The Spanish American wars of independence (Spanish: Guerras de independencia hispanoamericanas) were a series of early 19th-century conflicts across the Spanish Empire that resulted in new independent nation states in the Americas. They began shortly after the outbreak of the Peninsular War, part of the broader Napoleonic Wars.
The process unfolded in two main phases. First, the Spanish Crown broke up, beginning in Spain in 1808 with the French invasion, the Spanish uprising against the Bonapartes, the vacancy of the throne, and the emergence of juntas later replicated in America. This unfolded as it did because sovereignty reverted vertically, from the Crown down to the cabildos (town councils, or ayuntamientos), the monarchy's basic cellular units. Second, beginning in 1810, attempts at reconstruction failed and developed into wars in their own right: the Cortes of Cádiz sought a pan-Hispanic state, King Ferdinand VII sought to recover the Spanish Crown he had ceded to Napoleon Bonaparte, and in the Americas Simón Bolívar, Agustín de Iturbide and others tried to build large states, such as the Federation of the Andes or the First Mexican Empire. Strictly in terms of military campaigns, they ran from sporadic clashes such as the battle at Chacaltaya in 1809 (present-day Bolivia) to the Battle of Tampico in 1829 (present-day Mexico). The result was the fragmentation of the Hispanic world into multiple states that largely reconstituted the old Spanish administrative boundaries under uti possidetis.
The conflicts were multilateral, involving many factions traditionally grouped into two broad camps: Royalists, who favored continued rule by the Monarchy of Spain, and Patriots, who supported independent monarchies or republics, either united or separate from one another. They were fought as both irregular warfare and conventional warfare. Some historians argue that they began as localized civil wars that spread as secessionist wars for general independence. Under a typology based on whether or not the belligerents constitute a State, they were mixed wars, combining elements of civil wars between political factions, wars between states, and wars between empires. The independence of most of Spanish America produced new national boundaries that followed the colonial provinces and formed the basis of contemporary Hispanic America.
The Spanish Empire dissolved in the region and new states emerged. The new republics abandoned the Inquisition and noble titles, but slavery was not immediately abolished, and total abolition came only in the 1850s in most countries. Criollos and mestizos replaced Spanish-born officials in most political offices, and Criollos stayed at the top of a social structure that kept traditional features culturally, if not legally. For almost a century, conservatives and liberals fought to reverse or deepen these changes. Spaniards were also subject to forced displacement, during the war and later through expulsion laws meant to consolidate independence.
The wars followed the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and unfolded alongside Brazil's own path to independence. Spanish America and Brazil shared a trigger: Napoleon's invasion of Iberia, which in 1807 forced the Portuguese royal family to flee to Brazil. More broadly, they drew on Enlightenment ideas of popular sovereignty behind the Atlantic Revolutions. The more direct cause was the crisis within Spain, which resulted in new independent states in the post-Napoleonic world. Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish rule until the 1898 Spanish–American War. Under Monroe Doctrine, this reconfiguration culminated in the modern states of Latin America. More recently, decolonial currents have proposed reorganizing Latin American states into Abya Yala, a plurinational project criticized as Balkanization.
The Spanish American wars of independence (Spanish: Guerras de independencia hispanoamericanas) were a series of early 19th-century conflicts across the Spanish Empire that resulted in new independent nation states in the Americas. They began shortly after the outbreak of the Peninsular War, part of the broader Napoleonic Wars.
The process unfolded in two main phases. First, the Spanish Crown broke up, beginning in Spain in 1808 with the French invasion, the Spanish uprising against the Bonapartes, the vacancy of the throne, and the emergence of juntas later replicated in America. This unfolded as it did because sovereignty reverted vertically, from the Crown down to the cabildos (town councils, or ayuntamientos), the monarchy's basic cellular units. Second, beginning in 1810, attempts at reconstruction failed and developed into wars in their own right: the Cortes of Cádiz sought a pan-Hispanic state, King Ferdinand VII sought to recover the Spanish Crown he had ceded to Napoleon Bonaparte, and in the Americas Simón Bolívar, Agustín de Iturbide and others tried to build large states, such as the Federation of the Andes or the First Mexican Empire. Strictly in terms of military campaigns, they ran from sporadic clashes such as the battle at Chacaltaya in 1809 (present-day Bolivia) to the Battle of Tampico in 1829 (present-day Mexico). The result was the fragmentation of the Hispanic world into multiple states that largely reconstituted the old Spanish administrative boundaries under uti possidetis.
