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Re-Imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean, 1780-1860
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Francisco “Pancho” Fierro, Sigue la procesión cívica (1821) [civic procession celebrating Peruvian independence]. Courtesy of the Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino, Lima, Peru. Francisco “Pancho” Fierro Sigue la procesión cívica de 1821 Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino. Municipalidad Metropolitana de Lima
Subjects:LCSH:Democracy LatinAmerica History 18thcentury | Democracy LatinAmerica History 19thcentury.|Democracy Caribbean Area History 18thcentury.|Democracy CaribbeanArea History 19th century |LatinAmerica Politicsandgovernment |Caribbean Area Politicsandgovernment.
TheLatinAmericanHistoryseminarattheUniversityofOxfordhasprovidedavenueformanyhelpful presentationsanddiscussions andwearegratefulforthefundingprovidedbytheLatinAmericanCentre attheOxfordSchoolofGlobalandAreaStudiesonthoseoccasions PanelsattheannualLatinAmerican StudiesAssociationstudiesconferencealsosuppliedopportunitiestobringtogethercontributorsandother interestedpartiesoverseveralyears,andwearegratefultotheAssociationforprovidingtheorganizational frameworkforthesemeetings,andtoallthosewhogavepapersandjoinedindiscussion TheOxford MaisonFrançaisehostedoneofourreading-groupsessions,andwearegratefulforitshospitality.Thanks tothe Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies,inparticulartoitseditorGregorioAlonso,wewereableto publisha“dossier”onthesubjectcomprisingsomeearlycontributions Wewerefortunatetoholdourlast plannedcontributors’meetinginJanuary2020,beforetheonsetof thepandemic,thoughsomeofour workonthevolumewasdisruptedbyitse ects. p xvii
WearegratefultothePinacotecaMunicipalIgnacioMerinoinLima,Peru,forallowingustoreproduce Francisco“Pancho”Fierro’swatercolor, Sigue la procesión cívica (1821),whichservesasthecoverforour book—wewanttoacknowledgeinparticularthevaluableassistanceofMaryTakahashiHuamancaja,Katia MiluzcaAlzamoraArceandJessicaAdrianaClementeTejada TheeditorswouldalsoliketojoinPaulaAlonso andMarcelaTernavasiointhankingErikaR Hosselkus,Curator,LatinAmerican,EarlyModernandModern European,andMapCollections,RareBooksandSpecialCollections,HesburghLibraries,UniversityofNotre Dame,forfacilitatingtheselectionandreproductionofsomeoftheillustrationsincludedinChapter8
BenjaminRymerprovidedinvaluablehelpwiththeindex.WearealsogratefultomembersofOUP’sNew Yorkeditorialo ceandtheproductionteamforshepherdingourbookthroughtopublication p xviii
JoséAntonioAguilarRiveraisProfessorofPoliticalScienceattheDivisióndeEstudiosPolíticos,CIDE (MexicoCity) HehasbeenavisitingfellowattheKelloggInstituteforInternationalStudies,University ofNotreDame,andtheInstituteforAdvancedStudies,WarwickUniversity,andavisitingscholaratthe ÉcoledesHautesÉtudesenSciencesSociales,Paris,aswellasaFulbrightScholar.Heistheauthorof, amongotherbooks: El sonido y la furia La persuasión multicultural en México y Estados Unidos; En pos de la quimera: re exiones sobre el experimento constitucional atlántico; La geometría y el mito. Un ensayo sobre la libertad y el liberalismo en México, 1821–1970;and Ausentes del Universo Re exiones sobre el pensamiento político hispanoamericano en la era de la construcción nacional, 1821–1850 Heistheeditorof Liberty in Mexico: Writings on Liberalism from the Early Republican Period to the Second Half of the Twentieth Century and Las bases sociales del crimen organizado y la violencia en México Hehasalsoauthoredarticlesinthe Journal of Latin American Studies, Historia Mexicana, Revista de Occidente,and Cardozo Law Review,among others Hepublishesregularlyin Nexos,aleadingMexicanintellectualmagazine
PaulaAlonsoisAssociateProfessorofHistoryandInternationalA airsattheGeorgeWashington Universityand(correspondence)memberoftheArgentineNationalAcademyofHistory.Ahistorianof LatinAmericanpoliticsandprintculture,herpublicationsinclude Between Revolution and the Ballot Box The Origins of the Argentine Radical Party in the 1890s (translatedintoSpanish); Jardines secretos, legitimaciones públicas El Partido Autonomista Nacional y la política argentina de nes de siglo XIX (2010); (ed ) Construcciones Impresas: Pan etos, diarios y revistas en la formación de los estados nacionales en América Latina, 1820-1920;andco-editorof El sistema federal argentino. Debates y coyunturas (1860-1910).Her articleshavealsoappearedinthe Journal of Latin American Studies andthe Hispanic American Historical Review Sheiscurrentlywritingabook-lengthhistoryofArgentina,andisworkingonaresearchproject onthehistoryofdemocracyinArgentinaandtheAtlanticWorld,1860–1930.
