Age of Imperial Revolutions or Age of Atlantic Revolutions?
Klooster, Wim (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, vol. 3 — The Iberian Empires. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Odd things happened in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. As San Domingue imploded in the wake of generalized bottom-up slave rebellion, the elites of the island of Cuba wholeheartedly embraced slavery and successively established a much larger plantation regime, to replace Haiti as the main Atlantic supplier of sugar, tobacco, and coffee.[1] While abolitionist Atlantic calls expanded in the wake of the Seven Year War, the Spanish Empire opened the doors to free trade of African slaves.[2] As republicanism allegedly spread all over the Atlantic, Brazilians chose monarchy and empire and so too did the entirety of the British Caribbean and Canada. Slavery and monarchy survived unscathed in Cuba and Brazil, sustained by enslaved and free Black militias. In the Andean highlands of the viceroyalties of Peru, Nueva Granada and River Plate, Creole republicans engaged in civil wars against pro-imperial indigenous militias who stubbornly resisted independence movements. Struggling for “emancipation”, Bolivar and his allies twice lost their established republics to militias of slaves and free Blacks, fighting on behalf of empire. So much for revolutions as movements for emancipation and popular sovereignty.
The authors of the three volumes of The Cambridge History of Atlantic Revolutions struggle around the contradictions at the heart of the liberal concept of ‘Atlantic Revolutions.’ All the three volumes share the same introduction, namely, a collection of disjointed historiographical reflections by Wim Klooster, the editor. They summarize Klooster’s unresolved puzzlement over the evidence in this massive collection of nearly 80 cutting-edge essays covering the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires: Why did so many slaves and indigenous people fight in civil wars to defend both monarchy and empire? Why did the triumph of republicanism lead to the imperial US expansion beyond the Ohio River Valley into hitherto banned Native American lands? Why didn’t the collapse of the French ancien-regime involve the end of French mercantilism, empire, and slavery but simply their transformation into something more lethal? Why did enslaved and emancipated Haitian choose Black monarchs and emperors as ‘national’ leaders? Why did the Tupac Amaru rebellion, the alleged harbinger of an anticolonial, egalitarian indigenous movement, seek to establish an imagined neo-Inca hierarchical monarchical regime? These questions, and dozen others, catalogue the myriad contradictions at the heart of the liberal category of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions.
Benedict Anderson notwithstanding, early-nineteenth-century creole pioneers lived in an age that did not care much for nations, republican democracy, or emancipation.[3] Theirs was rather an Age of Imperial Revolutions, seismic movements to reform empire, as Jeremy Adelman aptly described the epochal transformations in a 2008 AHR essay.[4] Oddly Adelman’s essay goes unmentioned in Klooster’s carefully annotated introduction (that cites nearly 200 titles) and so too does Frederick Cooper’s classic Colonialism in Question (2005).[5] Clearly Adelman’s and Cooper’s arguments have failed to make much of a dent in the liberal fiction of the collapse of empire and the triumph of the nation state in the Age of Revolutions, a fiction that also organizes such recent books as Patrick Griffins’ and Nathan-Perl-Rosenthal’s.[6]
From their inception Atlantic Empires changed, revamped, reformed as they competed with one another, allowing for large bottom-up participation in the process. The Bourbon Reforms, including the opening of the slave trade, did not prefigure breakdown, just rearticulation of empire. When there was bottom-up push-back to tributary reform in some places, the empire simply renegotiated new fiscal arrangements with elites in others. The empire changed; it did not buckle.
To confuse “absolutism” with authoritarian regimes and liberalism with political bottom-up participation is part of the fiction that the nation has worked so much to instill in our collective imaginations. Clearly the sovereignty of the nation over the historiographical imagination is enduring and overwhelming, rhetorical claims to the contrary. Global and Atlantic history notwithstanding, history departments, like cartography, are organized on the everyday fiction of the nation state. The emancipatory teleologies of liberal democracy are in our DNA. Klooster’s introduction repeats some truisms upon which the paradigms of national popular sovereignty and the Age of Revolutions are built: Political debates became no longer the business of elites (11); freedom became “the ability to live under the laws that inhabitants of a country made themselves” (15); “on the whole , royalists belonged to the counterrevolutionary camp”(34).
The volume under review, The Iberian Empires, volume III of the triad edited by Klooster, traces revolution in both the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic. The volume reveals the tension within the normative narrative of revolution as transition from top-down-declining-empire to participatory-bottom-up-new sovereign-nation, for nearly half of the twenty-six contributors deeply contradict this narrative.
