1 Introduction
In the fifty years surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century, dissident
inhabitants of colonial cities from Boston to Buenos Aires condemned, fought, and finally
overthrew the European empires that had ruled the New World for more than three
centuries, creating new, sovereign states in their stead. These American independence
movements emerged from distinctive settings and produced divergent results, but they were
animated by strikingly similar ideas. Patriotic political theorists throughout the Americas
offered analogous critiques of imperial rule in the years leading up to their rebellions,
designed comparable constitutions immediately after independence had been won, and
expressed common ambitions for their new nations’ future relations with one another and
the rest of the world. This book adopts a comparative perspective on the revolutions that
liberated the United States and Latin America, offering a unified interpretation of their most
important political ideas. It argues that the many points of agreement it describes amongst
revolutionary political theorists in different parts of the Americas can be attributed to the
dilemmas they encountered in common as Creoles, that is, as the descendants of European
settlers born in the Americas.
The institutions of European imperialism in the Americas placed Creoles in a
difficult position. As Europeans within American colonies, Creoles enjoyed many privileges,
benefitting in particular from the economic exploitation and political exclusion of the large
Indigenous, African, and mixed-race populations that lived in or near their colonies.
However, as Americans within European empires, Creoles were socially marginalized, denied
equal representation in metropolitan councils and parliaments, and subjected to commercial
policies designed to advance imperial interests at the colonies’ expense. Independence
1
offered Creoles an escape from the vagaries of imperial domination, but posed a serious
threat to the internal hierarchy of the colonies, so the political theorists that organized and
defended rebellions across the hemisphere were forced to confront a question: how could
they end European rule of the Americas without undermining Creole rule in the Americas?
The ideology of Creole revolution—the set of ideas that, as I shall demonstrate, appeared in
all of the American independence movements—emerged from Creole theorists’ efforts to
answer this question.
Scholars of American and Latin American political thought have long sought, almost
always in isolation from one another, to understand the contradictions central to the ideas
they study. How can Americans invoke ideals of liberty and equality so passionately while
passing over the oppression and exclusion that their societies impose on indigenous, African,
and other non-white populations? What ends are served by the odd mixtures of democratic
and undemocratic institutions framed by the Americas’ influential constitutions? Why are
Americans so jealous of their own nations’ autonomy, yet so eager to influence events
elsewhere in the world? In the pages that follow, I argue that each of these contradictory
ideological tendencies first arose as revolutionary Creoles confronted the dilemmas inherent
in their independence movements. Seeking a way out from under imperial rule that would
not require them to relinquish the privileges imperialism had allowed, Creole political
thinkers throughout the Americas embraced an ideology that incorporated both antiimperialist and imperialist positions at the same time.
Anti-imperial imperialism took on distinct forms as the Creole revolutions
progressed, appearing first in defenses of revolution, then in constitutional designs, and
finally in foreign policies. Creole patriots justified their rebellions by reference to arguments
carefully tailored to impugn some, but not all of the inequalities that characterized their
2
societies, claiming that their right to rule themselves originated in their forefathers’ conquest
of the New World. Creole constitutional designers created political systems that, while
credibly conforming to revolutionary ideals of popular sovereignty, centralized authority and
separated powers in ways that actually limited the political influence that heterogeneous
populations could exert. Creole statesmen embarked on projects of territorial expansion and
internal colonization, arguing they could only protect and consolidate the Americas’
independence by expanding their new states’ spheres of influence and control of resistant
populations. Below, by comparing the political ideas of three carefully chosen Creole
revolutionaries, I demonstrate that the institutional context surrounding the American
independence movements exerted a decisive influence on their ideologies, producing
convergence around anti-imperial imperialism in these three forms even amongst thinkers
influenced by very different intellectual traditions.
Showing that the American independence movements were similar in their
institutional origins and political ideas, this book challenges established accounts not only of
American and Latin American political thought, but also of the Americas’ comparative
political and economic development, and the history of inter-American relations. It
reconstructs a critical moment of institutional change and evolving hemispheric affairs, a
moment when it was not yet inevitable that the United States would become the world’s
largest economy and foremost military superpower, or that Latin America would experience
persistent political instability and economic underdevelopment, a moment in which all
Americans were struggling to resolve similar problems. Recognizing and understanding the
Creole revolutions’ many points of ideological convergence prompts us to reconsider the
causes of the United States and Latin America’s subsequent divergence, raising a broad set of
questions about the long-term legacies of the Americas’ transition to independence.
