, and by the time Bolívar’s armies finally completed the liberation of Upper Peru, the region had long since separated itself from Buenos Aires.
• The main thrust of the southern independence forces met much greater success on the Pacific coast.
  • In 1817, San Martín, a Latin American-born former officer in the Spanish military, directed 5,000 men in a dramatic crossing of the Andes and struck at a point in Chile where loyalist forces had not expected an invasion; in alliance with Chilean patriots under the command of Bernardo O’Higgins, San Martín’s army restored independence to a region whose highly factionalized junta had been defeated by royalists in 1814.
  • With Chile as his base, San Martín then faced the task of freeing the Spanish stronghold of Peru; after establishing naval dominance in the region, the southern movement made its way northward.
    • Its task, however, was formidable: many Peruvian Creoles, having benefited from colonial monopolies and fearful of the kind of social violence that the late 18th-century revolt had threatened, were not anxious to break with Spain. Consequently, the forces under San Martín managed only a shaky hold on Lima and the coast, and the final destruction of loyalist resistance in the highlands required the entrance of the northern armies.

The North and the Culmination of Independence

• Independence movements in the northern regions of Spanish South America began in 1806, when the small group of foreign volunteers that the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda brought to his homeland failed to incite the populace to rise against Spanish rule.
  • Creoles in the region wanted an expansion of the free trade benefiting their plantation economy, but at the same time feared that the removal of Spanish control might bring about a revolution that would destroy their own power.
  • Creole elites in Venezuela had good reason for this fear, since a massive revolution had recently exploded in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue: beginning in 1791, a massive slave revolt sparked a general insurrection against the plantation system and French colonial power, developing into both a civil war (pitting blacks against whites) and an international conflict, as England and Spain supported the white plantation owners and rebels respectively; by the early 19th century, the rebels had shattered what had been a model colony and forged the independent nation of Haiti.
  • Partly inspired by these Caribbean events, slaves in Venezuela carried out their own uprisings in the 1790s — just as Haiti served as a beacon of hope for the enslaved, it was a warning of everything that might go wrong for elites in the cacao-growing areas of Venezuela and throughout slave societies in the Americas.
• Creole anxieties contributed to the persistence of strong loyalist factions in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, but did not prevent the rise of an independence struggle there.
  • Creoles organized revolutionary governments that proclaimed some social and economic reforms in 1810, and in Venezuela openly declared a break with Spain the following year; forces loyal to Spain fought the Venezuelan patriots from the start, leading to a pattern in which patriot rebels held the capital city and its surroundings but could not dominate large areas of the countryside.
  • Some saw the earthquake that wreaked particular destruction in patriot-held areas in 1812 as a sign of divine displeasure with the revolution; 1812 was indeed the onset of a difficult period for the independence cause, as loyalist forces crushed the rebels’ military, driving Bolívar and others to seek refuge in New Granada proper.
• Bolívar soon returned to Venezuela with a new army in 1813, waging a campaign under the army’s motto “War to the death.”
  • With loyalists displaying the same passion and violence, as well as obtaining significant support from the common people of mixed ethnicity, the revolutionists achieved only short-lived victories; the army led by loyalist José Tomás Boves demonstrated the key military role that the llaneros (cowboys) came to play in the region’s struggle, and these highly mobile, ferocious fighters pushed Bolívar out of his home country once more.
  • By 1815, the independence movements in Venezuela and almost all across Spanish South America seemed moribund — a large military expedition sent by Ferdinand VII that year reconquered Venezuela and most of New Granada, and another invasion led by Bolívar in 1816 failed miserably.
