This book is thought-provoking, well-researched and important. Echeverri puts forth several interlocking arguments that provide a useful corrective to some of the unexamined assumptions of Spanish American independence as they were framed and codified by the nineteenth-century historians of the grand national narrative across the continent. In the book, she seeks to explain the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon whereby ‘people who had been the object of imperial rule became its defenders’ (p. 2). Echeverri convincingly documents the ways in which indigenous people and enslaved Africans clearly understood that the wars opened up unprecedented opportunities for them to advance their own interests by extracting concessions in exchange for loyalty and thereby renegotiated their own sovereignty and autonomy (p. 9). In other words, far from being naïve or controlled by their priests, as the nineteenth-century liberal historians claimed, these communities were quite aware of their legal rights and consciously pursued strategies within the imperial system to achieve their own goals. In this way, Echeverri argues that ‘the notions of rights and freedoms – which historians generally identify with republican thought and institutions – were part of Hispanic and monarchical political culture’ (p. 13). This is an important insight which should balance much of the recent scholarship on the Hispanic liberalism that was produced alongside the bicentennial commemoration of the Constitution of Cádiz. The Spanish American independence movements were not inherently liberal or republican, nor did the interests of urban creoles in capital cities represent the desires and interests of all the people they sought to make their fellow citizens.
Popular royalism was both a real phenomenon and a powerful one. Echeverri characterises the politics of royalism as being ‘socially embedded and deeply tied to the legal identity of indigenous people and the enslaved’ (p. 12). For these communities, a legal strategy that was flexible, afforded them certain rights, and allowed direct access to crown mediation through its local agents was understood to be beneficial and protective (for example, to stave off the centre when Cádiz-era liberals attacked community land rights). Indeed, Echeverri notes that the communities she studied in Pasto and Popayán ‘did not understand freedom exclusively as freedom for the individual, as it was in the politically liberal sense’ (p. 230), but rather as a social or collective attribute. It was this deep cultural understanding of power relationships that was at the root of these communities’ conditional loyalty to empire, not an unthinking or reactionary rejection of outside control or innovation.
Echeverri has initiated several significant interpretations of the wartime experience in New Granada with this book. First, she has combined a discussion of the reactions of both indigenous people (Pasto) and enslaved and African-descended people (Popayán) in a single book rather than considering them to be separate spheres, as previous accounts often have done. Second, she also overrides the still-strong impulse among scholars to tell independence as a national story by situating her subjects in something she calls ‘the Pacific royalist block’, a geographic region that extended from the Andes through Quito and on to Lima. Third, Echeverri also consciously avoids using binary terms like liberal and conservative because, as she convincingly argues, that ideology was less important than practical evaluations of a community or region's interests based on their own assessment of their legal strategies and realistic chances of success in improving their conditions and status at any given time. In this way, some regions with strong African-descended communities like Cartagena might lean liberal or republican while others, like Popayán, aligned themselves with groups that later would be considered conservative. It is an important corrective to the assumption that race or ethnicity might inherently incline a group in one way or another. Finally, her discussion of Pasto's royalist revolt (1822–5) shows that its residents ‘did not welcome the project of transforming indigenous people into citizens, a principle that was at the core of the Colombian constitutional project’ (p. 225).
The two regions under study here offer suggestive similarities and differences. Echeverri's engagement with the current research in the history of Atlantic slavery and New World enslaved communities is particularly strong. Her case study of Popayán is unique because its slave population had a majority of people who had been born in America. Enslaved African labour was there deployed in gold mines, not plantation agriculture, which created a different sort of local dynamic. Furthermore, the enslaved people lived alongside indigenous communities and, when given the opportunity, tried to secure a similar sort of protected legal status for their own rights based on an already-existing model under which the Indians operated within the royalist sphere. The indigenous communities of Pasto were also distinct from those of other more-commonly studied regions of the Andes because they had not been part of the Inca empire. Echeverri's research shows that, for them, the ‘ongoing changes in cacique authority and tribute collection’ were the single most important factor in local indigenous politics (p. 91). As they managed to leverage the wars to expand and consolidate their own autonomy, these communities violently resisted the patriot insurgents’ efforts to integrate them into a new liberal republican order and preferred to die rather than collaborate (p. 207). These two case studies are fascinating and well chosen to illustrate Echeverri's arguments about the practical appeal of popular royalism.
Echeverri's book is written in an elegant, fluid style that balances big-picture argument with effective storytelling on a local level. Indeed, one of the remarkable things about her research is just how absent the famous, national actors are – Bolívar himself makes a brief appearance to throw some royalists off a cliff while passing through Pasto – which is a narrative and methodological strategy that probably reflects the way her subjects actually experienced the wartime era. Like all good scholarship, this book opens avenues for future research. From Echeverri's observations, it is abundantly clear that the issue of tribute played a central role in the way that indigenous communities responded to changing conditions. Similarly, there are many points in the book in which the actions of indigenous and enslaved women had a significant effect on political events, from the many cases of infanticide among enslaved women in the Popayán mines to the indigenous women weavers of Pasto whose textiles functioned as tribute payments; their experiences would certainly be worth fuller exploration. There does seem to be some conflation of the terms ‘absolutism’ and ‘royalism’ throughout the book and it would be valuable to try to recreate some of the ways political vocabulary of the era filtered down and was understood at the local level. This book makes a significant contribution to the study of independence in general, and to the complex process of events across northern South America specifically. Scholars working on similar processes in other regions will find much here to inspire new insights to be explored in their work as well. Highly recommended.
