Spanish American Research Articles

London in 1810: Spanish American Independence at 27 Grafton Street

The year 1810 marked a watershed moment in the history of Spanish America. During these months, several independent juntas, provisional governments created during the French occupation of Spain, were established across the continent from Mexico to Argentina and Chile. Even more significantly, future leaders of this continental-wide rebellion not only met each other for the first time but also forged a single, cohesive mindset for the future of Central and South America. And this remarkable gathering took place thousands of miles away on the opposite side of the Atlantic – right in the centre of London. In this essay, I explore the connection between England in 1810 and the project of nation building spearheaded by Creole patriots, bringing to light both the rewarding and problematic issues of transnational collaboration, which included the emergence of independent nation states at the cost of Britain’s informal economic ‘empire’ in the region.

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

Spanish American Independence Movements: A History in Documents by Wim Klooster

Reviewed by: Spanish American Independence Movements: A History in Documents by Wim Klooster Jane Rausch, Emerita Klooster, Wim, ed. Spanish American Independence Movements: A History in Documents. Petersborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2021. The independence movements of Spanish America in the early nineteenth century signal the virtual end of Spanish colonialism in the Americas (except for Cuba and Puerto Rico). These independence movements gave rise to the creation of the contemporary Latin American nations that stretch from Mexico in [End Page 229] the north to Chile and Argentina in the south. Wim Klooster's Spanish American Independence Movements: A History in Documents is the ninth instalment of Broadview Press' impressive Sources Series, which was launched with the 2016 publication of The Trial of Charles I. Klooster by K. J. Kesselring, who holds the Robert H. and Virginia N. Scotland Chair in History and International Relations at Clark University and is also the author of Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History and coeditor of The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination. Klooster's detailed and thought-provoking introduction provides the information needed to place the primary source documents in historical perspective. Topic discussed in the introduction include Ethnicity, Culture, and Power in the Spanish Territories; Early Revolts and Rebellions; The French Revolution and Spanish America; Napoleon's Invasion of Spain and the Imperial Crisis; The Road to a Constitution; The Constitution of Cádiz; Revolts in New Spain; Creole Ascension in the Río de la Plata; South America's Southern Theater; New Granada: South America's Northern Theater; The Perils of Self-Governance; Fernando's Return; Bolívar's Success; Peru and San Martín's Achievement; South America's Final Battles; and Mexican Independence. The book offers a carefully selected collection of fifty-four documents that cover the major developments from 1780 to 1826. The documents, many of which are appearing in English for the first time, are arranged chronologically in five sections: Prelude (documents 1–3), Imperial Crisis (documents 4–10), Independence Movements Take Off: Fernando's Restoration (documents 11–28), Continued Warfare and Independence (documents 29–41), and Imperial Defeat and Construction of New Regimes (documents 42–54). In addition to the chronological presentation of the documents, Klooster provides an alternative arrangement of the documents by region in a section called "Alternate Table of Contents: Documents Separated by Region." The "Questions to Consider" section offers a pathway to aid students in their assessment of the documents. Spanish American Independence Movements: A History in Documents, which also contains several maps, pictures, a glossary, and an index, can function both as a textbook and as a reference work. Used as a text in an undergraduate course, the instructor might assign the "Introduction" (which includes definitions of potentially unfamiliar Spanish words or phrases) to provide a succinct overview of the whole independence movement and then select one or two of the documents for a more intensive analysis. For example, "Bolivar's letter from Jamaica, [End Page 230] 6 September 1815" (document #30) has often been used to explain Bolivar's interpretation of the form of government that newly independent Spanish American nations might take. Other documents, such as the letters of Pablo Morillo to Spain's Ministry of War in July and September 1818 (documents #39 and #40), offer new insight as to why Morillo decided not to raise a battalion of enslaved Blacks to defend the empire against the insurgents. Used as a reference work, graduate students and scholars will find documents, previously inaccessible or difficult to locate, that are bound to enlarge their understanding of these extremely complicated events. To site just one example: in my capacity as a researcher of Gran Colombia, document #49, an extract from "Francisco María Roca's Friends of the Country or Essays about the Happiness of this Province, 1822," a work previously unknown to me, helps to explain why it was logical that many people in Guayaquil wanted to remain part of Peru rather than to become a department of Colombia (167–70). Klooster has assembled an invaluable collection of documents that will endure as an indispensable resource for students, instructors, and researchers of Latin America by...