NancyP AppelbaumisProfessorofHistoryandLatinAmericanandCaribbeanStudiesatBinghamton University,StateUniversityofNewYork.Herresearchasks:HowhaveLatinAmericansde nedand experiencedrace,region,andmigration?Howhaveinequalitiesbeeninscribedonlandscapesandin nationalimaginaries?HowhaveraceandgenderplayedintotheformationofLatinAmericannationsand regions?Herbook Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Colombia examines howmid-nineteenth-centurygeographers envisionedtheracialandterritorialcompositionofthe countrythatwouldbecomeColombia.Anearliermonograph, Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local p.xx
History in Colombia,examinesagrarianandregionalhistoryfromtheperspectivesofamultiracial communityinColombia’sco eeregionoverthelatenineteenthandearlytwentiethcenturies.Shealso co-edited Race and Nation in Modern Latin America Herbooksandarticleshavereceivedprizesand honorablementionsfromtheNewEnglandCouncilonLatinAmericanStudies,theLatinAmerican StudiesAssociation,theBerkshireConferenceofWomenHistorians,andtheConferenceonLatin AmericanHistory ShereceivedherPhDfromtheUniversityofWisconsin
JoannaInneshasretiredfromherOxfordteachingpostbutholdsthestatusofSeniorResearchFellowat SomervilleCollegeOxford,andProfessorofModernHistoryattheUniversityofOxford Shewasthe originator,withMarkPhilp,oftheRe-imaginingDemocracyproject,andhasco-editedwithhimrelated booksonAmerica,France,Britain,andIreland(2013),andtheMediterranean(2018) Herotherresearch andpublicationshavemainlyconcernedBritishsocialpolicyandmorebroadlypoliticalcultureinthe eighteenthandearlynineteenthcenturies.Someofherworkontheeighteenthcenturywascollectedin Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain;sheisatworkonanew bookonchangesinthesocialpolicyagendaandpolicymakingprocessesintheverylateeighteenthand earlynineteenthcenturies.
AnthonyMcFarlaneisEmeritusProfessorofHistory,UniversityofWarwick.Hisresearchhasfocusedon thehistoryofSpanishAmericaduringtheperiodc 1700–c 1850,especiallytheregionsofColombiaand Ecuador ItincludesstudiesofColombia’seconomichistoryinthelatecolonialandearlyrepublican periods,thehistoryofrebellions,slaveresistance,andcrimeinthelatecolonialperiod,andthe movementsforindependenceintheearlynineteenthcentury Hehaspublishedextensivelyonthese subjects,onthecomparativehistoryoflatecolonialSpanishAmerica,onBritishAmericancolonial history,andonthehistoryofviolenceandwarfareinSpanishAmerica.Hisbooksinclude Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule; The British in the Americas, 1480–1815;and War and Independence in Spanish America.
NicolaMillerisProfessorofLatinAmericanHistoryintheHistoryDepartmentatUniversityCollege LondonandcurrentlydirectoroftheUCLInstituteofAdvancedStudies SherecentlyheldaLeverhulme TrustMajorResearchFellowshiptoworkonahistoryofnation-buildingknowledgeinSpanishAmerica duringthecenturyafterindependence Her ndingswerepublishedas Republics of Knowledge Shehas alsoworkedontheintellectualandculturalhistoriesofLatinAmericancountriesfromatransnational perspective,forexamplein America Imagined: Explaining the United States in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America (ed withAxelKörnerandAdamI P Smith),and“ReadingRousseauinSpanish Americaduringthewarsofindependence(1808–1826),”in Engaging with Rousseau (ed.AviLifschitz).
numerousjournals,suchasthe Journal of Latin American Studies, Anuario de Estudios Americanos, Revista de Indias, Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies, Parliament, Estates and Representation,and Bulletin of Latin American Research Heauthored Armies, politics and revolution Chile, 1808-1826 andeditedVolume 1ofthe Historia Política de Chile, 1810-2010.In2017hereceivedtheawardforthebestresearcherinthe areasofthesocialsciencesandhumanitiesoftheUniversidadAdolfoIbáñez
LuisDanielPerroneisProfessorofHistoryofInternationalRelationsattheEscueladeEstudiosPolíticos yAdministrativos,UniversidadCentraldeVenezuela,andobtainedaPhDinPoliticalSciencefromthe sameuniversity HeisalsoresearcherattheInstitutodeInvestigacionesHistóricas“HermannGonzalez OtopezaS.J.,”UniversidadCatólicaAndrésBello.HeispartofIBERCONCEPTOS,internationalresearch grouponthehistoryofpoliticalandsocialconceptsinIberoamérica Hehaspublished Veredas de libertad e igualdad Expresiones del pensamiento político y social de Juan Germán Roscio (1797-1818) Hisresearch focusesonthehistoryofpoliticalthought,politicalconcepts,andpoliticalhistoryofnineteenth-century VenezuelaandLatinAmerica,withaparticularemphasisontheintellectualhistoryofpopular governments.