3
1.1 Comparing Revolutions
Despite their geographic and historical proximity, comparative studies of the
American independence movements have not been common. Scholars have usually
approached the revolutions that liberated the United States and Latin America using
different interpretive frameworks, with the result being that when they are compared at all,
the American independence movements have been compared to different sets of nonAmerican rebellions and revolts, rather than to each other. The concept of the ‘Creole
revolution’ that I develop here offers a new, unified interpretive framework capable of
explaining features of the ideology of the American independence movements that more
established alternatives have ignored or misunderstood.
The tendency to separate the American and Latin American independence
movements began early. In a series of letters written after his retirement, the Massachusetts
patriot, political theorist, and U.S. President John Adams reflected on the extraordinary
period of global history he had observed during his career in politics. Even as he was
“plunged head and ears in the American revolution from 1761 to 1798 (for it had been all
revolution during the whole period),” he had been “eye-witness to two revolutions in
Holland” and “ear-witness to some of the first whispers of a revolution in France.” Taken
together, he wrote, the “last twenty-five years of the last century, and the first fifteen years of
this, may be called the age of revolutions.” Adams pointedly declined to list, as events
definitive of this age, the colonial rebellions that had already shaken off Spanish rule in the
Southern Cone, and which would soon demolish the entire mainland edifice of the Spanish
American empire. The problem, for Adams, was that the “people of South America [were]
the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in
Christendom.” The idea that “a free government, and a confederation of free governments,
4
should be introduced and established among such a people, over that vast continent, or any
part of it” appeared to Adams “as absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies
among the birds, beasts, and fishes.” 1 In other words, Adams’ anti-Catholic prejudices,
common amongst Englishmen of his era, made it impossible for him to conceive of Spanish
Americans’ struggle for independence as of a piece with the broader age of revolutions that
Adams credited himself and his fellow North Americans with initiating.
Adams’ “age of revolutions” proved a durable analytical apparatus. His European
contemporaries, including figures like Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke, wrote
about England’s Glorious Revolution, the independence movement of the United States,
and the French Revolution as passages, more or less tortured, to the modern world.2 Later
scholars retained the same basic set of comparisons even as they refined the categories they
used it to illustrate, describing the Glorious Revolution, the North American independence
movement, and the French Revolution as paradigmatic “bourgeois” or “democratic”
revolutions,3 and tracing the intellectual lineage of “republican” political ideas from Ancient
Greece, through Renaissance Italy and seventeenth-century England, to the rebellious
colonies of British America. 4 Even authors who have insisted on the United States’
“exceptionalism” have done so with reference to Europe, arguing that the “absence of
feudalism” in American history made the political constellation that arose in the
independence movement utterly unlike any European analogue.5 From the first, then, the
independence movement of the United States has been treated as either an exemplary or an
exceptional event in a broadly north Atlantic “age of revolutions”: a wave of agitation
unified, primarily, by Enlightened philosophies and anti-monarchical aims.
Latin Americans have rarely been regarded as important participants in this period of
upheaval. 6 Instead, their roughly contemporaneous break with European rule has been
5
treated as the consequence of an early or “incipient” nationalism: a sense of separate,
American identity and a resulting desire for independence, which formed gradually over the
course of the colonial period and crystallized in the decades surrounding the turn the
nineteenth century.7 According to this view, Spanish Americans came to think of themselves
as Peruvians or Chileans, for example, rather than as Spaniards, and then sought
independence for these administrative subunits of the Empire in order to bring political
sovereignty into alignment with their new national identities. This concern with nationalism,
as opposed to anti-monarchism, has long governed scholarship on the ideology of Latin
America’s independence movements. The clearest evidence of its influence is a literature
organized according to the national boundaries that divide the region today. 8 In the rare
instances when this approach has inspired comparative inquiry, it has pointed scholars
toward the twentieth century anti-colonial movements of Asia and Africa. Like these later
uprisings of colonized peoples, the Latin American independence movements overthrew a
foreign ruler, creating a “model” of “national liberation” that subsequent freedom fighters
would follow.9 After achieving independence, Latin American political thinkers confronted a
set of political and economic difficulties akin to those experienced by other “post-colonial”
societies. Ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, the Latin American countries assumed a place
on the global periphery, as primary-goods producers frequently subject to foreign
interventions. 10 Though a few works analyze the independence movement of the United
States using something like the incipient nationalism thesis, they have, for the most part,
done so, again, in order to emphasize the qualities that made it fundamentally exceptional—
and ultimately exceptionally successful—amongst the larger group of nations that emerged
from imperial rule.11
6
Thus, as I noted, the dominance of different interpretative frameworks in the
literatures on the independence movements of the United States and Latin America has
limited comparative study, but this is not their only flaw. Both the “age of revolutions”
thesis and the “incipient nationalism” thesis fail to account for certain distinctive features of
the American independence movements, and both lead to problematic depictions of the
societies that independence produced in the Americas.