Beyond the Anglo-World: Settler Colonialism and Democracy in the Americas

This essay argues that delimiting the settler colonial analytic to colonial legacies in the “Anglo-world” risks disavowing its congruent relationship with other colonial ideologies such as those of the Spanish imperial world. In examining Alexis de Tocqueville’s comparisons of Anglo- and Spanish American colonization alongside Latin American writers like Lorenzo de Zavala and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, it shows how they occupied a common discursive terrain in grappling with the prospects for democracy in the new world. For Tocqueville, the failure of Spanish American democracy compared to the United States stems from the different systems of land colonization at work in each context. Sarmiento and Zavala provide different accounts of American colonization that exhibit both intersections with and departures from Tocqueville. Bringing these writers together shows how settler colonial ideologies and imaginaries in the Americas circulated in a shared hemispheric space and reciprocally shaped one another in contingent ways.

Liberalismo e independencia en la era de las revoluciones: México y el mundo hispánico

Liberalismo e independencia en la era de las revoluciones: México y el mundo hispánico

Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters

Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters

Review: Cabotajes Novohispanos: Espacios y contactos marítimos en torno a la Nueva España, by Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos

Review: <i>Cabotajes Novohispanos: Espacios y contactos marítimos en torno a la Nueva España</i>, by Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos

Blood and Boundaries: The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America

The Holy Office of the Inquisition in Lima arrested Manuel Bautista Pérez in 1635 on accusations that he was the leader of Peru's secret Jews and sentenced him to death in 1639. Bautista Pérez was a Portuguese converso merchant who had become one of Lima's wealthiest residents and who exerted significant influence and power in the city. Inquisitors arrested Bautista Pérez during investigations in the 1630s into some of Lima's most commercially successful residents, most of whom were conversos. How were Manuel Bautista Pérez and others able to operate as powerful players in international mercantile networks and settle in viceregal capitals when the Spanish crown had strictly prohibited conversos and other New Christians, such as Moriscos, from crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Spanish America? This is one of the important questions that animates Stuart B. Schwartz's Blood and Boundaries.Schwartz explores the limits of religious and racial exclusion in the Spanish American viceroyalties by focusing on the lived experiences of individuals and communities from three marginalized groups: Moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Schwartz explores how marginalized groups navigated laws and discourses that sought to exclude them, showing how “the restrictions and disadvantages were repeatedly circumvented, negotiated, ignored, and ultimately failed as policies of social marginalization—even though they were relatively successful in weakening those groups as corporate actors with political interests” (p. 10). Chapter 1 explores how the fear of Islam, Islamic practices, and Christian renegades who converted to Islam in captivity penetrated colonial anxieties in Spanish America, even though the number and proportion of Moriscos and Muslims in Spanish America were very limited. Schwartz analyzes the dynamic of this fear and anxiety about Islam in Spanish America by exploring how colonial subjects defended themselves against such accusations in Inquisition trials. The chapter convincingly shows that while not many Moriscos crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Castile to Spanish America, the fear of Islamic practices and beliefs remained ingrained in the imaginary landscapes of colonial authorities and the experiences of colonial subjects.In contrast, chapter 2 explores how conversos often crossed the ocean as merchants and entrepreneurs and settled in Spanish America in significant numbers with limited resistance from the crown, in spite of copious laws that prohibited conversos from traveling to the Indies. They often became wealthy and powerful residents in viceregal cities. Instead of focusing on the sporadic persecutions of conversos across colonial Latin America, Schwartz explores their lived experiences, especially of those who occupied prominent economic positions. Schwartz argues that many conversos were able to navigate and circumvent discourses and laws that sought to exclude them because, “in the context of the closed commercial economies of the Iberian empires, their mercantile skills and connections often made them not only useful but essential to local and regional economies, and that utility overrode the prohibitions on their residence and the suspicions about the sincerity of their Catholic piety” (p. 62). The third and final chapter explores how American-born mestizos, who faced significant legislation that sought to prevent their participation in higher echelons of colonial society, learned how to seek “legal relief and sometimes successfully challenged the system of restrictions and disadvantages by learning how to use legal representation, the law courts, appeals to viceregal authority, and direct petitions to the crown to defend themselves and their interests” (p. 106).This book is an important and welcome addition to the historiography of ideas about racial difference and exclusion in colonial Latin America. Schwartz shifts from a focus on how institutions of governance sought to marginalize and exclude particular groups and instead argues that individuals' and communities' lived experiences reveal how a broad array of colonial subjects negotiated and often circumvented ideas and rules that sought to exclude or marginalize them. In his own words, Schwartz eschews an analysis of “the laws and institutions that sought to enforce the exclusions and reinforce the social hierarchy or [of] the discourse and patterns of genealogical thinking that sought to distinguish between purity and infection” to instead focus on the agency and experiences “of those who lived under these constraints, and on how and why the attempts to marginalize them were limited, modified, ignored, or evaded—not only by the victims of the exclusions but also by other groups and individuals in their society, and at times even by the state or by ecclesiastical institutions as well” (pp. 4–5). This focus on how marginalized groups reacted to and navigated ideas and laws that sought to marginalize them is key “to understanding the role of race and other forms of social difference in these colonial regimes” (p. 4).

