Liberalismo e independencia en la era de las revoluciones: México y el mundo hispánico

Trained as a political scientist and holding an appointment in the Centro de Estudios Internacionales at El Colegio de México but working as a historian of political ideas and a self-described historiographer, Roberto Breña has given us a volume of 18 essays with much to chew on. The essays have been modified from the forms in which they first appeared over the last few years in online journals, conference proceedings, edited volumes published in Chile, Colombia, Spain, and Germany, and several academic venues in Mexico. His central focus, as it has been for much of his scholarly career, is on the protean meanings and instantiations of liberalism: the term in its modern sense first appeared not in London, Paris, or Philadelphia but at the Cortes of Cádiz in 1810. He stresses the inseparability of political events in early nineteenth-century Spain from those in its disintegrating Spanish American empire and the...