The conflicts were multilateral, involving many factions traditionally grouped into two broad camps: Royalists, who favored continued rule by the Monarchy of Spain, and Patriots, who supported independent monarchies or republics, either united or separate from one another. They were fought as both irregular warfare and conventional warfare. Some historians argue that they began as localized civil wars that spread as secessionist wars for general independence. Under a typology based on whether or not the belligerents constitute a State, they were mixed wars, combining elements of civil wars between political factions, wars between states, and wars between empires. The independence of most of Spanish America produced new national boundaries that followed the colonial provinces and formed the basis of contemporary Hispanic America.
The Spanish Empire dissolved in the region and new states emerged. The new republics abandoned the Inquisition and noble titles, but slavery was not immediately abolished, and total abolition came only in the 1850s in most countries. Criollos and mestizos replaced Spanish-born officials in most political offices, and Criollos stayed at the top of a social structure that kept traditional features culturally, if not legally. For almost a century, conservatives and liberals fought to reverse or deepen these changes. Spaniards were also subject to forced displacement, during the war and later through expulsion laws meant to consolidate independence.
The wars followed the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and unfolded alongside Brazil's own path to independence. Spanish America and Brazil shared a trigger: Napoleon's invasion of Iberia, which in 1807 forced the Portuguese royal family to flee to Brazil. More broadly, they drew on Enlightenment ideas of popular sovereignty behind the Atlantic Revolutions. The more direct cause was the crisis within Spain, which resulted in new independent states in the post-Napoleonic world. Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish rule until the 1898 Spanish–American War. Under Monroe Doctrine, this reconfiguration culminated in the modern states of Latin America. More recently, decolonial currents have proposed reorganizing Latin American states into Abya Yala, a plurinational project criticized as Balkanization.
Historical context
Political independence was not necessarily the foreordained outcome of the political turmoil in Spanish America. "There was little interest in outright independence." As historians R.A. Humphreys and John Lynch note, "it is all too easy to equate the forces of discontent or even the forces of change with the forces of revolution." Since "by definition, there was no history of independence until it happened," when Spanish American independence did occur, explanations for why it came about have been sought. The Spanish American Wars of Independence were essentially a power vacuum in the Spanish monarchy that resulting in a rupture that gave rise to new states.
Proposals for a controlled independence
A number of proposals to grant independence to parts of the Spanish Empire had been made over the centuries, the first of them going back to the conquest of the Aztec Empire in the 16th century, with Toribio de Benavente suggesting King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to place a Spanish prince at the head of New Spain. The idea strengthened in the 18th century after Spain's participation in the American Revolutionary War, with the goal of preventing the Spanish overseas territories from developing sentiments of independence in the example of the United States. Ministers José Ábalos and the Count of Aranda presented King Charles III with ideas of turning the empire into a confederacy of monarchies under the Spanish House of Bourbon. However, while not rejecting them, Charles did not act upon them either. A similar idea was presented in the 18th century by Secretary of State Manuel Godoy to Charles IV, which was found unrealizable at the time.
Administrative and economic reforms
There are a number of factors that have been identified to have provoked the independent movements. First, increasing control by the Crown of its overseas empire via the Bourbon Reforms of the mid-eighteenth century introduced changes to the relationship of Spanish Americans to the Crown. The language used to describe the overseas empire shifted from "kingdoms" with independent standing with the crown to "colonies" subordinate to Spain. In an effort to better control the administration and economy of the overseas possessions the Crown reintroduced the practice of appointing outsiders, almost all peninsulars, to the royal offices throughout the empire. This meant that Spanish American elites were thwarted in their expectations and ambitions by the crown's upending of long-standing practices of creole access to office holding.
The regalist and secularizing policies of the Bourbon monarchy were aimed at decreasing the power of the Roman Catholic Church. The crown had already expelled the Jesuits in 1767, which saw many creole members of the Society of Jesus go into permanent exile. By limiting the power of the Church, the crown attempted to centralize itself within the institutions of colonial Spanish America. Because of the physical and ideological proximity that the clergy had, they could directly influence and dictate the interactions between populations of colonial Spanish America, either as legal counsel or an advisor; a directness which the crown would need to attempt to create the centralized, colonial state which it wanted to implement.
Later in the eighteenth century the crown sought to decrease the privileges (fueros) of the clergy, restricting clerical authority to spiritual matters and undermining the power of parish priests, who often acted as agents of the crown in rural parishes. By desacralizing power and frontal attacks on the clergy, the crown, according to William B. Taylor, undermined its own legitimacy, since parish priests had been traditionally the "natural local representatives of their Catholic king."
In the economic sphere, the crown sought to gain control over church revenues. The Church functioned as one of the largest economic institutions within colonial Spanish America. It owned and retained jurisdiction over large amounts of land, which the crown wanted for itself because of the economic value which could be derived from the land. Moreover, by taking that land for itself, the Crown had the opportunity to cut down the physical presence of the Church to further weaken its ideological and social role within local colonial communities.
