One picks up a volume such as this with eager anticipation, because the history of the independence period has been a major bastion of traditional military-political narrative and has until now been little touched by the new (or even the old) social history. At the same time, French scholars are known as past masters of the vida cotidiana genre. Nor do Demélas and Saint-Geours wholly defraud these expectations in their presentation of the times, as distinct from the life, of Simón Bolívar. They offer both telling details and sound interpretations, on the basis of archival materials, travel accounts, folletería, and selective reading of recent secondary works. The treatment, though, is uneven. Specialists in the central Andes (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia) but with a pronounced side-interest in the Río de la Plata, the authors almost entirely ignore Bolívar’s Venezuelan homeland, and, despite the title, they ignore Brazil entirely. They say little about the life and work of urban artisans and middle sectors, and while they emphasize the massive entry of British goods, they do not attain the masterful overview of social and cultural influences from abroad contained in Tulio Halperín Donghi’s Aftermath of Independence. Outside the authors’ areas of expertise, there are also some questionable statements of fact.
The work nevertheless has important strengths. The authors’ thumbnail sketch of the late colonial church is exemplary, and they have rescued the Quito revolutions from the obscurity in which they are left by most general surveys of the period. Conventional military history is eschewed, but one learns what it was like to be a guerrillero in Upper Peru and even how many times, on average, one might have to fire a rifle per enemy killed. In short, this is not a comprehensive review of social life and customs or of popular culture so much as a somewhat miscellaneous collection of vignettes. On these terms, it is well worth reading.
