Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: December 11, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 408
ISBN-13: 9780691126647
Subjects: American history: c 1500 to c 1800; European history: c 1500 to c 1750; Imperialism; c 1700 to c 1800; c 1800 to c 1900; History - General History; Economic Conditions; History; Sovereignty; History: World; Portugal; South America; Spain; Europe - Spain & Portugal; Latin America - General; European History; History / Spain & Portugal; World History / Comparative History; Colonies; Administration; Autonomy and independence movements; Latin America
Description: This book takes a bold new look at both Spain's and Portugal's 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.