This chapter explores the experiences of Romani women (Gitanas) in the Spanish Atlantic empire through the lens of inquisitorial records from the seventeenth century. Centering the 1668 trial of María de la Concepción in Veracruz, it investigates how Gitanas navigated the complex religious, social and political landscapes of colonial society. By comparing inquisitorial cases from both Spain and New Spain, the chapter argues that colonial governance was less rigid than its peninsular counterpart, creating spaces in which Gitanas could engage in love magic, healing practices and other ritualized forms of knowledge. Operating in liminal zones across ethnoracial and class boundaries, these women provided services to a wide range of clients. Their practices functioned as both survival strategies and subtle forms of resistance against imperial and ecclesial authorities. The chapter demonstrates that Gitanas leveraged their ambiguous social position to subvert normative boundaries of ethnicity, gender and class, particularly by facilitating relationships that unsettled colonial hierarchies and exposed the permeability of imperial control.

Castile and Aragón stayed amalgamated under the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, which reigned for two centuries. Early on, Spaniards conquered the Aztec and Inca empires in the Americas, and huge transatlantic merchant fleets connected Spain with its growing American Empire. After unprecedented silver deposits were discovered in both North and South America, Spanish silver and other treasure contributed to growth and inflation around the globe. The long-sought return route eastward from Asia to the Americas allowed transpacific trade to begin in 1565, while conquest of the Philippines made Spain’s composite monarchy, as it is often called, truly global. Spanish power declined in the late seventeenth century, the victim of overextension and continual warfare. When the Habsburgs died out in 1700, a Bourbon prince had the best dynastic claim to become king of Spain. As Felipe V, he fought most of Europe to remain on the throne and would father three successive kings, whose reigns saw Spain’s global empire reach its greatest extent. Thereafter, the French Revolution and a Napoleonic invasion would shatter Spain and end the early modern period.

Andrés Bello (1781–1865) was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Early in his career he occupied various administrative positions in the government of the Captaincy General. In 1810, the newly inaugurated Junta of Caracas appointed him secretary of the commission sent to Great Britain to request support for the new government. He remained in London for nineteen years. He lived in Santiago for the remaining thirty-six years of his life, serving as government official, senator, and rector of University of Chile. He was in addition a poet, a literary critic, and a jurist. His most important works include Principios de derecho de jentes (1832), Gramática de la lengua castellana (1847), and the Civil Code of the Republic of Chile (1855). A towering intellectual figure in Spanish America, he has only recently been translated into English. The current selection concerns a specific development in Ecuador but involves a central principle of international relations where Bello took a strong position against foreign intervention, especially from emerging states that sought the political and military assistance of stronger ones. The polemical tone of the article is typical of the press debates in Chile in the 1840s.

Of humble origins and mixed race, Bernardo Monteagudo (1789–1825) was born in Tucumán, in the River Plate (Argentina today). He graduated in law from the University of Chuquisaca and soon became involved in the wars of independence against Spain, first in Upper Peru and then in Buenos Aires, where he stood out for his radical republicanism, which he originally displayed as a polemicist in newspapers. Embroiled in the internal conflicts of the revolutionary movement in the River Plate, he was forced into exile in 1815. In 1817, he joined the army of José de San Martín, which drove the Spaniards out of Lima in 1821, when Peruvian independence was declared. Monteagudo became San Martín’s right hand and was practically in charge of governing Lima while San Martín continued the fight against the royalist forces elsewhere. Monteagudo’s authoritarian rule provoked wide resentment and, following two days of riots, he was expelled from the city in 1822. Written a year later as a defence of his actions in government, his Memoir offered a systematic examination of the conditions that, in his view, made democracy unworkable in Peru.

Carlos Arturo Torres (1867–1911) was a journalist, teacher, and statesman. He was born in the Colombian town of Santa Rosa de Viterbo and studied in Tunja, Bogota, and the United Kingdom. After travels in Europe, he taught international law in Bogota, and founded such papers as La Crónica, El Nuevo Tiempo, and La Civilización. He was sent to diplomatic missions in France, England, and Caracas, where he died. He also served as minister of both treasury and finance. Undoubtedly, Idola Fori was his most influential work. He borrowed from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, who discerned four “idols” that obstruct the truth, including the idols of the forum and the market. Idola Fori was originally published with a prologue by José Enrique Rodó, with whom he has often been compared, and with whom he shared ideas about history and culture. Torres’ work, however, is more deeply grounded in politics, and shows his engagement with contemporary debates about the role of the state, major ideas about economic development, and the tension between individualism and collectivism.

This book offers a selection of key texts mostly written by leading figures in the history of Spanish American political thought during the first century of independence. Political thinkers in the region had to grapple with rather unique and extraordinary circumstances after three centuries of Spanish colonial rule. The emergence of a significant number of new independent polities that adopted representative institutions in an era when absolutism still prevailed in Western Europe, their general adoption of republicanism (except for Mexico during the brief rule of Agustín de Iturbide in 1822–1823, and Maximilian in 1864–1867), and their complex demographic composition, all posed serious challenges for the formation and consolidation of national states in Spanish America. In dialogue with the major currents of thought in Western Europe and North America, Spanish American thinkers often reflected upon these and other related problems while being politically engaged, either in government or in opposition.

