New Viceroyalty, New Nation, New Empire: A Transnational Imaginary for Peruvian Independence

Abstract

Abstract The independence process in Spanish America was accompanied by new imaginaries concerning the new political entities that would emerge from the breakdown of the old colonial jurisdictions. This essay explores an imaginary for Peruvian independence, Bolivarian in scope, which lay at the center of the Revolution of 1814–15 in the southern Andes. This “revolution of the patria” started in Cuzco in 1814 but soon captured Arequipa, Huamanga, and much of Charcas, until its military defeat by royalist forces in 1815. It not only proposed full independence from viceregal control but also aimed at completely severing American ties to the Spanish monarchy. Francisco Carrascón, a peninsular prebendary resident in Cuzco who became the movement’s leading ideologue, had in 1801 unsuccessfully proposed the creation of a new viceroyalty to the Council of the Indies. In 1814, however, he advocated the creation of a new and independent Peruvian empire stretching from Lima to the River Plate, from “Sun to Sun.” The cities of Buenos Aires, Lima, Montevideo, and Cuzco were equally to be the principal imperial cities, but Cuzco, because of its antiquity and central location, would be the seat of government or “national peak.” While there is a significant historiography on the Revolution of 1814–15, it has been largely overlooked in several key Latin American independence syntheses. This essay therefore also seeks to restore the movement to the center of wider historiographic debates on Latin American independence.