• In 1817, a larger and revitalized independence movement emerged, winning the struggle in the north and taking it into the Andean highlands, galvanized by the mercurial Bolívar.
  • Hero and symbol of South American independence, Bolívar did not produce victory by himself; still, he was of fundamental importance as an ideologue, military leader, and political catalyst.
  • In his most famous writing, the “Jamaica Letter” (composed during one of his periods of exile, in 1815), Bolívar affirmed his undying faith in the cause of independence even in the face of the patriots’ repeated defeats.
    • While laying out sharp criticisms of Spanish colonialism, the document also looked toward the future — for Bolívar, the only path for the former colonies was the establishment of an autonomous, centralized republican government.
    • Although liberal in some respects, in the Jamaica Letter and elsewhere he expressed strong doubts about the capacity of his fellow Latin Americans for self-government, revealing his socially conservative and politically authoritarian side; he wrote, “Do not adopt the best system of government, but the one most likely to succeed.”
    • Thus, the type of republic he eventually espoused was very much an oligarchic one, with socioeconomic and literacy qualifications for suffrage and power centred in the hands of a strong executive. And though he favoured the granting of civil liberties to all male citizens and the abolition of slavery, Bolívar also worried that the death of so many peninsular soldiers during the wars would condemn Latin America to a system of “pardocracy” — rule by pardos (people of mixed ethnicity) — an outcome he deemed threatening, believing that a virtuous governing system would not be possible if the nation was divided by ethnicity.
• Bolívar, The Liberator, emerged as a strong military and political force in the struggles that began in 1817.
  • He expanded the focus of the movement, shifting his attention to New Granada and courting supporters among the casta majority; a group of llaneros of mixed ethnicity led by José Antonio Páez proved crucial to the patriots’ military victories in 1818–19.
  • A major step in that success came with the subduing of the loyalist defenders of Bogotá in 1819; after leading his army up the eastern face of the Andes, Bolívar dealt a crushing defeat to his enemies at the Battle of Boyacá.
• Consolidating victory in the north proved difficult.
  • A congress that Bolívar convened in Angostura in 1819 named the Liberator president of Gran Colombia, a union of what are today Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador; in reality, however, sharp divisions permeated the region even before Angostura, ultimately dashing Bolívar’s hopes of uniting the former Spanish colonies into a single new nation.
    • The Bogotá area, for example, had previously refused to join a confederation with the rest of revolutionary New Granada, and loyalist supporters still held much of Venezuela, parts of the Colombian Andes, and all of Ecuador.
  • Still, the tide had turned in favour of independence, and further energetic military campaigns liberated New Granada and Venezuela by 1821; a constituent congress held that year chose Bolívar president of a now much more centralized Gran Colombia.
    • Leaving his trusted right-hand man, Francisco Santander, in Bogotá to rule the new government, Bolívar pushed on into Ecuador and the central Andes, where the southern and northern armies came together in a pincer movement to quash the remaining loyalist strength.
• In 1822, San Martín and Bolívar came face-to-face in a celebrated encounter in Ecuador; San Martín made the realistic evaluation that only Bolívar and his supporters could complete the liberation of the Andes, and from that point on the northerners took charge of the struggle in Peru and Bolivia.
  • After standing by while Spanish forces threatened to recapture the lands San Martín’s armies had emancipated, Bolívar responded to the calls of Peruvian Creoles and guided his soldiers to victory in Lima.
  • While he organized the government there, his lieutenants set out to win the highlands of Peru and Upper Peru — one of them, the Venezuelan Antonio Sucre, directed the patriots’ triumph at Ayacucho in 1824, the last major battle of the war.
  • Within two years, independence fighters mopped up the last of loyalist resistance, and South America was free of Spanish control.

