Ambitious yet curiously circumscribed, Jeremy Adelman’s study of the breakdown of the Spanish and Portuguese empires along the Caribbean and Atlantic seaboards falls squarely within the increasingly established consensus. Independence was not inevitable and the empires contained no budding nations striving to emancipate themselves; rather, the crises of 1808 (themselves the product of intensifying imperial rivalries that had strained imperial orders since the eighteenth century) set in motion a complex process of imperial breakdown that eventually forced redefinitions of sovereignty. The revolution of independence in Spanish America only came in response to Fernando VII’s clumsy counterrevolution after his 1814 restoration, while Portuguese America went through analogous processes slightly later.
For Adelman, sovereignty is characterized by “the notion that people who live in a civil society abide by rules to which all subjects are bound,” and these rules “extend to the defensible territorial boundaries of their political communities” (pp. 1 –...