The Hispanic World at War and the Global Transformation of Commerce. Global Merchants in Spanish America: Business, Networks and Independence (1800-1830)

This special issue investigates how in the times of war, political turmoil, and disruption of commercial practices during the Age of Revolutions two centuries ago, merchants appear as demiurges of a new order. This is part of a polycentric reading of epochal transformations that does not deny the primacy of politics and military power in establishing relations of force, but which underline the complex negotiations at their base. The collection of essays looks at the profound global consequences of the fall of the Spanish American empire, particularly as they related to the decline of mercantilism and the reconfiguration of both Atlantic and inter-Pacific commerce. A crucial element in this transformation was the war economy, which had implications not only in Spanish America, but in the whole of the Hispanic world and beyond. Global merchants or businessmen —foreigners and Hispanic— strategically located in the Hispanic World, whose networks and affairs linked Europe, Asia and the Americas, worked within the vacuum created by the crisis of the Spanish monarchy in what was a fluid and foundational moment. The essays investigate how the Napoleonic Wars and the Wars of Independence against Spain accelerated the emergence of new actors, practices, rules and commercial circuits, by analyzing the personal and business networks that built, redefined and renegotiated the role of Hispanic America in the global economy. This prosopography of merchants thus shows trajectories through which, despite infinite difficulties, global and transregional merchants appear as one of the maieutic forces in the birth of the modern world.

Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and its Borders, 1898–1940 by Sarah Deutsch