In order to establish an analogy between the Glorious Revolution, the French
Revolution, and the British North American independence movement, proponents of the
age of revolutions thesis tend to deemphasize the fact that the latter was, inescapably, a
rebellion directed by the inhabitants of a collection of colonies against an empire, stressing
anti-monarchical currents of its ideology instead.12 This makes it difficult, though, to account
for patriotic Americans’ loyalty to their monarchs, which persisted even in the late stages of
their disenchantment with empire, or their embrace of quasi-monarchical institutions after
independence had been won. The age of revolutions thesis also tends to pass over the
“peculiar institutions” present in British North America but absent in Europe at the end of
the eighteenth century, reducing the important roles that concerns with African slavery and
Indigenous expropriation played in the ideology of the independence movement, and in the
political struggles of the early republic.13
The incipient nationalism thesis, meanwhile, implies incorrectly that, prior to their
independence movements, Latin Americans had already adopted national identities
corresponding to the states that the endemic infighting of the nineteenth century would
eventually produce. 14 As a result, it cannot explain the ubiquitous, though mostly
unsuccessful, efforts Latin Americans made to unify former colonies after winning
independence. The incipient nationalism thesis also exaggerates the extent to which the
7
Creole leaders of the Latin American independence movements rejected their own European
identities in favor of nationalist alternatives that incorporated African and Indigenous
Americans on equal terms, assuming, again incorrectly, that the valorization of mestizaje and
democracia racial that emerged later in Latin American political thought preceded or
accompanied the region’s independence.15
Ultimately, I shall argue, The American independence movements did not oppose
European rule because it was either monarchical or foreign. Their leaders did not aim to
usher in a new era of human history or to rectify the historical injustice of European
conquest. Indeed, they initially demanded nothing more than to be recognized as the
subjects of legitimate monarchs, and to have the rights they bore as the descendants of the
Europeans who conquered the New World respected in their respective metropoles. When
what was perceived as intransigence in the face of these demands finally convinced
Americans to seek independence, they were anxious to escape European rule without
relinquishing the privileges that their European ancestry had given them. Thus, far from
eliminating all of the monarchical and imperial institutions from the independent societies
they created, after independence Americans maintained or reshaped institutional inheritances
in ways that served their interests.
If the age of revolutions thesis neglects the American independence movements’
imperial context, then, the incipient nationalism thesis mischaracterizes it. The empires
Europeans installed in the Americas differed importantly from the ones they built later in
Asia and Africa, stationing large, permanent settler populations overseas instead of ruling
“indirectly” through indigenous intermediaries. As the interdisciplinary literature on “setter
colonialism” has suggested, with the passing of generations, this form of imperialism
produced a distinctive political dynamic: a “triangular” system of interaction amongst
8
metropolitan, indigenous, and settler populations with conflicting interests in the abolition,
reform, or maintenance of the institutions that structured their societies.16 Building upon
this observation, here I will argue that the key to understanding the distinctive ideas of the
American independence movements is to understand how they reflected the distinctive
interests that the movements’ leaders pursued. The American independence movements
were Creole Revolutions, formed and led by the descendants of European settlers born in
the Americas. Creole leadership, I claim, made the ideas of the American independence
movements more like one another than has usually been acknowledged, and more like one
another than like the European, Asian, and African revolutions with which they are usually
compared.
1.2 Comparing Revolutionary Ideas
To support this unorthodox interpretation of the American independence
movements, I adopt an approach inspired by the growing field of comparative political
theory. In recent years, political theorists have devoted greater attention to traditions of
political thought that have traditionally been excluded from their canon. Studies of East and
South Asian, Islamic, African, and Latin American political thinkers have uncovered both
surprising areas of consensus across cultures we often assume are worlds apart, and stark
disagreement on ideas we often assume should command universal assent.17 These important
findings suggest that even as it improves our understanding of unfamiliar political ideas,
comparative political theory will also revitalize normative political theorizing, exposing longsettled opinions to new challenges and undermining the intellectual hegemony that has
accompanied western Europe and North America’s economic and military dominance of the
rest of the world.18 These are central motivations for the present study. Despite its immense
9
internal attractions and clear potential as a source of critical insights, Anglophone political
theorists have little knowledge of Latin American political thought. Here, by examining a
range of influential Latin American political thinkers alongside their better-known British
American counterparts, I hope to arouse interest in some rich, but unfamiliar ideas, while
also gaining new perspective on some canonical texts.
