Sovereignty and revolution in the Iberian Atlantic This book takes a bold new look at both Spains and Portugals New World empires in a trans Atlantic context. It argues that modern notions of sovereignty in the Atlantic world have been unstable contested and equivocal from the start. It shows how much contemporary notions of sovereignty emerged in the Americas as a response to European imperial crises in the age of revolutions. Jeremy Adelman reveals how many modernday uncertainties about property citizenship and human rights were forged in an epic contest over the very nature of state power in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic offers a new understanding of Latin American and Atlantic history one the blurs traditional distinctions between the imperial and the colonial. It shows how the Spanish and Portuguese empires responded to the pressures of rival states and merchant capitalism in the eighteenth cantury. As empires adapted the ties between colonies and mother countries transformed recreating trans Atlantic bonds of loyalty and interests. In the end colonies repudiated their Iberian loyalties not so much because they sought independent nationhood. Rather as European conflicts and revolutions swept across the Atlantic empires were no longer viable models of sovereignty and there was less to be loyal to. The Old Regimes collasped before subjects began to imagine new ones in their place. The emergence of Latin American nations indeed many of our contemporary notions of sovereignty was the effect and not the cause of th breakdown of European empires Empires that bleed Capitalism slavery on imperial hinterlands Between war and peace The wealth of empires Spanish secessions Brazilian counterpoints Dissolutions of the Spanish Atlantic Crossing the Rubicon Revolution and sovereignty