The volume is organized around national cartographies, as it follows the independence movements from Mexico down to Brazil and River Plate. There are essays that explore the politics of non-nation-states, including viceroyalties or the Spanish empire as one whole, but often to reinforce narratives of prefigurative, inevitable imperial breakdown and proto-national bottom-up radicalism as result of heightened imperial-colonial exploitation of natives and slaves (Stefan Rinke and Emily Berquist Soule). The volume also explores the transition to nation states in Spain and Portugal proper, in the wake of imperial break-down, without paying much attention, however, to the persistence of sprawling empire in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia (Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro and Juan Luis Simal). The two new Iberian nations emerged actually as imperial nations.[7] This applies to Brazil as well, as it became the dominant empire of the Luso Atlantic. There are essays like Ernesto Bassi’s that seek to do away with traditional political -geographical units of analysis to suggest other imperial geographies.
It would take a much longer essay to review all twenty-six essays, each by distinguished specialists. I will confine myself to offering broad strokes. Many of the essays reveal the deep contradictions of the liberal model of Atlantic Revolutions.
Marcella Echeverri and Jane Landers highlight the importance of Black and Indigenous loyalism throughout the Spanish empire that was as revolutionary in its own right as those claimed by the new republican independent states: experimenting, reimagining and renegotiating imperial sovereignty at every locale. To call these movements counterrevolutionary is to assume that there was a qualitative chasm between the degree of bottom-up political participation before and after empire. If the nation is an imagined community of brethren held by print culture, the empire was an imagined community of king-and-vassals held by petitioning and paperwork. There was as much room for bottom-up politics in both. If revolution was a transition to new forms of empire, then one should expect only changes of degree, not kind, in bottom-up political participation.
Authors like Timothy Hawkins see in Central America independence the continuity of political compliance, with no evidence of bottom-up politics before and after imperial revolutions. This might simple be a mirage of considering revolution exclusively as armed, sweeping political mobilization: Politics remains the monopoly of those who resist empire, not of those who choose to remain within it. Gabriel Meglio sees a qualitative difference in kind in urban plebeian political participation in Buenos Aires as independence unfolded. Yet the recent work of Sergio Serulnikov on eighteenth-century urban Chuquisaca, in the same viceroyalty, suggests that widespread plebeian urban participation was not solely a feature of imperial breakdown during the wars; it was constitutive of empire itself.[8] In fact, as the essay by Monica Ricketts suggests, the imperial imagined community was a bit more inclusive of females as political petitioners than the more patriarchal, new republican communities of mobilized, armed brethren.
Some essays remind us that the transition of empire to republics was a transition from empires to new empires, not nations. This is obvious in the case of Brazil, as the essays of Joao Paulo Pimenta and Gabriel Paquette forcefully show. But this transition from empire to new imaginary forms of empire also reveal themselves clearly in the Spanish debates of the Cortes of Cadiz (Roberto Breña) and in the revolutionary wars of Mexico (Juan Ortiz Escamilla), Central America (Timothy Hawkins), the Southern Cone (Juan Luis Ossa Santa Cruz), and the Caribbean (Jane Landers). Karen Racine elegantly reminds us that the leading agents of revolution in Spanish America, from Miranda to Bolivar, saw the British constitutional monarchy and empire as their ideal political model, not Republican France or the US constitution, as David Armitage once suggested to unanimous acclaim.
The greatest casualty of the liberal historiographical model is Africa. It receives no separate volume and is covered only in one chapter of the entire collection of three volumes. The consequences of imperial revolutions affected Africa deeply. Roquinaldo Ferreira explores seditious liberal movements in Angola that despite all the cultural and economic connections to Rio and Bahia remained nevertheless attached politically to the Portuguese empire. Ferreira’s essay shows that Angola became more connected to Brazil than Portugal demographically, culturally, and economically, yet not subordinated politically. The persistence of the imperial bonds to Portugal might have been an expression of the weakness of the Iberian monarchy. The weaker a crown the stronger the political imperial bonds became. This bred the fiction of early-modern Iberian ‘absolutism’. Absolutism was no more than the acceptance by all parties and factions of a single mediating authority, the more misinformed and weaker the latter, the greater the consensus over ‘absolute’ power of the monarch to offer just resolution in conflict and in the distribution of rewards.[9]
[1] Ada Ferrer. Freedom’s Mirror : Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
[2] Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018)
[3] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition (Verso, 2006).
[4] Jeremy Adelman, ‘An Age of Imperial Revolutions,’ The American Historical Review, Volume 113 (2008): 319–340.
[5] Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (University of California Press, 2005)
[6] Patrick Griffins The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World. (Yale University Press, 2023); Nathan-Perl-Rosenthal’s The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books 2024)
[7] Joseph Fradera, Imperial Nations: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish and American Empires, trans. Ruth Mackay (Princeton University Press, 2018)
[8] Sergio Serulnikov. El poder del disenso: Cultura política urbana y crisis del gobierno español Chuquisaca, 1777–1809 (Prometo libros, 2022)
[9] Arndt Brendecke, The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge (Walter de Gruyer, 2016)