At the same time, though, I aim to advance beyond existing approaches in this
exciting new field. For the most part, comparative political theorists have confined
themselves to the interpretive-historical task of establishing what a given piece of nonwestern political thinking argues and the evaluative-philosophical task of asking whether what
it argues is compelling. They have not taken advantage of the comparative method’s unique
capacity to accomplish the social scientific task of explaining why the political thinkers they
study thought what they did, rather than something else. In other words, they have not used
the comparisons they make to identify the factors that cause ideological convergence or
divergence amongst political thinkers or across traditions of political thought. In this book, I
compare the ideas of three carefully chosen Creole revolutionaries in order to argue that the
contradictions characteristic of American independence movements’ ideology were caused
by the contradictions inherent in their Creole protagonists’ institutional situation.
Of course, this formulation raises some difficult questions: in what sense can
political ideas be said to have been caused? What is entailed in explaining why a given thought
appeared where and when it did? I propose a minimal, and, I hope, minimally controversial
answer to these questions: political ideas are caused by the background problems that their
thinkers set out to solve. Explaining why a political thinker thought what he or she did
involves reconstructing the background problem that he or she wished to solve. 19 These
background problems are, in turn, products of an interaction between a thinker’s political
10
context and the intellectual tradition he or she brings to bear upon that context. By political
context I mean the existing institutions that impinge upon a political thinker’s life, especially
the institutions that structure the advantages or disadvantages that he or she enjoys relative
to other members of society, and thus the interests that he or she has in the maintenance,
abolition, or reform of those institutions. 20 By intellectual tradition I mean the inherited
concepts that shape a thinker’s perceptions of his or her political context, the philosophical
commitments that influence his or her evaluations of that context, and the very language that
he or she uses to express these perceptions and evaluations.21
Different thinkers may be more or less explicit about the background problem or
problems that caused them to think about politics in the way that they did. Indeed, they may
even be more or less conscious of those problems, depending on how deeply they
interrogate their own interests, presuppositions, prejudices, and inherited vocabulary and
concepts. Thus, often, the background problems to which a text responds cannot be simply
read out of the text itself; they must, rather, be inferred, and it is here that comparison
becomes useful. John Stuart Mill described what remains the basic logic of the comparative
method in 1843, describing two ways of choosing cases for comparison that make causal
inference possible. Mill’s “Method of Agreement” involves comparing cases that are as
different as possible in all respects, but which all display the phenomenon or outcome one
aims to explain. His “Method of Difference”, by contrast, involves comparing cases that are
as similar as possible in all respects, but in which the phenomenon or outcome one aims to
explain appears in some cases and not in others. Both Methods serve to highlight patterns of
variation across cases, and when successful, identify the factor or factors responsible for
causing the phenomenon or outcome one aims to explain.22 Both Methods can be used to
infer the background problems that caused political thinkers to think what they did: by
11
comparing thinkers situated in similar political contexts but influenced by different
intellectual traditions, or by comparing political thinkers influenced by similar intellectual
traditions but situated in different political contexts, we can isolate the effects of each factor
on their political ideas.
Below, I compare the ideas of three prominent Creole political theorists: Alexander
Hamilton of the United States (1755-1804), Simón Bolívar of Venezuela (1783-1830), and
Lucas Alamán of Mexico (1792-1853). I have chosen Hamilton, Bolívar, and Alamán
according to Mill’s Method of Agreement. 23 Hamilton, Bolívar, and Alamán came from
societies shaped by different versions of the settler colonial model European empires
imposed upon the Americas, and they inherited different stations within those societies’
settler elites. Even more importantly, for present purposes, they were each influenced by
different philosophical traditions. But, as I shall endeavor to show, Hamilton, Bolívar, and
Alamán all converged on an important set of ideas, defending American independence as a
response to the unequal conditions imposed on Creoles by European imperial rule,
proposing constitutions designed to protect Creole privileges within independent societies by
unifying former colonies and granting executives extensive authority, and seeking to
consolidate their states’ sovereignty through territorial expansion and internal colonization.
These differences and similarities provide a basis for inferring that Hamilton, Bolívar, and
Alamán’s ideological convergence was caused by the background problems they all faced as
Creoles who sought and won independence for their societies.
The colonial predecessors of the United States, Venezuela, and Mexico illustrate the
wide range of forms settler colonialism took in the Americas. British rule and a Protestant
majority sharply distinguished the United States from its Spanish American counterparts, but
the latter were by no means homogenous. Venezuela was in many senses a classic plantation
12
colony, with an economy dominated by the export of agricultural primary goods and a
relatively small, relatively rural population, of which a majority were African-American or
mixed-race. The colony enjoyed a metropolitan policy of benign neglect for much of its
history, permitting its Creole elites extensive autonomy in the oversight of local affairs, and
the development of dense illicit networks of trade with European powers other than Spain.