Mexico and Central America

• The independence of Mexico, like that of Peru, the other major central area of Spain’s American empire, came late.
  • As in Lima, Mexican cities had a powerful segment of Creoles and peninsular Spaniards whom the old imperial system had served well; Mexican Creoles, like those in Peru, had the spectre of a major social uprising to persuade them to cling to Spain and stability a while longer, since for many of the powerful in Mexican society, a break with Spain promised mainly a loss of traditional status and power, and possibly social revolution.
• What was unique to the Mexican case was that the popular rebellion that exploded in 1810 was actually the first major call for independence in the region.
  • Between 1808 and 1810, peninsulars had acted aggressively to preserve Spain’s power in the region: rejecting the notion of a congress that would address the question of governance in the absence of the Spanish king, leading peninsulars in Mexico City deposed the viceroy and persecuted Creoles, then welcomed weaker viceroys they knew they could dominate.
  • Peninsulars’ efforts could not, however, prevent the emergence of an independence struggle.
• In 1810, the Bajío region produced a unique movement led by a radical priest, Miguel Hidalgo.
  • When officials discovered the conspiracy that Hidalgo and other Creoles had been planning, the priest appealed directly to the indigenous and mestizo populace, giving the famous speech “The Cry of Dolores” (Grito de Dolores), calling upon the people to protect the interests of their King Fernando VII (held captive by Napoleon) by revolting against the European-born Spaniards who had overthrown the Spanish Viceroy.
  • A rich agricultural and mining zone, the Bajío had recently undergone difficult economic times that hit rural and urban workers particularly hard; Hidalgo had tried to help the poor by showing them how to grow olives and grapes, but the authorities discouraged or prohibited such crops due to competing Spanish imports — so many responded eagerly to Hidalgo’s call, which, though framed as an appeal for resistance to the peninsulars, was in effect a call for independence.
  • The enthusiasm Hidalgo stirred among Indians and mestizos shocked and frightened both Creole and peninsular elites: his untrained army grew to some 80,000 members as it conquered towns and larger cities, ultimately threatening Mexico City itself and attacking the persons and property of peninsular and Creole elites — the movement for independence was becoming a race and class war.
  • Perhaps fearing the atrocities his troops might commit there, Hidalgo prevented the movement from entering Mexico City; shortly afterward, troops of the viceregal government caught up with the rebels, and after a dramatic military defeat, Hidalgo was captured in early 1811 and executed.
• The death of its first leader did not end Mexico’s first independence campaign — another priest, the mestizo Morelos, took over the movement, under whom the rebellion gained clearer objectives of independence and social and economic reform, along with greater organization and a wider social base.
  • With the defeat and death of Morelos in 1815, the potential national scope of the movement came to an effective end; although smaller forces under leaders like Vicente Guerrero and Guadalupe Victoria (Manuel Félix Fernández) continued to harass the powerful through guerrilla warfare in several regions, the popular movement for independence in Mexico was no longer a grave threat to elite power.
• Final independence, in fact, was not the result of the efforts of Hidalgo, Morelos, or the forces that had made up their independence drive — it came instead as a conservative initiative led by military officers, merchants, and the Roman Catholic Church.
  • The liberals who carried out the 1820 revolt in Spain intended to eliminate the special privileges of the church and the military; anxious over this threat to two pillars of the Mexican establishment, and newly confident in their ability to keep popular forces in check, Creoles turned against Spanish rule in 1820–21.
  • Two figures from the early rebellion played central roles in liberating Mexico: Guerrero, an insurgent chief, and Iturbide, an officer who had fought against the popular independence movement. The two came together behind an agreement known as the Iguala Plan, centred on provisions of independence, respect for the church, and equality between Mexicans and peninsulars — a plan that gained the support of many Creoles, Spaniards, and former rebels.
  • As royal troops defected to Iturbide’s cause, the new Spanish administrator was soon forced to accept the inevitability of Mexican independence; a year later, in 1822, Iturbide engineered his own coronation as Agustín I, Emperor of Mexico.
• In 1823, a revolt that included the former insurgent Guadalupe Victoria (who, like Guerrero, had abandoned the cause of a popular independence) cut short Iturbide’s tenure as monarch; the consequences of this overthrow extended from Mexico through Central America.
  • In Mexico, the rebellion ushered in a republic and introduced Santa Anna, who occupied a central place in the nation’s politics for several decades.
  • The provinces of the Kingdom of Guatemala — which included the nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica — had adhered to Iturbide’s Mexico by 1822, but split off from Mexico in the wake of Iturbide’s fall, forming a federation, the United Provinces of Central America, which held together only until 1838, when regionalism led to the creation of separate countries in the region.