In a financial crisis of 1804, the crown attempted to call in debts owed the church, mainly in the form of mortgages for haciendas owned by the elites. The Act of Consolidation simultaneously threatened the wealth of the church, whose capital was mainly lent for mortgages, as well as threatening the financial well-being of elites, who depended on mortgages for acquiring and keeping their estates. Shortening the repayment period meant many elites were faced with bankruptcy. The crown also sought to gain access to benefices elite families set aside to support a priest, often their own family members, by eliminating these endowed funds (capellanías) that the lower clergy depended on disproportionately. Prominently in Mexico, lower clergy participated in the insurgency for independence with priests Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos.
The reforms had mixed results. In some areas—such as Cuba, Río de la Plata and New Spain—the reforms had positive effects, improving the local economy and the efficiency of the government. In other areas, the changes in the crown's economic and administrative policies led to tensions with locals, which at times erupted into open revolts, such as the Revolt of the Comuneros in New Granada and the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in Peru.
The loss of high offices to peninsulars and the eighteenth-century revolts in Spanish South America were some of the direct causes of the wars of independence, which took place decades later, but they have been considered important elements of the political background in which the wars took place. Many Creoles, particularly the wealthy Creoles, were negatively impacted by the Bourbon Reforms. This resulted in their taking action by using their wealth and positions within society, often as leaders within their communities, to spur resistance to convey their displeasure with Spanish reforms because of the negative economic impact which they had. However, because of how quickly their revolts would further radicalize the lower classes, the Creoles quickly stopped supporting general violent insurrection because they benefitted from social change that occurred through the systems of the Spanish crown. Institutional change ensured stability by supporting the political institutions that allowed for the creation of a wealthy Creole class and further adapting those institutions to meet demands, rather than propose a radical shift in the complete make-up of socioeconomic life and traditions. However, institutional change did not come as anticipated and further spurred on the radicalization of Spanish-American social classes towards independence.
Military restructuring
Spain's international wars in the second half of the 18th century evidenced the empire's difficulties in reinforcing its colonial possessions and provide them with economic aid. This led to an increased local participation in the financing of the defense and an increased participation in the militias by the locally-born. Such development was at odds with the ideals of the centralized absolute monarchy. The Spanish did also formal concessions to strengthen the defense: In Chiloé Archipelago Spanish authorities promised freedom from the encomienda to those indigenous locals who settled near the new stronghold of Ancud (founded in 1768) and contributed to its defense. The increased local organization of the defenses would ultimately undermine metropolitan authority and bolster the independence movement.
Spread of Enlightenment ideals
Other factors may include Enlightenment thinking and the examples of the Atlantic Revolutions. The Enlightenment spurred the desire for social and economic reform to spread throughout Spanish America and the Iberian Peninsula. Ideas about free trade and physiocratic economics were raised by the Enlightenment in Spain and spread to the overseas empire and a homegrown Spanish American Enlightenment. The political reforms implemented and the many constitutions written both in Spain and throughout the Spanish world during the wars of independence were influenced by these factors.
Napoleon showed an interest in retaining the American viceroyalties even before placing Joseph I on the Spanish throne in 1808, attracted by their resources and commercial potential. His policy towards Spanish America initially took shape through two simultaneous initiatives: the dispatch of commissioners to the viceroyalties and the summoning of American representatives to the Assembly of Bayonne. However, Napoleonic Spain (1808–1813) was ultimately defeated in the Peninsular War. The rejection of this new dynasty created a power vacuum and led to the emergence of liberalism and a desire for liberties throughout the Spanish Empire.
Collapse of the Bourbon dynasty
The Peninsular War was the trigger for conflicts in Spanish America in the absence of a legitimate monarch. The Peninsular War began an extended period of instability in the worldwide Spanish monarchy that lasted until 1823. Napoleon forced the Bourbon monarchs to abdicate, which precipitated a political crisis in Spain and Spanish America. Although the Spanish world almost uniformly rejected Napoleon's plan to place his brother, Joseph, on the throne, there was no clear solution to the lack of a king. Following traditional Spanish political theories on the contractual nature of the monarchy (see Philosophy of Law of Francisco Suárez), the peninsular provinces responded to the crisis by establishing juntas. The move, however, led to more confusion, since there was no central authority and most juntas did not recognize the claim of some juntas to represent the monarchy as a whole. The Junta of Seville, in particular, claimed authority over the overseas empire, because of the province's historic role as the exclusive entrepôt of the empire.