Meanwhile, Mexico – known as New Spain before independence – was the crown jewel of
Spain’s American possessions, home to roughly half of the empire’s overseas population,
densely urbanized, and much more economically diversified than colonial Venezuela. While
some slaves were brought to New Spain, indigenous communities and mestizos made up most
of the non-European population. Spanish sovereignty was also much more present in New
Spain, where for centuries newly-arrived Spanish immigrants married into established Creole
families, creating a local ruling class with a distinctly trans-Atlantic, but exclusively Hispanic,
character.24
Deeply shaped by the differences between their societies, Alexander Hamilton,
Simón Bolívar, and Lucas Alamán were also biographically dissimilar. Hamilton was the
illegitimate offspring of a wandering Scottish nobleman and a French Huguenot exile who
met in the Caribbean. He married into the colonial upper class of British North America,
and rose quickly up the ranks of first the military and later the political hierarchies of his
adoptive country by virtue of his extraordinary energy, administrative genius, and formidable
rhetorical talents. Bolívar, meanwhile, was born into Caracas’s Creole elite, inherited a huge
fortune and a large estate, and assumed a leadership position in the movement for Spanish
American independence virtually from the start, displaying throughout adept military strategy,
powerful personal charisma, and a singularly expansive vision of his revolution’s potential
world-historical import. Alamán, finally, was the scion of a long-established New Spanish
13
family whose financial fortunes had declined somewhat by the time of his birth. Of the three,
only he had an extensive formal education, which made him an indispensable statesman and
technocrat during Mexico’s early independence, and then his country’s premier historian in
his mature years.25
Perhaps most importantly, Hamilton, Bolívar, and Alamán differed in their dominant
philosophical influences. Hamilton’s political thought evidences deep debts to the authors of
the Scottish Enlightenment, especially David Hume, from whom he derived a historical
method for learning about politics, a focus on the interaction of individual interests within
different institutional settings, and a clear sense of the importance of commerce in
international affairs. Bolívar, meanwhile, was steeped in the classical republican tradition
developed by figures from Machiavelli to Montesquieu, whose influence is visible in
Bolívar’s concerns with the cultivation of civic virtue, his concept of collective liberty, and
his attraction to mixed models of government and protective territorial expansion. Finally,
Alamán lived long enough to absorb the conservative reaction to the French Revolution,
especially the writings of Edmund Burke. He offered a reformist solution, short of
independence, to the ‘American question’ at the Cortes of Cádiz, opposed and criticized the
largely indigenous rebellion that preceded Mexico’s independence movement, and was
keenly aware of the advantages that preserving some colonial political institutions might hold
for an independent Mexico.
As we will see, these divergent influences deeply colored each author’s intellectual
contributions to his respective country’s independence and early statehood. I do not claim
that the American Revolutions were similar in all respects, or that Hamilton, Bolívar, and
Alamán were ideologically identical. Rather, I will show that despite their differences—and
especially their philosophical differences—Hamilton, Bolívar, and Alamán’s ideas display a
14
common set of core contradictions: the anti-imperial imperialism that I claim was
characteristic of the ideology of Creole Revolution. I argue that they converged in this sense
because the social position each occupied as an American Creole imposed similar dilemmas
on their revolutionary political ideas.
1.3 Organization of the Book
Chapter Two states at greater length, and provides additional illustration of the main
theoretical contentions of the book. I describe the overlapping imperial institutions that
structured the interests shared by Creoles in different parts of the Americas, and the changes
to these institutions that eventually drove Creoles to seek independence throughout the
hemisphere. I argue that Creoles occupied a “contradictory” institutional position, which
imparted to them a set of internally adversarial interests, and caused the Creoles that
organized and led struggles for independence to develop an ideology that was both antiimperial and imperial at the same time. I show how anti-imperial imperialism appeared in
Creoles’ revolutionary, constitutional, and international political thought, drawing
illustrations of its distinctive tenets from intellectual leaders of the independence movements
in the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile.
Chapters Three, Four, and Five are dedicated to case studies of Alexander Hamilton,
Simón Bolívar, and Lucas Alamán. Each chapter provides enough background history and
biography to give readers a sense of the unique paths the United States, Venezuela, and
Mexico, respectively, followed to independence, and to contextualize each figure’s political
thought. In each case, I also document a characteristically Creole mode of political thinking,
showing how the contradictions of anti-imperial imperialism appear within the works of
single authors. In Hamilton’s writings, analyses of individual interests and commercial
15
interactions serve as the basis for a critique of British imperialism and a defense of a
renewed, American imperial project. For Bolívar, the same, classically republican selfreinforcing cycles of liberty and virtue, tyranny and corruption, justify both Spanish
American independence and the conquest and forced assimilation of a continent. Finally,
Alamán’s conservative preference for gradual political change provides grounds for the
establishment of a New Spanish empire that maintained many of the qualities of the old one.