MarkPetersenisAssociateProfessorofHistoryandDirectorofLatinAmericanStudiesattheUniversity ofDallas HeobtainedhisDPhilinHistoryfromOxfordUniversity Hisresearchfocusesonthehistoryof inter-Americanrelations,pan-Americanism,andChileanforeignpolicy.Heistheauthorof The Southern Cone and the Origins of Pan America, 1888-1933 andseveralshorterworksineditedvolumes, Latin American Politics and Society,and Estudios (Mexico) Heiscurrentlyworkingonadigitalhumanities projectontwentieth-centuryhemisphericperiodicals,aswellasabookprojectontheinternational historyofLatinAmerica
MarkPhilpisProfessorofHistoryandPoliticsattheUniversityofWarwickandanEmeritusFellowof OrielCollege,Oxford Hehasworkedextensivelyinthe eldofpoliticalcorruptionandrealistpolitical theory,aswellasinthehistoryofpoliticalthoughtandlateeighteenth-andearlynineteenth-century Europeanhistory.Hisbooksinclude Political Conduct; Reforming Political Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the shadow of the French Revolution,and Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London 1789-1815,alongwitheditionsofJ.S.Mill’sessaysandhis Autobiography.Hewastheoriginator, withJoannaInnes,oftheRe-imaginingDemocracyproject,andhasco-editedwithherrelatedbookson America,France,Britain,andIreland(2013),andtheMediterranean(2018)
EduardoPosada-CarbóisProfessoroftheHistoryandPoliticsofLatinAmericaattheOxfordSchoolof GlobalandAreaStudiesandtheHistoryFaculty,UniversityofOxford,andWilliamGoldingSenior ResearchFellowinBrasenoseCollege.Heedited Elections before democracy. The history of elections in Europe and Latin America Hehasauthoredandco-authoredchaptersinbooksandjournalarticlesonthe historyofelectionsanddemocracy,includingthe Hispanic American Historical Review, The Historical Journal, Past & Present, the Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas, and Estates, Parliaments and
p.xxiii p xxiv
Representation.WithAndrewRobertsonheiscurrentlycompletingtheeditionof The Oxford Handbook of Revolutionary Elections in the Americas, 1800-1910.
Carsten-AndreasSchulzisanAssistantProfessorinInternationalRelationsattheDepartmentofPolitics andInternationalStudies(POLIS)andTunSu anLectureratGonvilleandCaiusCollege,Universityof Cambridge HehaspreviouslytaughtatthePonti ciaUniversityCatólicaChileandheldvisitingpositions attheKelloggInstituteforInternationalStudiesandWarwickUniversity.Dr.Schulzisaco-investigator inaprojectfundedbytheUKArtsandHumanitiesResearchCouncilon“LatinAmericaandtheperipheral originsofnineteenth-centuryinternational order”(2021–2025) Hisresearchontheinternational relationsofLatinAmericanstateshasappearedinthe European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly,and Latin American Politics and Society, amongotheroutlets Heholdsa DPhilfromNu eldCollege,UniversityofOxford
AndréaSlemianisAssociateProfessoratFederalUniversityofSãoPaulo(UNIFESP)HistoryDepartment, whereshehastaughtColonialHistorysince2011 HerresearchinterestsareinLatinAmericanjudicial culturebetweentheeighteenthandnineteenthcenturies,withanemphasisoncourtsandcourt proceedingsinacomparativekey ShehasalsowrittenabouttheindependenceprocessandstatebuildinginAmerica,particularlyinBrazil ShewasVisitingProfessorat Universitat Jaume I (Castellónde laPlana,Spain),at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo do Mexico (ITAM,Mexico),atUniveristéToulouseJeanJaurès/FRAMESPA,CampusMirail(France),attheUniversityofTexas(Austin),andatUniversidaddel PaísVasco(Spain).Sheisco-editorof Jurisdicciones, soberanías, administraciones. Con guración de los espacios políticos em la construcción de los Estados nacionales en Iberoamérica withAlejandroAgüeroand RafaelDiego-Fernandez,and De las independencias iberoamericanas a los estados nacionales (1810-1850): 200 años de historia withIvanaFrasquet.Sheiscurrentlyeditor-in-chiefofthejournal Revista Brasileira de História
NataliaSobrevillaPereaisProfessorofLatinAmericanHistoryattheUniversityofKent.Sheobtainedher PhDattheUniversityofLondon,hasbeenavisitingfellowattheJohnCarterBrownLibrary,andheld grantsfromtheBritishAcademy,theBritishLibrary,theLeverhulmeTrust,andtheAlexandervon HumboldtFoundation.Shehaspublished The Caudillo of the Andes Andrés de Santa Cruz.Sheisthecoeditorof The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World, The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812 Between2015and2018sheledaninternationalnetworkofscholarsresearchingthe ideaofnationandthewarsofindependence,fundedbytheLeverhulmeTrust.Shehaspublished extensivelyonthecreationofthestateinPeru,focusingonelections,constitutions,andtheimportance ofthearmedforces.Sheiscurrently nalizingabookonthearmedforcesandthecreationofthe Peruvianstateinthenineteenthcentury
MarcelaTernavasioisProfessorofHistoryattheUniversidadNacionaldeRosario,Researcherofthe CONICET,teachesinthegraduateHistoryprogramattheUniversidadTorcuatoDiTella,Argentina,andis amemberoftheNationalAcademyofHistory Sheistheauthorof Candidata a la Corona La infanta Carlota Joaquina de Borbón en el laberinto de las revoluciones hispanoamericanas; Historia de la Argentina, 1806-1852; Gobernar la revolución Poderes en disputa en el Río de la Plata, 1810-1816; La revolución del voto Política y elecciones en Buenos Aires, 1810-1852,andeditorof Historia de la provincia de Buenos Aires De la organización provincial a la federalización de Buenos Aires 1821-1880 Vol.3; El pensamiento de los federales; La correspondencia de Juan Manuel de Rosas; Bicentenario de la Independencia Tucumán 1816-2016;andcoeditorof El laboratorio constitucional Iberoamericano: 1807/ 1808-1830; Historia de las elecciones en la Argentina 1805-2011;and Halperin Donghi y sus mundos.Hercurrentresearchfocusesontheintersections betweenpoliticsanddiplomacyintheIberianworldduringtherevolutionsofindependenceand restoration.
