This collection of articles is the third volume in a series about the nature of democracy in the modern world. The first volume re-imagined democracy in America, France, Britain, Ireland; a second tackled the meaning and practice of democracy in the Mediterranean. And this volume, edited by three Oxford historians, explores how independence and its aftermath shaped the idea and practice of democracy south of the Rio Grande. Its principal contribution is to bring Latin American and Caribbean experiences into conversations about the history of democracy from which they are typically (and regrettably) excluded.

Two introductory chapters, one by Joanna Innes and another by Eduardo Posada-Carbó, ably identify key findings. One is that printed sources, books and newspapers, rarely contain references to democracy during the last phase of European colonialism. References to democracy intensified with the struggle for independence in the 1810s. They began by juxtaposing it to aristocracy and monarchy, that is, by distinguishing it as a form of government. Echoing classical Greek distinctions, conservative critics disparaged it as a degenerate form of republican government.

But independence changed understandings of democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Natalia Sobrevilla Perea’s chapter discusses how the wars of independence shattered the ancien régime, but left new republics with traditions and structures with which to shape new experiments in popular sovereignty. Democracy became equated with constitutional or republican rule after independence, as José Antonio Aguilar Rivera and Eduardo Zimmermann note in their chapter on liberal constitutionalism. Constitutions turn out to be key sources of information in this and other chapters. That most republics saw civil war lead to the replacement of one constitution with a new one means that it is easy to trace how they centralised or decentralised political authority, separated or unified the branches of government, and, most importantly, restricted or expanded franchise rights.

Support for democracy varied across the region. Politicians and pundits in Brazil, Haiti and Mexico were among the most sceptical of democracy. In Brazil, it was only ‘during the 1870s’ that democracy became ‘widely endorsed as a slogan by those who wanted more radical change’ (p. 288), according to Andréa Slemian, even if she does not say whether monarchical sentiments or fear of slave insurrections were more responsible for this outcome. The absence of democracy talk is more of a surprise in Haiti, whose revolutionary armies won independence by 1804, the second state in the Americas (with the United States being the first). Emmanuel Lachaud suggests that the all-consuming war against slavery and France in Haiti (and the Spanish in the Dominican Republic) left little time for speculation about democracy. Even if discussions of democracy were, ‘by comparison with other Spanish American revolutions, relatively common in Venezuela’, Luis Daniel Perrone concludes that they were ‘rarely if ever conjoined with explicit statements about the equality and freedom of “pardos” and enslaved people’ (p. 323). At the end of the eighteenth century, ‘pardos’ made up 50 per cent of the population in Venezuela and ‘descendants of either blacks or mulattoes on the one hand and whites, Indians, or mestizos on the other’ (p. 325; enslaved people made up 10 per cent, p. 332).

Guy Thomson notes that democracy became associated with those forces ‘most inclined to try to work’ with ‘Mexico’s ethnic diversity and social inequality’ (p. 300). That, in 1814, more than ‘60 percent of New Spain’s population of around 6,000,000’ consisted of ostensibly self-governing Indigenous territories – la república de los indios – established by the Spanish imperial authorities helps to explain why the practice of popular sovereignty unsettled conservatives as well as liberals (p. 301). This is a finding broadly relevant for the other heavily Indigenous countries, as Nancy Appelbaum shows in ‘From Caste to Race’. Neither chapter is the only one to note that we know little about how Indigenous communities governed themselves in the early nineteenth century – or what they thought about the way elites consumed the language of democracy.

Talk of democracy also began to include egalitarian ideas in New Granada and Argentina, two countries with sizeable African and mixed populations, as early as the 1820s and 1830s. In New Granada, Posada-Carbó notes that democracy became associated with the notion that all men were equal; in 1853, radical liberals led the struggle to grant all men 21 or older the right to vote in direct elections using a secret ballot. In their chapter on Argentina and Peru, Paula Alonso and Marcela Ternavasio show how the end of Spanish rule led to inclusive democratic experiments in the River Plate and in Peru. Broad franchise rights empowered men to elect an assembly in the Province of Buenos Aires during the 1820s. But civil war led the legislature to make Federalist Juan Manuel de Rosas governor and grant him extraordinary powers, which started the slide into an 18-year dictatorship (1835–52). Talk of democracy was fashionable in Peru even as opposition movements repeatedly overthrew presidents; but, in 1851, a two-year campaign for the presidency led to the alternation of power, whose core features Alonso and Ternavasio ably depict. Suffrage rights for men 21 years or older were broad in this heavily Indigenous republic, at least according to the 1828 constitution (p. 194). These chapters were among my favourites because they use an array of sources to show how politics refashioned notions of popular sovereignty.

A core conclusion of Re-imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780–1870 is that political struggle ends up defining democracy. If radical ‘democrats’ favoured granting broad franchise rights, conservatives, soon after independence, grudgingly made their peace with popular sovereignty. Elections seemed to be a promising way to generate consent for the reconstruction of political order – which conservatives could design, not always with success, to keep in the hands of propertied and literate men. A chapter on suffrage rights, I note, would have clarified how inclusive were republican experiments in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Another finding is that opposition politicians, especially liberals, deployed democratic discourses against autocratic presidents. Juan Luis Ossa’s fine chapter on constitutional centralism in Chile is one of several that explores this issue. This volume has less to say about the theory and practice of the alternation of power, in part because it became a central theme in the struggle for democracy by the mid-nineteenth century, just as the temporal coverage of this volume comes to a close. It is la lucha por el poder, I suspect, that forged republican political traditions, of either a moderate or radical sort; and it is this struggle that the careful reading of newspapers and other sources should, in successive volumes, document and explain.