Together, the three case studies are intended to substantiate, in systematic fashion, the
general claims made about the ideas of American independence in Chapter Two, but along
the way, the concept of the Creole Revolution permits new insights into the political thought
of these important individuals, and interventions in the large literatures dedicated to each.
This productive feedback between theory and evidence, between an overarching
interpretation and its application to specific cases, strongly recommends the comparative
method I adopt.
Chapter Six addresses a puzzle that emerges from the arguments made in earlier
chapters: if the Americas were so similar at the time they achieved independence, why are
they so different today? When did ideological convergence give way to economic and
political divergence. I describe the rise of organized opposition parties within the ranks of
Creole revolutionaries, and compare the ideological divisions that underlay partisan conflict
in the newly-independent Americas. I suggest that the United States’ relatively peaceful first
transfer of authority might have contributed to its relatively stable politics and relatively fast
economic growth. In this way, I show how the systematic study of political thought, in
general, and the ideology of Creole Revolution, in particular, can help reframe longstanding
questions in comparative politics and economic history. The Conclusion traces the divergent
16
intellectual influence that the ideology of Creole Revolution has had in Latin America and
the United States up to the present day.
17
Notes:
1
John Adams to James Lloyd, Quincy, 27 and 30 March 1815, in Charles Francis Adams,
ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, 10 Volumes (Boston: Little,
Brown, and Co., 1856), X, 144-5, 149. The instance for Adams’ reflections on Spanish
America was apparently his correspondent’s interest in the efforts of the Venezuelan patriot
Francisco Miranda to obtain the United States’ support for an assault on then-Spanish South
America, efforts which Adams rebuffed but which were much more warmly received by
Alexander Hamilton. I return to these interesting events in Chapter 3.
2
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790] ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien
(London: Penguin Books, 2004); and Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835] trans.
Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
3
R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions: A Political History of Europe and America, 17601800 2 Vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959 and 1964); Eric Hobsbawm, The
Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1962); Barrington Moore, Jr.,
The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); and Perry Anderson, “The Notion of a Bourgeois Revolution”
[1976] in English Questions (London: Verso, 1992).
4
Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission,
Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II Until the
War with the Thirteen Colonies [1959] (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004); Bernard Bailyn, The
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1992); Hannah Arendt, On Revolution [1963] (New York: Penguin Books, 2006);
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York: W.W. Norton,
1972) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); J.G.A
Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); John M. Murrin “The Great Inversion, or
Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688-1721)
and America (1776-1816),” in J.G.A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776
(Princeton, 1980), 368-453; and Paul Anthony Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical
Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1992).
5
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since
The Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). For the wide range of theories offered as
explanations for the United States’ uniqueness, vis-à-vis Europe, see also: Seymour Martin
Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); and
Deborah Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).
6
In recent decades, two important exceptions to this rule have appeared. First, a revisionist
current in Latin American, and particularly Mexican, intellectual history has scholars tracing
the connections between the French Revolution, Spanish liberalism, and the Spanish
Americas’ independence movements; see: François-Xavier Guerra, “Revolución Francesa y
Revoluciones Hispánicas: Una Relación Compleja” in Modernidad e Independencias: Ensayos
Sobre Las Revoluciones Hispánicas Revised and Expanded Edition (Madrid: Ediciones
Encuentro, 2009), 35-77; Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “Two Revolutions: France 1789 and
Mexico 1810” The Americas, Vol. 47, No. 2 (October, 1990), 161-176; and The Independence of
Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Roberto Breña, El
Primer Liberalismo Español y los Procesos de Emancipación de América, 1808-1824: Una Revisión
18
Historiográfica del Liberalismo Hispánico (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2006). Second,
‘Atlantic’ and ‘Global’ historians have included Latin America in their description of the
“Seismic waves [that] traveled through the Atlantic world after 1775, linking uprisings on
either side”; see: Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New
York: New York University Press, 2009), 158 for the quoted portion; Lester D. Langley, The
Americas in the Age of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); John H. Elliott,
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006); and the essays collected in David Armitage and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840 (Houndsmills:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).
7
For the term “incipient nationalism” and the best-known English-language exposition of
this thesis, see: John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808-1826, 2nd Edition (New
York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1973), 24-37. See also: D.A. Brading, The First America: The
Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991); and the essays assembled in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden,
eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1987.
8
Often, even works that promise comparison are in fact often comprised of separate
chapters dedicated to individual countries’ experiences. For a recent example, see: Patricia
Galeana, ed., Historia Comparada de las Américas: Sus Procesos Independentistas (Mexico City: Siglo
XXI, 2010).
9
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Revised Edition (London: Verso, 1991), 46.
