Latin America between Colony and Nation: Selected Essays

Abstract

Students of Latin America’s late colonial and early national periods—especially those interested in the so-called Middle Period or Age of Revolution—should welcome this new work by John Lynch, a major scholar of both periods and Emeritus Professor of Latin American History at the University of London. Lynch’s anthology includes six essays originally published in books and journals, two unpublished papers, and a speech delivered at the University of Seville. Most of these writings date from the early 1990s, although some have been revised for the present work; the speech and two of the essays have been translated into English for the first time. Overall, the anthology exhibits the broad range of Lynch’s interests as a historian. Besides covering topics for which Lynch is known, it offers some surprises: a piece on the Spanish Conquest, and another on popular religion and millenarian movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More important, this work highlights Lynch’s contributions to our understanding of a dynamic and complex era in Latin American history, one he characterizes as “a time of transition when colony yielded slowly to nation and the nation retained much of the colony” (p. viii).The anthology reflects certain themes long associated with its author. One is the idea that the roots of Latin American, especially Spanish American, independence lie in the eighteenth century, when an increasingly uncompromising, if “enlightened,” colonial regime triggered the breakdown of the “colonial consensus” and the growth of an aggrieved creole sense of identity (or patriotism). First developed in Lynch’s classic The Spanish American Revolutions 1808–1826 (1973), this idea runs through several chapters of the present work, including chapter 3, “The Colonial State in Latin America,” and above all in chapter 5, “The Colonial Roots of Latin American Independence” (both previously published). Another of Lynch’s trademark themes is the impact of social and racial tensions in both the late colonial and independence era. Chapter 4, “Spanish America’s Poor Whites: Canarian Immigrants in Venezuela, 1700–1830,” sketches a vivid portrait of such tensions in Venezuela. A translated and revised version of the 1991 Spanish-language original, “Poor Whites” examines the role of Canarian immigrants in eighteenth-century Venezuela’s increasingly volatile economy and stratified society. It highlights the slippery position that Canarians and their descendants came to occupy within a society that was ever-more obsessed with matters of race and class, and within the minds of a creole elite who, in their desire to maintain exclusion, tagged their ambitious, white-skinned social inferiors as “pardos” (p. 66). “Poor Whites” also offers insight on the popular movements with which Canarians became involved, and on the political struggle that emerged after 1810 between creole patriots and royalists—a struggle in which Canarians tended to align with the latter.Awareness of the social and racial tensions that marked late colonial life has long shaped Lynch’s interpretation of the Spanish American revolutions and independence movements. This can be seen not only in the analysis of the roots of independence in chapter 5 but also in the two chapters addressing the role of Simón Bolívar. Chapters 7 and 8 epitomize the third trademark theme to be found in the anthology, namely, the nature of the independence struggles, and especially the Bolívarian. Lynch stresses the uniqueness of these struggles within the context of the North Atlantic “Age of Revolution”—that tidal wave launched by the French and North American upheavals. In chapter 7, “Simón Bolívar and the Age of Revolution,” Lynch states that “the concept of a single revolution inspired by democracy and nurtured on the Enlightenment does not do justice to the complexity of the period” (p. 136). Many scholars today would agree (see, for example, the contributors to State and Society in Spanish America during the Age of Revolution, edited by Victor M. Uribe [2001]). Lynch’s careful study of the ideas and policies of Simón Bolívar, moreover, provides a valuable corrective to those who might dismiss the Spanish American movements as merely failed versions of the French or North American experiences—or as an example of “Revolution Denied,” a phrase coined by historian Lester Langley in his 1996 comparative study of revolution in the Americas. Its assessment of Bolívar’s still-controversial legacy is sympathetic, yet balanced and clear-eyed, grounded in a knowledge of the constraints and challenges Bolívar himself faced. Here and in chapter 8, “Bolívar and the Caudillos,” Lynch also reminds us that independence was not a given, but rather a grim, hard-fought power struggle full of twists and turns, ironies and disappointments; and, that in social policy, as in military strategy, prejudices and ideals were both bent to circumstances of political (and cultural) reality.Readers should not miss Lynch’s account of his intellectual formation and profession of faith as an historian, both contained in chapter 1, “Passage to America.” Here, the author offers a brief riposte to postmodern theoretical influences on the discipline—“history is a process of discovery . . . truth is a matter to be ascertained, not invented, discovered rather than constructed” (p. 9). This may strike some as quaint, while others (such as this reviewer) will find it honest and refreshing. In any case, the present work stands as a fine testimony to the fluid prose and empirically based social and politico-institutional history with which Lynch has made his mark.