Reviewed by: Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and its Borders, 1898–1940 by Sarah Deutsch Alicia M. Dewey Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and its Borders, 1898–1940. By Sarah Deutsch. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. 666. Notes, bibliography, index.) Sarah Deutsch has written possibly the most important survey of modern U.S. western history in a couple of decades. Along with her own original research and interpretations, she has synthesized aspects of recent twentieth-century borderlands historiography with the new western history of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Although she treats the West as a region that has been a place of mixing, cooperation, and conflict among diverse groups, she moves beyond region to make a case, in somewhat Turnerian fashion, that the modern West played a significant role in forming and maintaining the twentieth-century U.S. nation-state as a “white man’s country” (454). The book is important to Texas history because she includes Texas as part of the West and incorporates examples of episodes in Texas history in almost every chapter. Although Deutsch’s work does not cover as broad a time period as Patricia Nelson Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (W. W. Norton & Co., 1987) or Richard White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), it is as significant because it encompasses the critical years between the late nineteenth century, traditionally viewed as the “end of the frontier” by Frederick Jackson Turner and those who followed him, and World War II, a time when the West had been modernized and fully incorporated into the United States politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Deutsch starts in 1898 rather than in 1893, the date of Turner’s famous thesis, because she sees the start of the Spanish American War as the beginning of a shift in the government’s approach to new territories and new peoples from a policy of “democratic incorporation” to “an imperial philosophy of official colonization” (3). Deutsch argues that this new imperial philosophy affected how the government managed land and people in the West, differentiating between Whites as the true exemplars of American citizens and non-Whites, like the colonized abroad, in a secondary status. Armed with new scientific “expertise” and eager to draw lines, segregate, and categorize, the federal government had considerable ability to influence and shape the West because of its control of the extensive public lands remaining there. Policies regulating water, land, and population aimed to transform the Jeffersonian “agrarian ideal of independent small farmers . . . into a self-consciously modern nation-state” [End Page 395] while continuing to preserve the western myth of boundless opportunity for White men. (2) The book is divided into four parts: Demarcating, 1898–1910; Agitating, 1910–1921; Speculating, 1920–1929; and Mobilizing, 1928–1940. Throughout, Deutsch explores federal, state, and local efforts to define physical and racial borders, create clearer definitions of citizenship, exclude or subordinate non-Whites, identify and promote as normative the White nuclear family and White community, preserve the ideal of the self-sufficient small farmer, and promote development that primarily benefited Whites. For example, in early twentieth-century South Texas, Anglos built irrigated farm towns that segregated ethnic Mexican laborers to one side of town, in contrast to the more ethnically mixed border towns, created new counties to give more power to White ranching and farming families, and formed the White Men’s Primary Association to attempt to keep ethnic Mexicans from political participation. Elsewhere, government-encouraged speculative investments in oil, land, and tourism in the 1920s benefited Whites, often at the expense of Native Americans. Deutsch contrasts efforts to delimit and control with the reality of blurred boundaries, mixing of peoples, and insurgent movements, showing that neither conquest nor homogeneity were ever fully achieved. Nature did not always cooperate with enough water for small farms despite the construction of irrigation canals and modern dams. Drawing clear racial lines was not always possible, often erasing complex mixed heritage, as in Oklahoma, where...

“The Last Time” by Guillermo Martinez: Latin American boom and its assessment after 60 years

The article attempts to trace the general dynamics of the development of Latin American literature before and after the Latin American boom through the prism of Guillermo Martinez’s recently published novel “The Last Time” (2022). Well learned Latin-American literature of “boom” in some sense eclipses the following generations. The purpose of the article is to show the general picture of the development of Latin American literature before and after, to comprehend the processes taking place in Spanish American literature over the past 60 years and to summarize them. The recent novel by argentine writer Guillermo Martinez “The last time” represents some kind of farewell, an attempt of looking to the “golden generation” from long distance and appreciate it in the terms of postmodern poetic. From the Martinez’s point of view the writers of boom were conspirators, and there books were passwords. These conspirations and passwords could ne comprehended as confirmation of their specific reality described throw unique code, precisely mythopoetic. The article deals with the story of search for Latin-American identity and the way towards mythopoetic, witch is analyzed as connected with archaic mentality and archaic categories of myth and magic. The following generations of Latin-American writers gradually returned to plain reality of human world: magic realism turns into naked and dirty. Simultaneously the tradition of Borges and Cortazar brings the literature of continent into the configuration of western postmodern.