EduardoZimmermannreceivedalawdegreefromtheUniversityofBuenosAiresandaDPhilinModern HistoryfromtheUniversityofOxford HehasbeenaJuniorResearchFellowattheInstituteofLatin AmericanStudies,UniversityofLondon;aVisitingFellowattheKelloggInstitute,UniversityofNotre Dame;aVisitingProfessorattheDepartmentofHistory,ParisI,Panthéon-Sorbonne;andEdward LarocqueTinkerVisitingProfessoratColumbiaUniversity.Hewasawardedthe Premio Ensayo Histórico La Nación 120 Aniversario,BuenosAires,andisafellowoftheArgentineNationalAcademyofHistory.Heis currentlyAssociateProfessoratUniversidaddeSanAndrés,BuenosAires Hisresearchfocuseson nineteenth-andtwentieth-centuryLatinAmericanhistory,particularlyonstate-buildingprocesses, legalandpoliticalhistory,andthehistoryofpoliticalthought Amonghispublicationsarethefollowing books: Los liberales reformistas La cuestión social en la Argentina, 1890-1916;(ed ), Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Latin America;(co-ed.), Los saberes del estado; Las prácticas del estado;and Las fuerzas de guerra en la construcción del estado América Latina, siglo XIX
1
The Project and the Setting
Joanna Innes
The Project and the Book
This book looks at the re-imagining of democracy, in Latin America and the Caribbean, between the later eighteenth and later nineteenth centuries. By “re-imagining” we mean the process of reconceptualizing the ancient word demokratia (Greek) or democratia (medieval Latin) so as to frame thinking about the modern world. That process unfolded across Europe and both Americas over broadly the same time period, though with different inflection points. In all of these places, the ancient word was known and had achieved some, if limited, currency in modern vernaculars before it was put to vigorous and urgent new use in our period, against a background of revolution, war, and more or less radical change in the institutions and practices of government.
These processes shared some common features across this trans-oceanic space, and there was much cross-referencing as people in each place were exposed to information about experiences undergone and discourses and interpretations developed elsewhere. But experiences differed from place to place, and patterns in the use of the word also differed—and differed all the more as the word was applied to characterize or interpret differing circumstances and accordingly acquired local baggage. This being so, tracing the history of the word in this important transitional phase of its re-imagining has the potential to enrich and complicate our ideas about what “democracy” might mean. It also has the potential to provide a comparative perspective on the development of political cultures, and insight into interactions between these cultures, within at least the more European or Europeanized parts of this huge, heterogeneous cultural space.
In two previous collective volumes, we assembled international teams of contributors to explore the “re-imagining” process as it unfolded across the North Atlantic (in the United States, France, Britain and, Ireland) and the
Joanna Innes, The Project and the Setting In: Re-imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780–1870
Mediterranean (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and the Ottoman world).1
In this volume we turn our attention to Latin America and the Caribbean, exploring what was common and what was idiosyncratic and particular in the re-imagining of democracy within the region, as between one polity and another and as between the region and elsewhere. We also explore how ways of deploying and understanding the term were shaped by—and sometimes employed to try to shape—understandings in other parts of the world. It is important to our story that the Americas, including Caribbean islands, were, from the sixteenth century, occupied and made subject to sovereignty claims by European states, because it was Europeans who brought the word “democracy” to the region, even if they initially had little use for it. As elsewhere, it was at first a learned or at least bookish word. When it was more adventurously taken up, sometimes at the end of the eighteenth and more often in the early nineteenth century, it was quite often employed to challenge colonial regimes. It was taken up by locals trying to imagine new and more inclusive social systems, or new forms through which independent states could be governed (though these commentators were often initially skeptical, or at the very least tentative about whether “democracy” could really be the answer to that). Later, the word won wider acceptance as a way of characterizing new states, but it was also often deployed to challenge the achievements of those states or of colonial regimes where these regimes survived (mostly on the islands). When its equality dimension was stressed, it could be directed against enduring social or racial hierarchies and exclusions. As the word was used to do new kinds of work, it was pushed or passed on to new audiences, who in turn sometimes put it to further new use. Nonetheless, it does not seem, even at the end of our period, to have become a key word in the lexicon of the marginal. Rather, research to date suggests that it continued to be a word more often used about than by “the people.” Moreover, it remained an ambiguous term, one that could be used to disparage. People in the region could be said to be capable of sustaining only a barbarous and turbulent form of democracy (though it should be stressed that the viability of democracy as a political form, at least in the current state of society, also continued to be debated in Europe).