Brazil

Colonisation of Brazil

• The land now called Brazil was claimed by Portugal in April 1500, on the arrival of the Portuguese fleet — the second Portuguese India Armada — commanded by Cabral, on the Bahian shores.
  • The Portuguese encountered indigenous nations divided into several tribes; though the Portuguese sailors stayed for only nine days, the indigenous people soon became fascinated by the iron tools, the Catholic mass service, and the alcoholic beverages they observed — leading the Portuguese to assume they would quickly convert to Christianity once educated.
  • Still, Portugal did not really appreciate the value of Brazil, since its imports came mainly from India and the Far East; it was only the New Christian (converted Jewish) investors who were scouting and defending the coast, trading in brazilwood and sharing their monopoly contracts with the Portuguese king, who in turn allowed private investors to conquer certain areas for their own benefit, but at their own cost — leading to a combination of royal and private ownership.
• It was not long before other European nations wanted the opportunity to conquer and occupy parts of Brazil.
  • Brazilwood provided a rich red dye valuable in the colouring of textiles and clothing, prompting repeated efforts by the French and Spanish to enter Brazil; the Portuguese fought determinedly against these invasions, dispatching strong fleets to clear the coast.
  • Another Portuguese effort was to establish permanent settlements — the first of these, São Vicente, was established in 1532.
    • Though this first settlement was founded in 1532, colonization was effectively started in 1534, when Dom João III divided the territory into fifteen hereditary captaincies; this arrangement proved problematic, and in 1549 the king assigned a Governor-General to administer the entire colony.
• The Portuguese had established a management culture of violent domination and abuse in India, but this did not go down well with Brazilian locals, who captured and ate their Portuguese “owners” in complex ceremonies — forcing the Portuguese king to heed the warnings of the indigenous people and assume direct control.
  • Sousa was made the first Governor-General of Brazil in 1549 and reigned until 1553; by order of the king, he declared Salvador the capital city, and went on to declare war on the indigenous people to reduce the threat posed to the colony by the French (who had planned to cooperate with the locals for increased power). This Governor-General was integral to building towns, sugar mills, and important buildings.
  • Later, the crown ordered Sousa to treat the locals well, with the aim of converting them to Christianity — anyone who did not convert could be enslaved. As the groups intermingled, so did the cultures and genes, with colonists adopting as much of Brazilian culture as the indigenous people adopted of European culture.
  • As the crown and bishop of Portugal underwent renewal, the concept of slavery was no longer approved of, and the numbers of slaves in Brazil dropped drastically; the Portuguese assimilated some native tribes while others slowly disappeared, either in long wars or through European diseases to which they had no immunity.
• In 1562 and 1563, smallpox, measles, and influenza struck the local people, annihilating huge proportions of their population, followed by a famine — the locals, desperate for food and income, were driven to sell themselves as slaves rather than die of starvation.
  • Investors were required for portions of land as well as for sugar mills, and Portuguese colonisers needed to establish and maintain positive working relationships with the locals; centuries later, sugar would become the agricultural and financial pillar of Brazil.
  • Towards the end of the 1500s, the indigenous people fled to the interior of Brazil to escape colonial pressures, so European settlers turned to importing slaves from Africa; by the mid-16th century, sugar had become Brazil’s most important export due to rising international demand.
    • To profit from the situation, by 1700, over 963,000 African slaves had been brought across the Atlantic to work in Brazil — more Africans were brought to Brazil up to that date than to all other places in the Americas combined.
• Through wars against the French, the Portuguese slowly expanded their territory to the southeast, taking Rio de Janeiro in 1567, and to the northwest, taking São Luís in 1615; they also sent military expeditions to the Amazon rainforest and conquered English and Dutch strongholds, reaching the far south in 1680 and founding Sacramento (present-day Uruguay).
• At the end of the 17th century, sugar exports began to decline, but beginning in the 1690s, the discovery of gold in the region later called Minas Gerais (“General Mines”) saved the colony from imminent collapse, drawing thousands of immigrants from all over Brazil and from Portugal.
• In 1775, the three colonies of Portuguese America — the State of Brazil, the State of Maranhão and Piauí, and the State of Grão-Pará and Rio Negro — were united into a single colony under the State of Brazil, an arrangement that would last until the end of Colonial Brazil; as a result, Brazil did not split into several countries as happened to its Spanish-speaking neighbours.
• The Spanish tried to prevent Portuguese expansion into territory that belonged to them under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, and succeeded in conquering Uruguay in 1777; however, this proved short-lived, as another treaty signed the same year settled territorial disputes — Spain ceded territories in Brazil to Portugal (i.e., the Amazon Basin) in return for maintaining control over Uruguay, confirming Portuguese sovereignty over all lands from its territorial expansion and thus creating most of the current Brazilian borders.

From Colony to United Kingdom

• During the invasion of Portugal by Napoleonic France (1807), the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil, establishing Rio de Janeiro as the de facto capital of Portugal.
  • This had the side effect of creating within Brazil many of the institutions required to exist as an independent state; most importantly, it freed Brazil to trade with other nations at will.
• After Napoleon’s army was finally defeated in 1815, in order to maintain the capital in Brazil and allay Brazilian fears of being returned to colonial status, King John VI of Portugal raised the de jure status of Brazil to an equal, integral part of a United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves, rather than a mere colony — a status it enjoyed for the next seven years.

