Peggy Liss’s book has a deceptive title. It is in fact an examination of the roots of the multiple Latin American independence movements of the beginning of the nineteenth century in terms of the impact on them of developments—both economic and intellectual—in the United States, Great Britain, and Spain. It is a synthetic work with two main theses.
One is that the “material” and “ideational” elements of revolutions are equally important, and that the key is in their “interplay” (p. 222). For Liss, the eighteenth century was a kind of watershed in both spheres, which accounts for the fact that it culminated in multiple revolutions. It would have been nice if she had shown therefore that the French Revolution was also an outcome of the same general developments, but this was outside her purview. We see that revolution in this story only as a creator of further ideational change elsewhere.
The second thesis is that the North American and Latin American revolutions “had more in common, and more connections, than has been assumed” (p. 229). The later divergence of their two histories was not, for Liss, something there ah initio but developed only in the 1800s. The period from 1713 to 1826 was the highpoint, to the contrary, of an “accord” in “the outlook of entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and patriots . . . throughout the Atlantic world” (p. 239). She makes a passing reference to a parallel with the divergence between western and eastern Europe in early modern times. The cause of the divergence in the Americas lies in the fact that “the birth of the American nations began within a multinational network and within an international trading system” (p. 239). Presumably, the same phenomenon was true of early modern Europe. I certainly believe so.
The main element missing in Liss’s panoramic survey of ideas and economic trends is France, la grande oubliée. This is a pity, since I think its inclusion could have both strengthened and refined Liss’s case. It is hard to deal adequately with the interaction of Britain and Spain in the eighteenth century without mentioning the Due de Choiseul or the Pacte de famille, neither of which appears in the index. And I personally believe the creation of Haiti deserves more space than Liss accords it in this story. But this is in some sense quibbling, given the fact that Liss has already integrated so much.
I turned to John Clark’s book on La Rochelle with the hope that it would fill this lacuna and complete the picture. Alas, this was not to be. Clark has dumped the archives on us. If one wants to know what the eighteenth century looked like in the eyes of the armateurs of La Rochelle—it was a “most trying time” (p. 139)—this book will tell you. And a useful corrective it is—in the field of more narrowly French history. It turns out that what angered the armateurs about French government policy was not that the government interfered too much, but that it interfered too little, not that it taxed too heavily but that it did not tax enough. We often forget that one of the principal reasons Great Britain won its great eighteenth-century battle with France was because the British state was stronger (especially internally) and more effectively protectionist than either the Ancien Régime or its revolutionary-Napoleonic successors.
This last fact is important in writing the history of the American revolutions. In the long run, Great Britain could profit from both the North American and the Latin American revolutions because it became the hegemonic power of the world-system, and it did not do this by espousing Adam Smith’s doctrines: quite to the contrary, as after all Adam Smith himself knew (since he wrote The Wealth of Nations as a critique of British policy). The free-trade ideology that finally (and briefly) triumphed in 1846 was the consequence, not the cause, of British success in the world economy. And the American independences were in that sense as much a consequence as a cause of the restructuring of the world system as a whole.