The Monroe Doctrine and Anglo-American Rivalry in Latin America, 19th – early 20th centuries

In the article, the author analyses the issues related to the US adoption of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 in the context of Anglo-American confrontation and rivalry in Latin America. The author examines the relations between the USA and Great Britain during the Spanish American wars of independence, the main aspects of the policy of “neutrality”, the actual support of Latin American patriots in their struggle against the Spanish metropole. Despite the common interest in preventing European competitors from entering South America, the Americans did not sign a joint document with the British, despite repeated proposals from London. The Doctrine was put into effect under conditions unfavourable to the US, characterised by Britain&amp;apos;s unchallenged world domination in military and economic power. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the situation changed dramatically in favour of the USA. The author analyses the content of the Doctrine (“America for the Americans”), its adjustment in the course of the rivalry between the USA and Great Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the concessions made by the UK in its rivalry with its strategic competitor. In all events related to the Anglo-American rivalry in Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine was the “starting point’ for the actions and statements of American politicians, and it is not by chance that President Woodrow Wilson stated at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that the doctrine should be extended to the whole world.

Novelas originales y americanas

Relationships between literary texts, identity constitution, and genre are explored in this digital analysis of 19th century Spanish American novels from Mexico, Argentina, and Cuba, of their subgenres, and their function in the formation of collective identities, starting from references to identity which were found in the subtitles of the novels. In particular, the label “novela original”, as well as identity references that can be subsumed under the terms “novela americana”, “novela mexicana”, “novela argentina”, and “novela cubana” are analyzed. It is found that each type of identity novel, that is, novels with explicit references to a linguistic, cultural, or national context in their subtitle, has its own characteristics. There is not the one genre, theme, or style that serves to represent and constitute identity, but there are forms that are specific for each case, a result which corresponds with findings from memory studies on group-defining stories.

Inscrevendo a história do Novo Mundo na história universal: Cronologias coloniais e conhecimento astral na América Hispânica do final do século XVII

Abstract In this article, we study historical and astronomical works published between 1680 and 1690 by Diego Andrés Rocha, oidor of the Royal Audience of Lima, and the Creole intellectual Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, viceregal cosmographer of New Spain. We contend that for these Spanish American colonial authors, history writing and the knowledge of celestial phenomena were inextricably linked within a shared epistemic framework. Astronomy and astrology provided them with a foundation for reasoning, judging the weight of disparate evidence, and establishing the legitimacy of competing claims related to the chronology of the New World, especially regarding theories about the ancient origins of the Indians. We show how the mobilization of astral knowledge in the establishment of local chronologies offered an answer to politically charged questions about the place of the Americas in the universal history of empire and Christian redemption, as well as the authors’ own place in their respective colonial societies.

In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain's Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870