This chapter has three main objects. First it aims to do what its opening paragraphs have already begun to do, that is, to introduce the larger project to which the book contributes. Second, it explains the plan of this book.
1 Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions; Re-imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean
Third, it provides a quick sketch of the region and its history through this period—for the benefit of specialists, inasmuch as they do not usually work on the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean, but even more for the benefit of those who are interested in the history of democracy but know little about the context in which it was re-imagined here.
The Project
Interest in writing the history of democracy has grown in recent years, but there is no agreed way of approaching the task.2 Until recently historians, wary of anachronism, rarely wrote histories of democracy except in relation to times and places where the word clearly had a central role in political self-understanding: chiefly ancient Greece, the United States, Europe from the later nineteenth century, and some other parts of the world (for example India and Latin America) from the twentieth century. When R.R. Palmer wrote a two-volume history of the “age of democratic revolutions” in 1959 (meaning by this the era of the American and French revolutions), he was criticized for anachronism. He responded by writing one of the first articles to try to chart uses of the word and its cognates, showing that although it was not among the most-used political words in the era of the French Revolution, and it was not always employed in ways we might find familiar today, nonetheless it was used to assess and to try to influence what was happening.3 It is certainly possible to construct extended histories of practices and ideas that we now think of as defining democracy: thus histories of popular participation, of representative government, of universal suffrage, or of the principle that all men or all people are equal. But if the object is to write a history of “democracy” specifically, our view is that that must entail paying attention to the word and how the word was used—and we accordingly make it central to our program of enquiry.4 This is because there is no one way of
2 Eugenio Biagini, ed., A Cultural History of Democracy, 6 vols. (London, 2021); Marku Peltonen, ed., The Cambridge History of Democracy, 3 vols. (Cambridge, in preparation).
3 R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions: A Political History of Europe and America, 17601800, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1959; new edn. Princeton, 2014); R.R. Palmer, “Notes on the Use of the Word ‘Democracy’ 1789-1799,” Political Science Quarterly 68, no. 2 (1953): 203–26.
4 Other studies emphasizing the word include Jens Andreas Christophersen, The Meaning of “Democracy” as Used in European Ideologies from the French to the Russian Revolution. An Historical Study in Political Language (Oslo, 1966); Francis Dupuis-Déri, Démocratie: histoire politique d’un mot aux Etats-Unis et en France (Montreal, 2013); Jussi Kurunmäki, Jeppe Nevers, and Henk te Velde, eds., Democracy in Modern Europe: A Conceptual History (New York, 2018).
imagining what “democracy” consists in even now, and it seems arbitrary to choose one among other contemporary definitions and use it to characterize things in the past (which might rule out cases in which elections were indirect, or where women did not have the vote, or where slavery was tolerated). If we want to avoid anachronism and teleology, then we need to pay attention to how people configured things at the time and place under study; we need to understand the challenges they saw themselves as facing and how they tried to meet them. Democracy was not as frequently invoked in our period as it would come to be in later centuries. Still, our research has provided ample evidence to support Palmer’s claim that it was among the words that people used to try to make sense of changing and confusing times, and the spin they gave it continues in some ways to shape its trajectory. Pursuing the early history of its application to modern settings has the potential to shed broader light on this stretch of the past, and thereby on an interesting section of the zig-zag route which links past to present.
Our choice to follow the word “democracy” does admittedly have some odd and some limiting effects. Since the word has been used to characterize different things in different times, an effect of focusing on it is that we do not consistently explore the same thing. Moreover, limits to who used the word and about what—especially pronounced at the start, but also evident at the end of our period—tend to narrow one’s field of vision. We try to offset inconsistency of focus and narrowing of vision by offering broad characterizations of the political and social context in which the word was employed. In any case, what ultimately interests us is not how the word’s meanings changed as a topic in its own right, but rather how and why these changes came about, and what people were trying to do when they used the word in new ways— so that the history of the word also becomes a history of aspirations and achievements, of political cultures in the making. Still, we have to concede that adopting this approach sheds more light on some people’s experiences and aspirations than on others’, even when we identify its wider dissemination as an important and interesting part of the story.
It is probably helpful at this point to recap some of the findings of our previous volumes. Across all the regions we have studied so far, the word’s initial associations were predominantly negative. It could be used neutrally, to characterize a particular way of organizing state power and placing it in the hands of the many rather than in one or few—though even in that context it had a bad reputation. Democracies were typically represented as unstable, as prone to lurch toward either anarchy or tyranny. Moreover, the word was
often used in ways colored by ancient history to designate a form of political culture or set of behaviors associated with the gathering of crowds or mobs, speechifying by demagogues, and dramatic, erratic political mood swings— akin to phenomena that are now sometimes termed “populism.” Even in the United States, sometimes imagined to have been born democratic during the era of the revolution and the making of the federal constitution, uses of the word that have been documented were mainly negative. In the 1790s some US political actors used it more positively, but at that time it designated a contentious set of political values. Only from 1800 did it win wider acceptance there—though it retained partisan resonances, and these grew stronger with the rise of the Democratic Party.5
Not only in America but also in Europe, from the 1830s the term was more commonly given a positive spin.6 This was partly because representative institutions increasingly won acceptance but also because, whereas once these institutions had been contrasted with tumultuous “democracy,” increasingly they were conceptualized as embodying it, as incarnating “representative democracy.” That renaming was two-edged. On the one hand, a striking shift was involved in any form of “democracy” winning widespread recognition as a possible and perhaps even inevitable feature of the modern world; on the other hand, what was most strongly endorsed was an emphatically bounded version of democracy. In the spirit of boundary-setting, people were told not to aim at anything like “pure democracy” or any form of direct action, but rather to channel their views through their representatives. Still, attempts to deny the word alternative meanings failed. Democracy as representation always remained (and remains) vulnerable to the charge that it is not representative enough, or not democratic enough. So the word remained ambiguous in its implications. It could be, as it still is, employed to legitimate and celebrate representative government—but it has also always had the potential to fuel challenges to any regime.
