The Historiography of the Spanish American Revolutions

Abstract

T HE LITERATURE relating to the fall of the Spanish American empire and to the establishment, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, of the independent states of Spanish is already vast and is rapidly increasing. No other period, with the possible exception of that of the conquest, has so closely and continuously engaged the attention of historians in Spanish itself. pioneers of the last century, Bartolome Mitre in Argentina, Diego Barros Arana in Chile, Jose Maria Restrepo in Colombia, Lucas Alaman in Mexico-to mention only a few outstanding -names, none of which, incidentally, has attracted the notice of G. P. Gooch in his well-known History and Historians in the Ninetenth Century-have been followed by a host of investigators (though unevenly distributed as between the Spanish American states themselves), who have devoted themselves to the political, biographical, military, institutional and diplomatic aspects of the revolutionary period, though much less to its social and economic aspects.' And if the subject lends itself both to pietas and polemics, such names as those of Ricardo Levene and of the late Emilio Ravignani in Argentiina, of Ricardo Donoso in Chile, and of the late Eduardo Acevedo and Vicente Lecuna in Uruguay and Venezuela-names chosen almost at random from the ranks of older scholars and easily to be supplemented by those of younger men in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico in particular-testify to the past and present vigor of historical scholarship and to the high quality of much of the work produced. Outside Spanish the case is different. When the late F. A. Kirkpatrick wrote his chapter on The Establishment of Independence in Spanish America in volume 10 of the Cambridge Mlod-