Scholars of Mexican history who have complained for years that they did not fully understand the ten-year struggle for independence will both thank and curse Brian Hamnett for offering them answers. Hamnett’s study is by far the most significant work published on the period since Lucas Alamán, Carlos María Bustamante, José María Luis Mora, and others in the nineteenth century wrote multivolume works to establish foundations for the history of the new Mexican nation. At the same time, however, Hamnett’s work is extremely complex, detailed, and even frustrating at times in that it leaves open many questions about the real meaning of revolution and insurgency in Mexico. Hamnett departed from tradition by removing the main focus from the independence heroes to center on the regions of Puebla, Guadalajara, Michoaeán, and Guanajuato which were major theaters of operations during the conflict. It is clear that the fragmented insurgencies or revolutions of the independence period make Mexico a major case study in the general history of insurgency, counterinsurgency, and guerrilla warfare. Hamnett made an exhaustive study of these topics both to clarify his definitions and to see what lessons may be learned from comparisons with other significant insurgencies in history. While the exercise was most useful, sometimes the author became a prisoner of his approaches and definitions. The uniqueness of Mexico and its regional and human complexities frustrated some attempts to draw parallels.
Unlike many recent scholars of the period, Hamnett abandoned entirely the well-marked trails opened by Mexican historians. Employing the massive documentary sources available in Mexico City and in provincial archives, he places the independence struggles into the context of the late colonial and the early national periods. The intense localism or provincialism of the insurgency emerged as a pervading theme that often obscured the theoretical end of national independence. The use of case studies allowed Hamnett to make sense out of the intricate maze of personalities, grievances, and incidents, and to draw meaning from voluminous runs of documents that appeared to have accomplished little more than to chronicle chaos. Often, endemic social and ethnic tensions, land and water disputes, economic conditions, harvest failures, and other issues held more meaning in the regions than the cause of independence.
In Hamnett’s view, the defeats suffered by José María Morelos in 1814 left the insurgency leaderless and in an unequal strategic position against the royalist army. In part, he accepts the traditional interpretation that there was a reduction in the insurgency by 1816 when many rebel leaders accepted royal amnesty. In fact, however, royalist victories in the central provinces were offset by defeats in Veracruz Province and peripheral districts which had become permanent foci of insurgency. Even within the settled regions, the amnesty program was not as successful as its proponents wanted to believe and Hamnett accepts. Instead of ending or marginalizing the insurgency by 1817 to 1820 in the central provinces, the fragmented movement had adjusted to the nature of royalist counterinsurgency. In Veracruz Province, the royalist army experienced extreme difficulties through 1819 with insurgent forces that cut communications and severed vital communications and commerce between the interior and the coast. Even in the Bajío provinces, insurgent activities after 1816 were so widespread and organized that it is difficult to accept Hamnett’s dismissal of the rebels as mere bandits or itinerant vagrants. The disunified insurgents who had lost strategic direction after the death of Morelos regained the initiative over time through the gradual erosion and exhaustion of the government forces. Hamnett describes the emergence of de facto insurgent states or entities that had grown up within the national polity.
Hamnett downplays the existence of a major agrarian revolution coinciding with the independence period and argues that there did not appear to be major efforts by tenants and the landless to occupy or to redistribute hacienda lands. Although the evidence is fragmentary, the topic deserves more attention. As the author points out, guerrilla activity and brutal royalist counterinsurgency policies turned some provinces and districts into permanent zones of war where cultivation of the soil was impossible for years. In some insurgent territories land redistribution did take place, but in a decentralized way without a theoretical framework or major political exponents who would gain fame for enunciating specific doctrines on the subject. Tenants occupied their plots, and the landless took up subsistence farming or stockraising in the mountains and barrancas. During occasional military incursions, royalist officers were surprised to find that insurgent-occupied districts enjoyed a state of normalcy and prosperity under the rebel caciques without the former landowners and mayordomos.
By moving the focus away from the heroes and the political center in Mexico City, Hamnett has opened many new avenues for reinterpretation and future research. Mexican nationalists may regret the downgrading of Padres Miguel Hidalgo and Morelos, but in the process Mexico has gained an even more central place in the history of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Just as important, Hamnett explains the origins of many nineteenth-century developments. He has offered a ground-breaking reinterpretation of the independence period that is essential to understanding the modern history of Mexico.
