Historians of Spanish America tend to ignore mid and late nineteenth-century Spanish politics, since by the 1830s most of the mainland had achieved effective independence. While it is common knowledge that Carlos IV and Ferdinand VII abdicated following Napoleon’s invasion in 1808, Spain’s subsequent civil wars, governments, and constitutional crises generally interest only scholars of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Yet, the pair of new books by José María Portillo Valdés on the Atlantic dimensions of Spain’s crisis in monarchy and governance suggests that there might be reason to continue to look to both sides of the Atlantic beyond 1825. An extended United States sojourn from 2000 to 2004 led Portillo Valdés, a historian of Spanish constitutionalism, to a surprisingly understudied research agenda. He explores the relations between the constitutionalism of the Spanish Cortes of 1810, in which both peninsular Spain and Spanish America were direct participants, and subsequent “federalist” or...

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