10
Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western
Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Mabel
Moraña, Enrique Dussel, Carlos A. Jáuregui, eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the
Postcolonial Debate (Durham, Duke University Press, 2008). See:
11
Louis Hartz, ed., The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin
America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964); Thomas C.
Barrow, “The American Revolution as a Colonial War for Independence” The William and
Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Jul., 1968), 452-464; Seymour Martin Lipset, The
First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1979).
12
For example, in his magisterial intellectual history of the United States’ early republican
period, Gordon Wood notes at several points that the British North American Revolution
“was no simple colonial rebellion against English imperialism,” each time emphasizing the
relatively greater importance of republican ideals in the founders’ motivations. Wood,
Creation of the American Republic, 91, 128, and 395. Scholars of Spanish American
independence who have adopted the age of revolutions thesis display the same tendency.
Jaime Rodríguez, for example, goes even further than Wood, insisting that “Spanish America
was not a colony of Spain”, nor Spain itself an “Empire”, and that consequently the Spanish
American revolutions are better understood as a “civil war”, a conflict over the future of the
Spanish monarchy, than an anti-colonial or anti-imperial conflict. Rodríguez, Independence of
Spanish America, xii; 107-168.
19
13
As Rogers Smith has argued, these accounts “falter because they center on relationships
among a minority of Americans—white men, largely of northern European ancestry—
analyzed in terms of categories derived from the hierarchy of political and economic status
such men held in Europe…But the relative egalitarianism that prevailed among white men
[in the early United States]… was surrounded by an array of fixed, ascriptive hierarchies, all
largely unchallenged by the leading American revolutionaries.” Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of
Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 17.
14
It has proven difficult to find evidence of nationalist identities in the documentary residues
of the independence movements, and as a result, in recent years historians of Spanish
America have rejected both the incipient nationalism thesis, and related attempts to draw
comparisons between American independence and later struggles for national liberation. See:
Rodríguez, Independence of Spanish America and Tomás Pérez Vejo, Elegía Criolla: Una
Reinterpretación de las Guerras de Independencia Hispano Americanas (Mexico City: Tusquets, 2010).
Claudio Lomnitz “Nationalism as a Practical System: Benedict Anderson’s Theory of
Nationalism from the Vantage Point of Spanish America” in Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 3-34; Eric Van Young, “The Limits of
Atlantic-World Nationalism in a Revolutionary Age: Imagined Communities and Lived
Communities in Mexico, 1810-1821” in Joseph Esherick, Hasan Kayalı, and Eric Van
Young, Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World (Oxford:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); and the essays collected in Sara Castro-Klarén and John
Charles Chasteen, eds., Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in NineteenthCentury Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
15
As Benedict Anderson notes, it is profoundly “puzzling”, that these “colonial provinces,
usually containing large, non-Spanish-speaking populations, produce[d] creoles who
consciously redefined these populations as fellow-nationals” and regarded “Spain, to whom
they were, in so many ways, attached, as an enemy alien”. Imagined Communities, 50.
16
Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macillan,
2010), 17-18. For the literature on settler colonialism, see also: Veracini, “‘Settler
Colonialism’: Career of a Concept”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 41,
no. 2, (2013), 313-333; and Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, “Settler Colonialism: A
Concept and Its Uses” in Elkins and Pedersen, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Routledge, 2005). A few notable works have used the concept of settler
colonialism to the interpret the independence movement of the United States, and even to
frame interesting comparisons between the American Revolution and other “settler revolts”
in the British colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. See: James Belich,
Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783-1939 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009); Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2010); and Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous
People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Unfortunately, these studies have paid little attention to Latin America. I am aware of only
two works that place Creole leadership at the center of comparative studies of the
independence movements in the United States and Latin America: Anderson, Imagined
Communities, 47-65; and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, Volume III: The Second
Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s Revised and Expanded
Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 191-256. The importance of the
Latin American independence movements’ Creole leadership has long been acknowledged;
20
see especially the work of the Venezuelan historian Germán Carrera Damas, Venezuela:
Proyecto Nacional y Poder Social (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1986); and De la Dificultad de ser
Criollo (Caracas: Grijalbo, 1993). See also my review essay, “The United States as Settler
Empire”, settler colonial studies, Volume 1, Number 2 (2012), 150-63.
17
Illustrative examples include: Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism
and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Andrew F.
March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009); Leigh Jenco, Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political
Theory of Zhang Shizhao (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Karuna Mantena,
“Another Realism: The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence” American Political Science Review
vol. 106, no. 2 (May 2012), 455-70; and Diego A. Von Vacano, The Color of Citizenship: Race,
Modernity, and Latin American/Hispanic Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012).
