By the late eighteenth century, Chuquisaca—present-day Sucre—stood as one of the most dynamic centers of intellectual and political life in the southern Andes. As the seat of the Real Audiencia, the University of Charcas, and the Academia Carolina, the city was dominated by an educated Creole patriciate alongside a prosperous group of plebeian confraternities and artisan guilds. When the Aymara insurgency led by Túpac Katari brought Spanish rule to the brink of collapse, Chuquisaca closed ranks in defense of the crown, mobilizing men and resources to suppress the rebellion. Yet, paradoxically, after 1808 the city became the first in Upper Peru to establish an autonomist junta.
This trajectory sits uneasily with a substantial body of scholarship on the imperial crisis in the southern Andes, which has emphasized the political caution of Creole elites and their reluctance to pursue independence, largely out of fear that challenges to imperial authority might reignite the racial violence of the 1780s. How, then, are we to explain Chuquisaca’s distinctive political path, and what does it reveal about the nature of the crisis of Spanish rule in the southern Andes—and Spanish America more broadly—during the Age of Revolutions?
Sergio Serulnikov’s most recent book offers a counterintuitive yet persuasive answer. Rather than locating the unraveling of colonial rule in the crisis of authority unleashed by Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808, Serulnikov traces its roots to the longer-term consolidation of a political culture of dissent. First published in Spanish in 2022, The Power of Dissent is now available to Anglophone readers in a carefully edited English-language edition. Despite a substantial reduction in length, the translation preserves the book’s analytical coherence and stylistic elegance while adding a map and an updated bibliography.
Framed by an introductory essay and ten chronologically organized chapters, the book reconstructs a series of conflicts stretching from the implementation of the Bourbon Reforms in 1777 to the formation of the first junta in 1809. As new taxes and royal monopolies expanded, Creoles were displaced from positions of authority and the traditional privileges and jurisdictional powers of the cabildo and other corporate bodies were curtailed, the city’s inhabitants became increasingly involved in public affairs—an arena formally reserved for the king and his ministers.
The first three chapters examine disputes between the magistrates of the Real Audiencia—the highest tribunal of appeal—and the city council. Over a short period, Creole magistrates were removed from the Audiencia and displaced from key administrative posts, including the corregimientos. Through close readings of jurisdictional struggles—between the Creole-dominated cabildo and the peninsular-born corregidor of Lamparáez, and between magistrates and councilors during ceremonial encounters—Serulnikov shows how these conflicts politicized urban society and sharpened debates over authority.
Chapters 4 and 5 turn to two riots, in 1781 and 1784, directed against peninsular militias stationed in Chuquisaca after the defeat of Túpac Katari’s forces. Serulnikov demonstrates that locally raised volunteer militias—largely plebeian and led by Creole officers—had played a central role in defending the city and subsequently mobilized their wartime service to demand privileges, including the abolition of royal monopolies. The decision to station permanent peninsular militias intensified tensions, as abuses against local residents provoked riots in which the city council allied with plebeians to demand the prosecution and expulsion of soldiers. These episodes, Serulnikov argues, fostered the emergence of a Creole political identity and blurred long-standing distinctions between patricians and plebeians.
Chapters 6–8 shift to the University of Charcas, focusing on disputes surrounding the contested election of a rector in 1785. Centered on the eligibility of Creole candidates nominated by the reformed university cloister, these conflicts pitted the institution against the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the Audiencia. Far from isolated, they culminated in the exile and imprisonment of a leading Creole patrician, Juan José Segovia, and intensified throughout the 1790s amid renewed efforts to reform exclusionary statutes.
The final chapters address the monarchical crisis itself. Serulnikov argues that Chuquisaca entered the upheavals of 1808 with a well-established tradition of political experimentation with representative practices, even if these were not formally liberal. Particularly suggestive is his claim that the British invasion of Buenos Aires in 1806 produced a “crisis before the crisis,” exposing the fragility of elite authority and foreshadowing the legitimacy debates of 1808.
One of the book’s most significant contributions lies in its reinterpretation of the political dynamics of the ancien régime in Spanish America. Challenging portrayals of colonial rule as a resilient order capable of absorbing crises through renegotiation, Serulnikov shows how recurrent conflicts destabilized the very mechanisms of accommodation on which the system depended. By foregrounding claims to political participation articulated by both patricians and plebeians, the book reveals fractures within colonial governance that progressively undermined its legitimacy.
While the study’s close focus on Chuquisaca raises questions about broader applicability, this limitation does little to diminish its impact. The Power of Dissent is a major contribution to the historiography of the Age of Revolutions in the Andes and to scholarship on political culture and the public sphere in Latin America. It will be essential reading for historians of empire, popular politics, and revolutionary change in the Atlantic world.