Liberation from Colonial Rule of Brazil

• Brazil’s independence shared a common starting point with Spanish America’s, since both conflicts were triggered by Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, which forced the Portuguese royal family to resettle in Brazil in 1807; yet Brazil gained its independence with little of the violence that marked similar transitions in Spanish America.
• Conspiracies against Portuguese rule during 1788–98 showed that some groups in Brazil had already been contemplating independence in the late 18th century, and the reforms of the second half of that century — Portugal’s attempt to overhaul the administration of its overseas possessions — were an inconvenience to many in the colony.
  • Still, the impulse toward independence was less powerful in Brazil than in Spanish America, for several reasons:
    • Portugal, with more limited financial, human, and military resources than Spain, had never ruled its American subjects with as heavy a hand as its Iberian neighbour — neither enforcing commercial monopolies as strictly, nor excluding the American-born from high administrative positions as widely.
    • Many Brazilian-born and Portuguese elites had received the same education, and their economic interests tended to overlap.
    • The reliance of the Brazilian upper classes on African slavery favoured their continued ties to Portugal, since plantation owners depended on the African slave trade — which Portugal controlled — to provide workers for the colony’s main economic activities; the size of the resulting slave population (approximately half the total Brazilian population in 1800) meant Creoles shied away from political initiatives that might mean a loss of control over their social inferiors.
• The key step in the relatively bloodless end of colonial rule in Brazil was the transfer of the Portuguese court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808.
  • The arrival of the court transformed Brazil in ways that made its return to colony status impossible; the unprecedented concentration of economic and administrative power in Rio de Janeiro brought new integration to Brazil, and the emergence of that capital as a large and increasingly sophisticated urban centre expanded markets for Brazilian manufactures and other goods.
  • Even more important to the development of manufacturing in Brazil was one of the first acts undertaken there by the Portuguese ruler, Prince Regent John: the removal of old restrictions on manufacturing. Another of his enactments — the opening of Brazilian ports to direct trade with friendly countries — was less helpful to local manufacturers but further contributed to Brazil’s emergence as a metropolis.
• Brazil headed into a political crisis when groups in Portugal tried to reverse the metropolitanization of their former colony.
  • With the end of the Napoleonic Wars came calls for John to return to Lisbon; at first he demurred, and in 1815 even raised Brazil to the status of a kingdom, legally equal to Portugal within the empire he ruled.
  • The situation was a difficult one for John (King John VI after 1816): if he moved back to Lisbon, he might lose Brazil; if he remained in Rio, he might well lose Portugal.
  • Finally, after liberal revolts in Lisbon in 1820, the Portuguese demands became too strong to resist; in a move that ultimately facilitated Brazil’s break with Portugal, John sailed for Lisbon in 1821, leaving his son Dom Pedro behind as prince regent.
• It was Dom Pedro who, at the urging of local elites, oversaw the final emergence of an independent Brazil.
  • Matters were pushed toward that end by Portuguese reaction against the rising power of their former colony: although the liberal government constituted after 1820 allowed Brazilian representation in a Cortes, it became clear that Portugal wanted to reduce Brazil to its previous colonial condition, endangering all the concessions and powers the Brazilian elite had won.
  • By late 1821, the situation had become unbearable — the Cortes now demanded that Dom Pedro return to Portugal. As his father had advised him to do, the prince instead declared his intention to stay in Brazil, in a speech known as the “Fico” (“I am staying”).
• When Pedro proclaimed independence on 7 September 1822, and subsequently became its first emperor, Brazil’s progression from Portuguese colony to autonomous country was complete; there was some armed resistance from Portuguese garrisons in Brazil, but the struggle was brief.
• Independence still did not come without a price:
  • Over the next 25 years, Brazil suffered a series of regional revolts, some lasting as long as a decade and costing tens of thousands of lives; Dom Pedro I was forced from his throne in 1831, succeeded by his son, Dom Pedro II.
  • The break with Portugal did not, however, produce the kind of disruption and devastation that plagued much of former Spanish America — with its territory and economy largely intact, its government headed by a prince of the traditional royal family, and its society little changed, Brazil enjoyed continuities that made it extraordinarily stable in comparison with most of the other new states in the region.