18
For “scholarly” and “engaged” comparative political theory, see Andrew F. March, “What
is Comparative Political Theory?” The Review of Politics, Vol. 71 (2009), 531-65. For alternative
accounts of the field’s normative importance, see: Anthony J. Parel, “The Comparative Study
of Political Philosophy”, in Parel and Ronald C. Keith, eds., Comparative Political Philosophy:
Studies Under the Upas Tree 2nd ed. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003); Fred Dallmayr, “Beyond
Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory” Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 2, No. 2 (June,
2004), 249-257; Leigh Kathryn Jenco, “‘What Does Heaven Ever Say?’: A Methods-centered
Approach to Cross-cultural Engagement” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 101, No. 4
(Nov., 2007), 741-55; Farah Godrej, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought: The
Hermeneutics of Interpreting the Other” Polity, Vol. 41, No. 2 (April 2009), 135-65;; Michael
Freeden and Andrew Vincent, “Introduction: The Study of Comparative Political Thought”,
in Freeden and Vincent, eds., Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices (Oxford:
Routledge, 2013); and Melissa S. Williams and Mark E. Warren, “A Democratic Case for
Comparative Political Theory” Political Theory, vol. 42, no. 1 (Jan., 2014).
19
Though the language of causality here is new, the connection suggested between political
ideas and background problems is not; see, for example, Michael Rosen, “The History of
Ideas as Philosophy and History” History of Political Thought, vol. 22, no. 4 (Winter, 2011),
702-5.
20
The effects of “context”, in this sense of the word, on political ideas has traditionally been
emphasized in studies influenced by Karl Marx. See: Richard Ashcraft, “On the Problem of
Method and the Nature of Political Theory”, Political Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (February, 1975),
5-25; “Political Theory and the Problem of Ideology” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 42, No. 3
(August, 1980), 687-705; “Marx and Political Theory” Comparative Studies in Society and History,
Vol. 26, No. 4 (October 1984), 637-671; Neal Wood, “The Social History of Political Theory”
Political Theory, vol. 6, no. 3 (Aug., 1978), 345-367; Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood,
“Socrates and Democracy: A Reply to Gregory Vlastos” Political Theory, vol. 14, no. 1 (Feb.,
1986), 55-82; and Ellen Meiksins Wood, Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political
Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (London: Verso, 2008), 1-16. More recently, social
scientists working within the “new institutionalist” framework have proposed similar
theories. See:
21
The influence of such concepts, commitments, and languages on political ideas has been
the central focus of scholars connected to the “Cambridge School” of intellectual history.
For influential methodological reflections, see: J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time
21
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume 1:
Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Dunn, The History of
Political Theory and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Mark
Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
22
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Raciocinative and Inductive from J.M. Robson, ed., The
Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), VII,
especially 388-90. The literature on the relevance of Mill’s Methods to social science is,
predictably, huge. For influential discussions, see: Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method:
Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987); and Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific
Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
23
The Method of Agreement suffers from certain difficulties, but serves its purpose well in
this application. For the danger of biased inference associated with “selecting on the
dependent variable”, see: Barbara Geddes, “How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers
You Get: Selection Bias in Comparative Politics” Political Analysis, Volume 2, No. 1 (1990),
131-150; and, for a more general critique, see: Stanley Lieberson, “Small N's and Big
Conclusions: An Examination of the Reasoning in Comparative Studies Based on a Small
Number of Cases” Social Forces vol. 70, no. 2 (December, 1991), 307-320. Though I cannot
claim to have completely avoided the problems identified in these important articles, I seek
to mitigate their effects by providing as much evidence as possible for the general
interpretation of Creole political thinking that I propose within each individual case study, a
method akin to “process tracing”. See: Andrew Bennett, “Process Tracing and Causal
Inference” in Henry E. Brady and David Collier, eds., Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools,
Shared Standards 2nd Ed. (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 207-220; and James
Mahoney, “The Logic of Process Tracing Tests in the Social Sciences” Sociological Methods
Research vol. 41 no. 4 (November 2012), 570-597.
24
For a portrait of the United States on the eve of independence, see: Gordon Wood, The
Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 11-94. For Venezuela,
see: P. Michael McKinley, Pre-Revolutionary Caracas: Politics, Economy, and Society, 1777-1811
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For Mexico, see: D.A. Brading, Miners and
Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. For a
comparative discussion of variation in the forms of imperial rule established by the British
and Spanish in the Americas, see: J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in
America, 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); and James Mahoney,
Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
25
For Hamilton’s biography, see: Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin
Press, 2004). For Bolívar, see: John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2006). Unfortunately, we still lack a biography of Alamán in English, though Stanley C.
Green, The Mexican Republic: The First Decade, 1823-1832 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1987) provides most of the relevant facts. Spanish readers can consult José C. Valadés,
Alamán: Estadista e Historiador (Mexico City: José Porrua e Hijos, 1938).
22