In turning our attention to Latin America and the Caribbean, we turn to a part of the world in which usage tracked broadly the same course, but with key differences. Differences sprang from the timing and character of struggles for independence, the character of the regimes established or sustained and adapted, and the social and cultural settings within which governments
5 Seth Cotlar, “Languages of Democracy in America from the Revolution to the Election of 1800,” in Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions, 13–27.
6 Innes and Philp, “ ‘Democracy’ from Book to Life.”
operated. Central-state organs in the region often had little purchase on outlying provinces; even in small Caribbean islands, in some districts power was ceded to runaway slaves and their descendants, “maroons.” Societies were characteristically ethnically mixed and culturally divided.
Political experiences in the region during our period were diverse. The most obvious divide lay between states which became independent and those which remained colonies of European metropoles. All mainland states and the island of Hispaniola (Haiti/Dominican Republic) fell into the first category; most islands and some slivers of the Caribbean coast fell into the second. The first set of places provided more obvious opportunities for the word “democracy” to find purchase—though (as we shall see) this does not imply that the term was always embraced at the start, or consistently thereafter; nor did any single understanding of it consistently hold sway. In those places that remained colonies, the term fit less well with prevailing circumstances, yet nonetheless, as it became increasingly a talking point elsewhere in Europe and the Americas, it entered local discourse and found local applications, though possibly mostly by way of challenge to the status quo.
Observers in the United States and in Europe (as Carsten Schulz and Mark Petersen explain in Chapter 10) recognized the new republics of this region as sites of democratic experiment, in fact the world’s largest contiguous cluster of such sites. Yet they also often saw them as revealing the difficulties of the form—because their regimes enjoyed uneven success in facing down challenges (often in the form of armed insurgencies or secessions), and, when challenges were faced down, that was often by ramping up executive power. Critical accounts which highlighted turbulence and instability frequently also entailed racial or religious disparagement: Latin Americans and Caribbeans were said to be too ethnically mixed, or not “white” enough to make democracy work or, alternatively or additionally, too Catholic.
Yet the pattern on the ground was variegated. Furthermore, we need to pause and consider what comparators we are applying if we judge the region’s experience to have been peculiarly disheartening. Republics elsewhere experienced similar troubles, including Switzerland (with its Sonderbund War, 1844) and the United States, with its often-contested processes of internal regulation and expansion and, at the end of our period, its own Civil War. France opted for kings and emperors to bring stability through much of the nineteenth century but still experienced a succession of revolutions and coups. Perhaps such problems were endemic to contemporary states, and the spread of democratic values at most exacerbated them.
Some recent historians have been more upbeat about Latin American experience at this time, stressing the region’s pioneering role in the democratic experiment (or liberal experiment, or republican experiment—different commentators press different values and descriptions to the fore).7 We broadly endorse this perspective. Large parts of our region saw strikingly daring attempts to instantiate new forms of the ancient mode “democracy” in challenging modern environments. In this region, this venture usually entailed incorporating into formal politics populations that were both scattered and diverse—meaning, among other things, diverse in their ethnic origins, which some European commentators saw as inherently risky.8 Many of the reasons why such experiments were undertaken were pragmatic. They arose from the exigencies of war and from the need to establish and give legitimacy to new institutions of government. But they were also clearly influenced by political ideas that, if not wholly new, had at the very least been invigorated and given new twists by recent developments in Europe and other parts of the Americas, under similar exigencies. In all these experiments there was also an element of idealism (in some interpretations of the time, and since, foolhardy idealism).
Latin American and Caribbean experiments at this time certainly underlined the inherent difficulty of “democratic” enterprise. If government is believed to be bound to give force to the wishes of the people, then it is always in principle open to challenge. It can always be delegitimized by discontent, and discontent can be cultivated and exploited by the ambitious. Those problems are intrinsic to any approach to governance that aims to count all people as equal and give them a voice in how they are ruled. These problems manifest themselves in different ways in different times and places, but—as even some of the most “advanced” states have rediscovered in recent decades—they never go away. During the period under study here, some people came to think that “democracy,” for all its problems, was the only viable form of government in the modern world. We may think that is true. Yet, insofar as democracy gives voice to the “people,” that inevitably entails channeling tensions and contradictions, so will never guarantee an easy ride.
