The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence

This collection of essays, as Marcela Echeverri and Cristina Soriano explain in their incisive introduction, “highlight[s] key questions” and seeks to “overcome inherited paradigms” in the history of Latin American independence (p. 17). While the recent bicentenary looms in the background, it is innovative engagement with the last two decades of scholarship, marked by an expansive understanding of the political and attention to the diverse social and cultural experiences that archival research has revealed, that drives the contributions. Each chapter traces the historiographies of the questions under consideration and offers an interpretive argument with a view to future inquiries. Previous surveys of Latin American independence have tended to assert a clear chronology, beginning with origins, and to deploy national or subregional frameworks that also stand in for particular paths to independence: an early independence movement in Río de la Plata, conservative independence in imperial Brazil, and so on. In contrast,...