The seemingly irresistible desire of Latin American institutions and scholars to celebrate the bicentenaries of the independence movements of the early nineteenth century has spawned in the last decade or so numerous conferences and publications, of variable quality. This occurred even in Brazil, Mexico and Peru, countries whose dominant elite groups remained fervent royalists during the decade following 1810. These elites were determined to fight against insurgency, especially that supported by those whom they regarded as their social and racial inferiors, until continuing political turmoil in the centres of metropolitan power left them by the early 1820s with no real alternative but to follow the examples of the peripheral regions of the Río de la Plata and separate from Portugal and Spain. US and European scholars have been somewhat more circumspect than their Latin American counterparts in commemorating the bicentenary, with the exception of those in Spain; the latter have also found something to celebrate in the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz – La Pepa – which, they argue, left an enduring legacy of respect for liberal principles in both the emerging nation-states of Spanish America and in peninsular Spain itself, notwithstanding its abolition by the absolutist Ferdinand VII, first in 1814, and again in 1823 following its restoration in 1820. In this context, significant publications include the lavish Construyendo patrias: Iberoamerica 1810–1824 (Banamex, 2010), edited by Guadalupe Jiménez Codinach; Revolución, independencia y las nuevas naciones de América (Fundación MAPFRE, 2005), edited by Jaime E. Rodríguez O.; Manuel Chust Calero's América en las Cortes de Cádiz (Fundación MAPFRE, 2010); and John Lynch's outstanding biographies of the two most important revolutionary leaders in South America, Simón Bolívar: A Life (Yale University Press, 2006) and San Martín: Argentine Soldier, American Hero (Yale University Press, 2009).

The historiographical context is relevant to an evaluation of Rinke's monograph, because the major issues that need to be addressed in reviewing his new history of the causes, processes and consequences of independence are not only what it contributes to recent scholarship, but also the novelty or otherwise of its interpretation(s) of this particularly crucial period in Latin American history – this has already been scrutinised in great detail by the seminal works of a substantial number of previous commentators, including John Lynch in The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (W. W. Norton, 1986) and Jaime E. Rodríguez O. in The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge University Press, 1998). The first substantive difference, of course, is that these earlier works deal only with Spanish America, whereas Rinke provides detailed coverage of the processes that led to the independence of Haiti from France in 1804 (pp. 79–131) and that of Brazil from Portugal in 1822 (pp. 291–324), albeit without providing any particularly novel conclusions. The former, it is argued, ‘se convirtió en inspiración para posteriores movimientos de descolonización en América y mas allá’ (p. 131) – perhaps an unconsciously ironic suggestion, given the shambolic state of the former colony of Saint-Domingue throughout its two centuries of post-colonial existence. The latter, by contrast, was a cautious, conservative process, organised by elite groups determined to preserve colonial institutions – notably black slavery and monarchy, which survived until 1888 and 1889 respectively – and to exclude the lower classes in general from political representation and participation in the new state.

A further novelty, of degree rather than absolute, in Rinke's approach to the independence era is the very detailed attention that he gives to the history of Ibero-America during the half-century prior to 1808 in ‘Las bases colonials’, and to post-independence problems in the new states prior to 1830 in the concluding chapter, ‘El precio de la libertad’. The former emphasises the emergence in the last quarter of the eighteenth century of a growing sense of creole identity but dismisses the rebellions and protests against the tightening of metropolitan control and increasing taxation that did occur as ‘más bien la expresión conservadora de una protesta colectiva’ (p. 77), while the latter draws the obvious conclusion that ‘el precio de la libertad fue alto, y la libertad que se había obtenido … había sido coartada en muchos sentidos’ (p. 354). The two core chapters of the volume provide a coherent, systematic and well-informed survey, based entirely upon published sources, of the reasons for the onset of insurgency in Spanish America following the 1808 abdication of Ferdinand VII, and of the inexorable collapse of royalist authority from 1816. The first makes frequent and interesting references to the broader theme of Atlantic revolutions – notably the American and French revolutions – and, at a different level, provides a very sound explanation of why the Constitution of 1812 failed to resolve the crisis of legitimacy in Spanish America in 1810–14, when many creoles might have accepted autonomy within a constitutional monarchy as an alternative to full-blown independence. It also emphasises, correctly, the diverse nature of the early movements for independence and the deep divisions within the creole elites, complicated by intense regional rather than national identities. As is conventional, 1816 is defined as a critical year, when the independence of the ‘United Provinces of the Río de la Plata’ was declared in Tucumán, thereby scuppering the possibility of a royalist reconquest in southern South America. In Venezuela, Simón Bolívar began a military campaign which by 1822 had secured, for what it was worth, the independence of all the territory of the former viceroyalty of New Granada. This, with Venezuela, became the short-lived ‘Gran Colombia’. With the Mexican elite already having secured in 1821 the independence of the former viceroyalty of New Spain, that left only Peru in royalist hands until 1824, when the largely Colombian army of Bolívar won the decisive battle of Ayacucho and imposed independence upon the conservative elite that fought against it to the bitter end. Rinke describes these processes accurately and fluently, and his book can be strongly recommended to non-specialists seeking an up-to-date introduction to the history of Latin American independence.