7 Hilda Sabato, Republics of the New World: The Revolutionary Political Experiment in NineteenthCentury Latin America (Princeton, NJ, 2018); James E. Sanders, The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Durham, NC, 2014).
8 Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005), for Tocqueville on political options for Algeria.
Plan of the Book
Though adopting the same overall approach, different books in our series have varied in plan. The plan of this book reflects our desire to make it accessible to, among others, readers who are interested in the history of democracy but have little knowledge of the regional context. Accordingly, following two introductory chapters (this, and another focusing more particularly on language), we offer a series of thematic chapters that explore topics we judge important because of the part they played in shaping uses of the word “democracy,” We hope that specialists will also find these surveys useful, and suggestive in relation to our main concern.
The thematic chapters explore successively colonial inheritances, the processes by which new independent states were formed, patterns of ethnic diversity, and how ethnic relations were reframed over the period. Also explored are the local uses made of the (then quite innovative) device of the state (or provincial) “constitution,” and the nature of urban and other political cultures that developed in interaction with new governmental and political institutions. We had hoped to include a chapter on church and religion— on the ways in which religious institutions and practices shaped political life and, in some places, became major objects of contention—but the pandemic intervened and frustrated our efforts. Two final thematic chapters explore the role assigned to education in fitting populations for the challenges of life in the new states, and external perceptions of Latin American and Caribbean democracy.
The thematic chapters focus above all on the settings in which talk of democracy developed. But along the way, many of them also shed light on how “democracy” and associated terms were employed: what baggage they carried, what subjects they were used to talk about, and what work they were used to do. In Chapter 4, Dexnell Peters looks at Caribbean islands which remained colonies of France or Britain and explores briefly how “democracy” made its appearance in local political vocabularies, mainly from the mid-nineteenth century, in what might be thought to have been unpromising settings. In Chapter 7, José Antonio Aguilar Rivera and Eduardo Zimmerman among other things look at ways in which “democracy” figured in constitutions and constitutional debates. Paula Alonso and Marcela Ternavasio, in Chapter 8, show how changes in political cultures in Argentina and Peru aligned with changes in talk about “democracy.” In Chapter 9, Nicola Miller shows that national education projects were sometimes conceptualized as serving
“democratic” ends. Mark Petersen and Carsten Schulz explore US and European discourses about Latin American and Caribbean “democracy” in Chapter 10.
Language moves to the fore in the final six chapters, which build upon but aim to move beyond previous work by providing sketches of the word’s use in a variety of local settings. Emmanuel Lachaud looks at the word’s history in Hispaniola: that is, in Saint Domingue/Haiti and Santo Domingo/ the Dominican Republic. Andrea Slemian looks at imperial Brazil, and Luis Daniel Perrone looks at Venezuela—his chapter focuses especially on how democracy was and was not invoked in discussions of slavery and racial issues, in a state where many inhabitants were of African descent. Guy Thomson in Chapter 13 looks at how the language of democracy figured as a vehicle for social as well as political criticism in Mexico, and in Chapters 15 and 16 respectively, Eduardo Posada-Carbó and Juan Luis Ossa explore its relatively early and widespread adoption in two of the region’s more stable and lively representation-based political cultures.
Overview of the Region
This introduction has already stressed the heterogeneity of the region that this book explores. We aim now to enlarge on that assertion, to encourage specialists to keep in view the region as a whole, and to begin to orient readers with little prior knowledge of these places and their histories.9
The region that we are concerned with stretched down the North American west coast, from San Francisco southward through Central and South America toward its southernmost part, Patagonia, and eastward to the Caribbean islands as they arced from Cuba down to Trinidad, through the Greater Antilles—that is, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti and Santo Domingo) and Puerto Rico—and then the Lesser Antilles, the smaller, mainly British and French Leeward and Windward Islands.
At the start of our period, the vast bulk of this land was (at least according to European conceptions) subject to the crown of Spain. Mainland Spanish territories were organized into four viceroyalties: New Spain (which included Central America); New Granada (which included modern Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela); Peru (which included modern Chile), and
9 See Further Reading for general studies which inform this account.
the Rio de La Plata or River Plate (which included modern Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina). This last viceroyalty was a late foundation, dating only from 1776. Spain also held several of the larger Caribbean islands: Cuba, the Santo Domingo section of Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. Excepting only a chunk of coast called Guiana (divided among the Dutch, the British, and the French), the remaining colonized chunk of the South American mainland was Portugal’s Brazil. Spain’s viceroyalties represented one jurisdictional geography, but one that sat over or overlapped with others—captaincies within viceroyalties (like Chile within Peru) and audiencias, areas subject to the jurisdiction of a single court. The post-colonial political geography that ultimately emerged roughly followed the lines of these smaller units. Portugal’s Brazil, for its part, from 1774 constituted a single viceroyalty, but it was divided into captaincies which, after the formation of a separate Brazilian kingdom, morphed into or were redistricted to form around twenty provinces.
Anthony McFarlane in Chapter 3 explains how Iberian lands were governed—at the top level, by people sent out from metropoles. These were highly unequal societies, with overlapping (but not identical) governing and landowning elites, some of whom had noble titles. He also emphasizes the importance of cities as central nodes in networks of government and as powerful entities in their own right, with some self-governing capacity. It was in such cities that many of the more ethnically and culturally European members of these societies lived. Major cities in Spanish (though not Portuguese) America had their own universities, so were equipped to reproduce local professional elites.
