Scott Eastman – författare

Independence and Nation-Building in Latin America: Race and Identity in the Crucible of War reconceptualizes the history of the break-up of colonial empires in Spanish and Portuguese America. In doing so, the authors critically examine competing interpretations and bring to light the most recent scholarship on social, cultural, and political aspects of the period.Did American rebels clearly push for independence, or did others truly advocate autonomy within weakened monarchical systems? Rather than glorify rebellions and "patriots," the authors begin by emphasizing patterns of popular loyalism in the midst of a fracturing Spanish state. In contrast, a slave-based economy and a relocated imperial court provided for relative stability in Portuguese Brazil. Chapters pay attention to the competing claims of a variety of social and political figures at the time across the variegated regions of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Furthermore, while elections and the rise of a new political culture are explored in some depth, questions are raised over whether or not a new liberal consensus had taken hold. Through translated primary sources and cogent analysis, the text provides an update to conventional accounts that focus on politics, the military, and an older paradigm of Creole-peninsular friction and division. Previously marginalized actors, from Indigenous peoples to free people of color, often take center-stage.This concise and accessible text will appeal to scholars, students, and all those interested in Latin American History and Revolutionary History.

Independence and Nation-Building in Latin America: Race and Identity in the Crucible of War reconceptualizes the history of the break-up of colonial empires in Spanish and Portuguese America. In doing so, the authors critically examine competing interpretations and bring to light the most recent scholarship on social, cultural, and political aspects of the period.Did American rebels clearly push for independence, or did others truly advocate autonomy within weakened monarchical systems? Rather than glorify rebellions and "patriots," the authors begin by emphasizing patterns of popular loyalism in the midst of a fracturing Spanish state. In contrast, a slave-based economy and a relocated imperial court provided for relative stability in Portuguese Brazil. Chapters pay attention to the competing claims of a variety of social and political figures at the time across the variegated regions of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Furthermore, while elections and the rise of a new political culture are explored in some depth, questions are raised over whether or not a new liberal consensus had taken hold. Through translated primary sources and cogent analysis, the text provides an update to conventional accounts that focus on politics, the military, and an older paradigm of Creole-peninsular friction and division. Previously marginalized actors, from Indigenous peoples to free people of color, often take center-stage.This concise and accessible text will appeal to scholars, students, and all those interested in Latin American History and Revolutionary History.

In March 1812, while Napoleon’s brother Joseph sat on the throne of Spain and the armies of France occupied much of the country, legislators elected from Spain and its overseas territories met in the Andalusian city of Cádiz. There, as the cornerstone of a government in exile, they drafted and adopted the first liberal constitution in the Hispanic world, a document that became known as the Cádiz Constitution of 1812.The 1812 Constitution was extremely influential in and beyond Europe, and this collection of essays explores how its enduring legacy not only shaped the history of state-building, elections, and municipal governance in Iberian America, but also affected national identities and citizenship as well as the development of race and gender in the region.A bold blueprint for governing a global, heterogeneous monarchy, the Constitution represented a rupture with Spain’s Antiguo Régimen (Old Regime) in numerous ways - in the limits it placed on the previously autocratic Bourbon monarchs, in the admission to its governing bodies of deputies from Spain’s American viceroyalties as equals, and in its framers’ vociferous debate over the status of castas (those of mixed ancestry) and slaves. The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World covers these issues and adopts a transatlantic perspective that recovers the voices of those who created a vibrant political culture accessible to commoners and elite alike.The bicentenary of the Constitution of 1812 offers scholars an excellent moment to reexamine the form and role of constitutions across the Spanish-speaking world. Constitutionalism remains a topic of intense debate in Latin America, while contemporary Spain itself continues to seek ways to balance a strong central government with centripetal forces in its regions, notably the Basque and Catalan provinces. The multifaceted essays compiled here by Scott Eastman and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea both shed new light on the early, liberal Hispanic societies and show how the legacies of those societies shape modern Spain and Latin America.

A Missionary Nation focuses on Spain’s crusade to resurrect its empire, beginning with the so-called War of Africa. Fought in Morocco between 1859 and 1860, the campaign involved more than forty-five thousand troops and led to a long-lasting Spanish engagement in North Africa. With popular support, the government backed French invasions of Indochina and Mexico, and many veteran soldiers from the African war were reenlisted in the brutal and protracted conflict following the reannexation of the Dominican Republic in 1861. In addition, expeditions to West Africa built a colonial presence in and around the island of Fernando Po.Few works in English have examined the impact of these nineteenth-century imperial ventures on Spanish identity, notions of race, and culture. Agents of empire-from journalists and diplomats to soldiers, spies, and clerics-took up the mantle of the “civilizing mission” and pushed back against those who resisted militarized occupations. In turn, a gendered, racialized rhetoric became a linchpin of Spain’s growing involvement in North Africa and the Caribbean in the 1850s and 1860s.A Missionary Nation interrogates the legacy of Hispanic identities from multiple axes, as former colonies were annexed and others were occupied, tying together strands of European, Mediterranean, and Atlantic histories in the second age of global imperialism. It challenges the prevailing notion that secular ideologies alone informed imperial narratives in Europe. Liberal Spain attempted to reconstruct its great empire of old, but the entangled issues of nationalism, race, and religion frustrated its efforts.