Jesús Sanjurjo posits that the end of the slave trade to the Spanish empire was largely the result of “international political negotiations that excluded the Spanish authorities and ignored Spanish political actors”—an argument that echoes older, Anglocentric scholarship on the topic and fails to engage with the literature's recent focus on the role that the enslaved themselves played in pushing for abolition (p. 2). (White) Spanish anti–slave trade activists, he sustains, contributed only in terms of turning public sentiment against the slave trade. In so doing, they worked concurrently with the growth of liberalism in the Spanish empire, which Sanjurjo rightly points out looks different in the Spanish context. In Spanish liberalism, liberal political actors privileged preserving what was left of the empire, safeguarding the wealth of Cuba, and generally placating the Cuban elite. This argument about the ties between slavery and Spanish liberalism is intriguing, but it remains unclear whether the book's research, writing, and analysis do it justice.Chapter 1 treats the familiar early Spanish anti–slave trade activists: the statesman Agustín de Argüelles, law student Isidoro de Antillón, and expatriate journalist José Blanco White. With just a few allies, these men singlehandedly initiated public discussion about outlawing the slave trade and slavery itself in Spain—an essential aspect of the author's argument that they “contributed to building the public consensus” against the slave trade (p. 2). But strangely, Sanjurjo barely references—much less analyzes with any thoughtfulness—the body of work that they produced. This is a curious choice because their speeches and publications not only evince deep engagement with the broader abolitionist movements throughout the Atlantic world but also present uniquely Spanish arguments and proposals that merit attention.The next chapter outlines the British diplomatic pressure that resulted in the deeply flawed—and unenforced—Treaty of 1817, by which Madrid agreed to a plan to end the slave trade to the Spanish territories. Here, Sanjurjo references the related 1816 Council of the Indies report that recommended the abolition of the slave trade. He refers to it as “extraordinarily important”—even though it was a dead letter—but does so while attacking other scholars who have written on this topic for downplaying it, misinterpreting it, or failing to mention it altogether (p. 29). Unfortunately, such ruthless attacks against existing scholarship mar much of the book.Chapter 3 has some useful aspects, as it explains the “necessary evil” argument that Spanish elites forged in response to British abolitionist pressure. Sanjurjo shows how instead of attempting to directly counter British arguments about the immorality of the slave trade, proslavery Spanish and Spanish American elites argued that it was a “necessary evil” that would preserve the Cuban economy—and by extension, the economy of the entire empire. Its proponents, Francisco Arango y Parreño among them, framed British abolitionist pressure in terms of nationalistic discourse, suggesting that to be Spanish and Cuban would mean to push back against foreign interlopers who sought to harm Spanish interests under the guise of abolitionism.Chapter 4 examines Cuban historian and politician José Antonio Saco, who is sometimes considered as having contributed to antislavery sentiment. Sanjurjo rightly characterizes Saco as arguing against the slave trade not because he believed it was wrong but because he was convinced that the island's sugar industry and white population would be better off without it. But here again, when given an opportunity to execute original research with new archival sources that could have shed light on such important concepts, the author fails to do so, instead relying on just a few well-known published sources and secondary literature. Throughout the book, in fact, there is a notable lack of substantive engagement with archival sources in England, Spain, and Spanish America. The final chapter—the book is quite short, at only 123 pages of body text—outlines the rise of the Spanish Abolitionist Society in Madrid but strangely fails to engage with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's groundbreaking work on the topic or the archives he used, instead delivering a basic outline of historical events largely based on secondary sources.The epilogue offers a thesis that frames antislavery and anti–slave trade thinking as “contradictory and complementary . . . Liberal and absolutist, progressive and conservative, egalitarian and racist” (p. 121). While in theory this gesture toward the confounding complexity of Spanish political sentiment regarding the slave trade is suggestive, the book is simply not up to the task of illustrating such historical nuance. It is hampered by an excessively combative approach to the existing literature and an impoverished understanding of the relevant archival documentation. Throughout, its organization is difficult to follow, and the argumentation is both scant and unclear. The book will be of interest to scholars who work on antislavery and abolition in the Spanish empire, but it brings little new to their table.

Los juegos de la política: Las independencias hispanoamericanas frente a la contrarrevolución

