The original English title of this study, The Politics of Counter-Revolution, was presumably changed to Revolución y contrarrevolución in the hope of attracting a wider audience. The change is distinctly misleading, however much any discussion of counter-revolution must involve some treatment of the revolution being countered, for the work’s main thrust and originality lie precisely in its primary focus on the royalist side of the independence struggle in the two great centers of Spanish power in America. To be sure, if an unwary popular reader does pick up the book because of its title he will soon put it down, for it is quite heavy going.
Even the academic reader might be wise to go from the brief preliminary statement, “El tema,” directly to the conclusion which is also a rather full summary, before either turning back to chapter 1 or picking and choosing among the intervening chapters on such topical themes as viceregal war finances, the attempted restoration of the Jesuits, and the vicissitudes of creole deputies to the Spanish Cortes. In most chapters, there is a tendency to slight certain kinds of background and connecting information—hence the desirability of first gaining an overview—while telling us more than we want to know about things covered in the particular documents that the author used in Mexican and Spanish, though not Peruvian, archives. Self-justificatory memorials of royalist officials are summarized repeatedly and at undue length. At the same time, the author’s mastery of collateral printed sources occasionally shows surprising lapses, as when (p. 61) he mixes the Chuquisaca and La Paz revolutions of 1809.
Despite its shortcomings, however, the book has obvious importance. Its value as a detailed work of reference is augmented by some thirteen appendixes, including tables of fiscal statistics, name lists, and useful glosses on points of controversy. The work is valuable too for its interpretation of the historical process, which gives special attention to disentangling the complex divisions among those groups that for different reasons and with varying enthusiasm opposed the insurgent forces. These divisions, as Hamnett shows, were not just between creole and peninsular, absolutist and constitutionalist, but also between geographic regions and between economic sectors, even between “old” merchants such as the leaders of the Mexico City Consulado and “new” merchants who had benefited from the Bourbon reforms. Obviously, they further weakened what was in the long run a doomed cause, and they also foreshadowed many of the interests and issues that would continue to be fought over after independence. In all this Hamnett makes few if any points that are wholly new, but he relates them to each other in a coherent and often suggestive manner.