Among other powers with footholds in the Caribbean, we concern ourselves here only with the most powerful, the French and the British. France’s largest island was Saint Domingue (the western part of Hispaniola); Britain’s was Jamaica. Dexnell Peters in Chapter 4 aims to give a general picture of patterns of French and British rule. Insofar as he pays attention to particular places, these are those large islands and, among the Lesser Antilles, French Martinique and Guadeloupe, and British Barbados (a small island with a particularly successful plantation economy) together with Trinidad, a late British acquisition lying at the southern end of the Antillean arc just off the Venezuelan coast. Like Spain and Portugal, France and Britain sent governors from the metropole. Major landowners were often absentees, running their plantations through managers, but some family members moved back and forth between colony and metropole, and there were also long-term
European settlers, who sometimes played a part in the islands’ government (some but not all British islands had elected legislatures).
All in all, this was an enormous region with hugely varied topography and climatic conditions, population mixes and economies, and, already in the colonial period, systems of rule.
The population of Spanish (including Spanish island) territories at the start of our period was perhaps in the region of 10 million, on the same order as Spain. The population of Brazil, at around 4 million, was at least half as much again as that of Portugal. British and French metropolitan populations, by contrast, dwarfed those of their colonies. Britain (still more, Britain and Ireland) had a population several times that of all British colonies in North America and the Caribbean combined (even if we include those North American colonies which, in 1780, were in the process of asserting their independence). France, with its larger population—over 25 million in 1780— had a still more decisive lead. Considering all the Caribbean islands together, the four largest had more than one million inhabitants among them (France’s Saint Domingue being the most populous); the smaller islands totaled something less.10
Europeans, and mainly European “creoles” (of European descent, but locally born), were generally a minority across this space, though least so in cities and some coastal regions. But mixes varied from place to place. Two of Spain’s viceroyalties, New Spain and Peru, had once been home to major indigenous civilizations, and more or less assimilated indigenous people continued to bulk large within their populations. Enslaved Africans were particularly numerous around tropical coasts suitable for plantation agriculture: thus in New Spain, New Granada, Brazil, and above all on the islands. But enslaved people, who formed vast majorities on the most successful plantation colonies—Saint Domingue, Barbados—were less numerous in others: thus in the early years in Cuba, Santo Domingo, Dominica (which the British acquired from the French in the Seven Years War), and Dutch Trinidad (subsequently acquired by the British). In some places—Caribbean New Granada, Saint Domingue, Trinidad—there were substantial free black or mixed Afro-European (“mulatto”) populations; in others (Cuba, Jamaica, Barbados) initially less so. One effect of these varying mixes was that
10 I have relied on Leslie Bethell ed. Cambridge History of Latin America Vol. 2, Part I, “Population”, 1–64, for Spanish and Portuguese America; Watts, The West Indies, chap. 7–8, 10 for other parts of the Caribbean.
attitudes to the indigenous heritage varied. In Mexico, an emerging nationalism claimed Aztec roots; there was little of this in the River Plate or on the islands, where the indigenous, insofar as they survived, were marginalized. Another effect was that cultures of privilege and the contestation of privilege took different forms in different places. Peru faced a major rebellion under indigenous leadership, the so-called Tupac Amaru rebellion, in 1780–1782. In Saint Domingue, the free mulatto population was instrumental in destabilizing the political and social order in the early years of the French Revolution, but then faced a more radical challenge from insurgent slaves.
Colonial economies were in important part export-oriented, with plantation crops, especially sugar, and minerals being key exports—the latter figuring especially prominently in the economies of New Spain, Peru, and Brazil. In mainland colonies there was also much small, sometime subsistence, farming; stock-raising (favored on poor land); and some manufacture, especially of textiles, catering to domestic, more or less local markets. Regions that had once been home to complex and buoyant indigenous civilizations sometimes had lots of villages, providing a focus for local social, cultural, and some form of political life. To draw just one contrast, rural life in Chile’s extended central valley focused on haciendas and associated peasant-worker communities. Caribbean island economies were export-oriented to varying degrees. They often depended for strategic imports (such as timber) and manufactures (such as cloth) on imports mediated by their metropoles. They also featured small farming. Many islands, along with mainland regions with significant slave populations such as New Granada and Brazil, featured “maroon” communities of escaped slaves, often located in relatively inaccessible and perhaps forested regions, supporting themselves by farming, foraging, and hunting.
In the course of our period, the region underwent two major institutional transformations affecting different parts of it in different ways. The first followed from the destabilization of the Iberian monarchies, initially as a result of Napoleon’s initiatives; the second from abolitions of slave trades and slave statuses. The second development energized competitive growth in remaining slave economies such that, though slavery declined overall, it also changed its geography. These twin transformations helped to promote, and were conditioned by, other political, economic, social, and cultural changes. Both Anthony McFarlane (Chapter 3) and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea (Chapter 5) explain that the Napoleonic push to dominate the Iberian peninsula from 1807 to 1808 precipitated massive turbulence in the