In Los juegos de la política, Marcela Ternavasio invites the reader to ponder what would have happened to the Spanish American processes of independence if the Portuguese and Spanish armies had formed an alliance to defeat them. While Luso-Spanish alliance never came to fruition, the question allows the author to dwell on “what happened in the context of what could have happened” (p. 13). Sitting at the intersection of Atlantic politics, war, and diplomacy, Los juegos de la política unearths the history of expectations, fears, and calculation that the move of the Portuguese royal family to Brazil, the restoration of Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne, and Napoleon's defeat in France generated on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.The book is divided in three parts, each addressing one specific conjuncture and the potential scenarios that this conjuncture enabled. In the first part, Ternavasio compares and contrasts the diplomatic correspondence of different agents of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns to exhume the myriad political calculations that surrounded the fate of the expedition led by General Pablo Morillo. The author shows how the final destination of the expedition (New Granada) emerged from a politization of European diplomacy in which the role of colonial agents in Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires was central. The second part explores the diplomatic negotiations over a double marriage between the Braganzas and the Bourbons and the feverish political realignments and speculation that this possibility elicited. Certainly, dynastic marriages were an established part of European diplomacy, but Ternavasio's analysis reveals the significant role that princesses, Carlota Joaquina specifically, played in forging these alliances (p. 114). Moreover, Ternavasio highlights the role that the Portuguese invasion of the Banda Oriental (present-day Uruguay) played in the international diplomatic arena by influencing the fresh political realignments that the Congress of Vienna had made possible. Finally, the third part traces how the declaration of independence of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata forced a resolution of the Luso-Spanish alliance. The intense negotiations over the type of government that the United Provinces would adopt—a republic or a monarchy—show the significant role that local powers played in the international diplomatic arena. In the end, the book dissects a political game that all players involved would end up losing. In the Banda Oriental, after building one of the most radical political alternatives of the era, the leader José Gervasio Artigas lost his political ascendance and went into exile. Moreover, in the United Provinces, the internal divisions among different regional leaders resulted in the implosion of the central government in 1820. The European powers did not fare well either. The Portuguese royal family had to leave Brazil after a liberal revolution took place in Portugal. Ferdinand VII of Spain faced the revolt of Rafael de Riego, which not only derailed a military expedition to the Río de la Plata but also reinstated a constitutional monarchy under the liberal principles of the Constitution of Cádiz.Ternavasio's methodological choices aid in the reconstruction of a highly convoluted political scenario. The author utilizes the present tense to stress the contingency of each conjuncture and to recover the level of fear, excitement, and scheming that those conjunctures generated among the European nations and the revolutionary elites in Spanish America. Likewise, the author utilizes the metaphor of politics as a game to highlight the capital importance that calculation had in the decisions that the actors made and the actions that they performed. Ternavasio successfully reveals the complicated and convoluted trajectory that absolutist and independence ideas had. In an ever-changing political and military scenario, political players constantly measured their ideological choices against hypothetical alliances that could ultimately secure political and military victory. Ultimately, Ternavasio's methodological choices reveal the profound impact that the Spanish American processes of independence had in international diplomacy. The Congress of Vienna had created a new balance of power within Europe that the revolutionary experiments in Spanish America questioned. As Ternavasio shows, the wars of independence in Spanish America forced the European powers to broaden the geographical scope of political negotiation outside Europe. In doing so, the wars played a significant role in the construction of a global and interdependent concert of nations.This book complements and expands the ideas explored in Ternavasio's previous book, centered on the figure of Carlota Joaquina. Written in agile prose, Los juegos de la política will make a fantastic addition to any graduate-level class on Latin American history. More importantly, it is a fantastic example of the potential benefits that a new diplomatic history of Latin America can offer, not just for Latin American history but for global history as well.

Visceral Politics and Its Impact on US Foreign Policy Decision-Making

Abstract Growing understanding of the connections between the mind and the body, and of the ways in which interoception influences decision-making, may well revolutionize our understanding of how decisions are reached in foreign policy analysis, drawing attention to a phenomenon which has been termed “visceral politics.” Applying the somatic marker theory to an understanding of political decision-making, this manuscript briefly analyses President William McKinley's decision-making prior to the Spanish–American War, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's decisions about the Iran hostage rescue mission, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's Kosovo decision-making, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ decisions about the Bin Laden raid, and National Security Adviser Susan Rice's decision-making about Syria. We draw these five disparate but related examples together in order to illustrate the impact of somatic markers on foreign policy decision-making, a role hitherto neglected in the literature.

Review: Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America, by Aaron M. Hyman; Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820, by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

Review: <i>Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America</i>, by Aaron M. Hyman; <i>Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820</i>, by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

The Dutch Republic and the Spanish Slave Trade, 1580-1690

This article investigates the reason why groups of merchants operating from the Dutch Republic, particularly from Amsterdam, decided to take part in the exploitation of the Spanish Empire, through a very particular type of activity, that of the slave trade. We argue that Amsterdam-based merchants were heavily engaged, through various organizational forms, in supplying Spanish American markets with enslaved Africans. This participation was rewarded with a path for access to Spanish American silver, at the time the essential exchange mechanism for entry and expansion in the Mediterranean and Asian trades.

Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective ed. by Margaret E. Boyle and Sarah E. Owens

Reviewed by: Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective ed. by Margaret E. Boyle and Sarah E. Owens Jean Dangler Boyle, Margaret E., and Sarah E. Owens, editors. Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective. U of Toronto P, 2021. Pp. 268. ISBN 978-1-4875-0518-9. This excellent collection of essays, titled Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective, aims to shed new light on the roles of women and gender in health and healing in the early modern Iberian world from 1500 to 1800. Many readers will be familiar with this broad theme, but maybe not as it relates to the book’s inclusive lens, which encompasses the Iberian Peninsula and colonial Latin America. The editors state in the introduction that they seek to bring into dialogue healing practices from indigenous, continental Iberian, and African contexts, a goal that emerges as one of the volume’s many strengths. They further underscore the need to move beyond a series of narrow assumptions about early modern women and gender, such as the model of the healer-witch and women’s restricted social role as mothers. The volume covers topics from a range of areas and disciplines. It consists of an introduction and ten essays, which are divided into three sections: “Treatment Models” (four essays), “Representing Health” (three), and “Faith and Illness” (three). In the introduction, the editors situate the volume in the trajectory of recent work on the links between the humanities and narrative medicine, and of questions about health that arise in today’s continuing global pandemic. However, deeper engagement with these connections will have to be taken up elsewhere. The book’s more focused framework includes recent transatlantic approaches to science and medicine, and to women and gender, as well as the importance of studying gender with attention to women and men, as opposed to centering only on women, or on individual women as exceptional. This more ample approach makes the book a welcome addition to recent scholarly trends. The first essay is the outstanding critical case study, “Healing across Ideological Boundaries in Late Seventeenth-Century Madrid,” by Carolin Schmitz and María Luz López-Terrada, who explore the biography of María Sánchez de la Rosa, a healer in late seventeenth-century Madrid. The historical record demonstrates Sánchez de la Rosa’s expertise and renown, although it also shows the fragility and transitory qualities of women’s work, since the legal accusations and trials against her ultimately led to the demise of her reputation. In “Killer Skin Care: Gender and Venereal Disease Experiences in Colonial Lima,” Kathleen M. Kole de Peralta examines women’s treatment of venereal disease (bubas) in sixteenth-century Lima. Kole de Peralta’s superb work confirms previous findings that portray women’s healing as dangerous when occurring outside men’s control. Sarah E. Owens’s thought-provoking “Convent Medicine, Healing, and Hierarchy in Arequipa, Peru” illuminates the power struggles that ensued between male physicians who were assigned to late eighteenth-century convents and the indigenous and African women healers whom patients often preferred. The chapter also examines the European medicines and indigenous foods that were used in healing practice. Karen Stolley’s provocative “Leche and lagartijas: Injecting the Local into Eighteenth-Century Spanish American Medical Discourse” explores two substances, milk and lizards, to show how medical practices were managed in eighteenth-century Latin America. Lizards were used by indigenous cultures in the cure of cancer, inflammation, and ulcers, becoming part of what Stolley calls the “transatlantic pharmacopeia.” [End Page 458] Part two opens with Emily Colbert Cairns’s “Breastfeeding in Public? Representations of Breastfeeding in Early Modern Spain.” Colbert Cairns studies how, much like the present, representations of lactation from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century depict women’s bodies as “open to public debate” (116), and as further mediating larger social problems of racial purity, patriarchal control, and lineage. Sherry Velasco’s “The Queer (Evil) eye and Deviant Healing on the Early Modern Stage” explores the ways in which an entremés shifts the focus of the traditional blame for the mal de...