In This Issue

This issue brings together four examples of the kind of new scholarship on the independence era that is advancing our understanding and raising new questions as we reach the two hundredth anniversary of the first declarations of local, regional, and national sovereignty within the Spanish Americas. The questions of who would rule what territory, how, and toward what ends would be fiercely disputed across the Americas over subsequent years and decades. Not surprisingly, given the history of tumultuous events and sharp local reversals, which nevertheless generated profoundly similar panoramas across time and space, debates over the degree of rupture versus continuity have been central to the historiography of the independence era. Articles in this issue offer intriguingly contradictory contributions to these debates, finding transformation alongside persistence. These studies foreground local fractures as well as transnational connections and slow evolution of idea and practice as well as rapid responses to contingencies...