White cultural elites in the US capital of Philadelphia in the 1780s and 1790s depicted Native Americans (or “Indians”) as vanishing peoples, soon to be replaced by Anglo culture. The fledgling nation’s premier naturalist Bejamin Smith Barton and the consecrated poet of the American Revolution Philip Freneau turned to Spanish American antiquarianism to invent a glorious antiquity for North America. They learned from Antonio de Ulloa’s Noticas Americanas (1772) and Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Storia Antica del Messico (1781) how to practice antiquarian materialism, then chose early Republican literary and scientific periodicals to disseminate their conquest of the Native American past. Those two americanistas in particular showed how to collect Indigenous artifacts, assemble them, and invest them with European meanings, which inspired the first generation of US Americanists to relegate Native American life to the dustbin of prehistory and at once fabricate their own Whiteness.

Chapter 1 opens with a description of the different peoples of the Americas in 1492 and the earliest contacts with Europeans, and outlines the process of Spanish penetration and settlement. It then explores indigenous reactions to Europeans at first contact, and analyzes the roots of the apotheosis of Europeans in Spanish America, arguing that it is misleading to distinguish too sharply between religious and rational considerations, and indicating that native peoples did not bow before the strangers as gods. The chapter then shifts the focus to the intellectual framework employed by Europeans to situate native peoples within a European worldview (European Mythology of the Indies I). Europeans interpreted indigenous peoples according to their own mythological concepts, such as the myth of the Earthly Paradise, the myth of the Reconquest of Jerusalem, the myth of the Marvelous East, and the myths of the Classical Tradition. The chapter ends with a summary of Spanish expansion into the Pacific.

The theories of rights articulated in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were innovative in their own time and have exerted widespread influence ever since, but they were marked by profound contradictions that spurred generations of critical engagements. This chapter offers an explanation for these dynamics by considering the social position occupied by rights theorists within the Americas. It begins with the British and Spanish American independence movements, considering the roles of universalist and particularist rights claims within the ideologies of the movements’ European-descended leadership. Next, it explores how, in the instances where Americans that occupied less privileged social positions took over the leadership of struggles for independence, the kinds of rights claimed, the grounds upon which these rights were claimed, and the range of persons on behalf of whom rights were claimed varied in such a manner as to reflect the difference of leadership. Finally, it traces the ways that Americans initially excluded from enjoyment of the rights claimed by the independence movements and enumerated in the Americas’ early constitutions sought both recognition as equal rights-bearers and revisions to the rights that they and other Americans bore over the course of the nineteenth century.

The revolutionary processes that led to the dissolution of the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas formed an entangled process. The states that emerged from these processes built their new national identities around the heroes and the deeds of the independence period from roughly 1760-1830. These hero myths are still important markers of identity today. The chapter explores the main interpretations of Spanish American independence, presents conflicting periodizations, and then discusses the events from the crisis of the empire, colonial reactions to the different phases of independence (1810-1814 and 1814-1830). Finally, it demonstrates that many revolutionary promises remained unfulfilled. Everywhere in the Spanish possessions the motivation for revolution was the problem of legitimacy arising from the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. The individual experiences of revolution, however, were very different and ranged from popular uprisings to elite-led exchanges of ruling oligarchies. The ethnic dimension, which overlapped with the social problem, was a unique feature of the Spanish American revolutions of independence. It contributed to boosting the ideas of freedom, equality and self-determination. Until 1830 and long after, this explosive force could not yet unfold. What remained was the promise of the revolution.

The reinstallation of liberal constitutionalism in Spain in 1820 was the first major challenge to the conservative political system of the Restoration, with far-reaching effects on the European and American continents. Spanish liberals endeavored to continue a political program based on the constitution of Cádiz (1812), although they encountered many obstacles in the form of inner discord and, especially, a local robust counterrevolutionary movement which enjoyed external support. The Trieno Constitucional was a moment of rapid and intense politicization, which surpassed the social elites to reach into a wider public that included popular sectors. A vigorous public opinion was developed and elections with mass participation were held at various administrative levels. The reverberations of the Spanish revolution were felt abroad. Naples-Sicily, Portugal and Piedmont-Sardinia soon adopted the Cádiz constitution. Moreover, during the Triennium the American possessions of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies secured their independence, at a critical moment in which the Iberian metropoles were unable to delay the process anymore. Ultimately, the return of liberalism to Southern Europe was short-lived. The constitutional regimes fell after interventions accorded by the continental powers endorsed the local reactionary interests.

It is habitual among scholars to suggest that European nations were formed during, and to some degree because of, the colonial expansion.1 Many argue that this expansion, which placed colonizers in opposition to the natives they sought to control, to other Europeans with whom they competed, and to the large African population that they enslaved, led to the emergence of new identities. In the Spanish case, it enabled the move from multiple local distinctions to a unitary national designation, allowing individuals originating from the different Iberian kingdoms (Castile, Navarre, Aragón, and so forth) to assume a single identity as Spaniards. While some scholars pointed to the formation of nations (or proto-nations), others concluded that the colonial experience led Europeans to think of themselves as participants in a community, members of which belonged to a particular race. Imagining themselves to be distinct from both natives and Africans, these Europeans refashioned themselves as “white.”2