Sinclair Thomson (NYU)
Yale Conference, “Reframing Latin America’s Nineteenth Century”
27-28 February 2015
The Beginning of the End:
Debating Colonial Crisis and the Origins of Independence
in the Southern Andes
According to the currently dominant historiographic narrative about Latin
American independence, “Everything begins, as is well known, with the abdications
of Bayonne” (F.X. Guerra). The prevailing notion among scholars is that the
Napoleonic invasion of 1807, which provoked a peninsular crisis of sovereignty for
the Spanish monarchy, triggered a chain reaction that would lead to the eventual
separation of Latin American territories from the Iberian metropole. In epochal
terms, this sharp and sudden rupture amounted to a mutation from Ancien Régime
to Modern politics.
From the perspective of the southern Andes, this narrative seems forced and
awkward since a wealth of evidence new and old suggests that the colonial order in
the region underwent profound turmoil in the late eighteenth century and that it
never fully recovered in the aftermath of the powerful indigenous insurgencies of
the early 1780s. The narrative of rupture in 1808 relies on artificial notions that the
turbulence of the 1780s was of a pre-modern or pre-political nature – by this
account, the Andean movements were tax revolts which hinged on a conception of a
1
legitimate Hapsburg colonial pact, backwards-looking attempts to restore a preconquest political order, or typical and transparent old-regime jacqueries with
limited political horizons.
Drawing on my own work and that of colleagues working on the southern
Andes, I wish to question the idea of an epochal and epistemic rupture initiated in
France and Spain in 1808 (“everything begins with Bayonne”) and to rethink the
relationship between the Andean insurrection of the 1780s and the political culture
and mobilizations in the same region in the independence era. This approach need
not resuscitate a historia patria about precursors and immanent teleologies that
would lead to the modern nation-states. Nor would the point be to ascribe an
alternative indigenous modernity to Tomás Katari, Tupac Amaru, and Tupaj Katari
and the movements they led. By questioning the contending nationalist and
Hispanist narratives, and stripping away the teleological assumptions about the
advent of modernity built into both, I believe we can recover a more politically
complex and compelling history for the period. We can see, for example, the ways in
which political discourse, strategy, and practice in the independence moment
derived from earlier references, patterns, and outcomes from the revolutionary
moment of the 1780s. At the same time, we can see the ways in which local political
cultures and subaltern actors contributed to the independence dynamics. This is
not to deny the importance of contingency, short-term conjunctural dynamics, and
political innovation in the new revolutionary moment after 1808. But this approach
can allow us to restore a deeper sense of the political temporalities and causal
dimensions underlying the crisis of the colonial regime in Andes.
2