Week 5. Nation, Sovereignty and Civil and Political Rights 

 

Did the idea of rights and human rights begin to emerge in the late-eighteenth and early- nineteenth century? How did rights develop in post-independence Latin America and how were they negotiated? How were rights related to the nation state and ideas of sovereignty?

How did Latin American elites understand citizenship during the process of state building? What systems of representation were introduced in Latin America after independence? How did indigenous groups, Afro-Latin Americans, peasants, enslaved individuals and workers participate in politics? How were tensions between group and individual rights played out? How did people claim political rights? What civil and political rights were afforded in constitutions? Were civil and political rights the only rights at stake in the issues arising? 

 

Core Reading: 

Marcela Echeverri, "Popular Royalists, Empire, and Politics in Southwestern New Granada", 1809 – 1819. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 May 2011; 91 (2): 237–269. 

Hilda Sábato. ‘On Political Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Latin America’ The American Historical Review. 106:4 (2001), 1290–1315.

Phillip Kaisary, ‘"To Break Our Chains and Form a Free People”: Race, Nation, and Haiti’s Imperial Constitution of 1805’, in Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks (eds.), Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2018.

 

Further Reading: 

Jeremy Adelman. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Catherine Andrews (2016) 'Alternatives to the constitution of Cadiz in New Spain: republicanism and the insurgent constitutional decree of Apatzingan (1814)', Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 22:3, 163-180.

Sergio Armando Gallegos Ordorica. "The Racial Legacy of the Enlightenment in Simón Bolívar's Political Thought." Critical Philosophy of Race, vol. 6 no. 2, 2018, p. 198-215. 

Manuel Barcia. The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the fight for freedom in Matanzas. Louisiana State University Press, 2012.

Manuel Barcia. West African Warfare in Bahia Cuba. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Manuel Barcia. Seeds of Insurrection: domination and resistance on Western Cuban Plantations 1808-1848. Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

Peter Blanchard. Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.

Simon Bolivar, El Libertador: Writings of Simon Bolivar, Trans Fred Fornoff, David Bushnell (ed.) Oxford University Press, 2003.

Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette (eds.) Connections after Colonialism : Europe and Latin America in the 1820s, University of Alabama Press, 2013.

Simon Collier. “Nationality, Nationalism, and Supranationalism in the Writings of Simon Bolivar.” The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 63, no. 1, 1983, pp. 37–64.

Laurent Dubois. Avengers of the New World. Harvard: Belknap Press, 2004.

Marcela Echeverri. Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780-1825. Cambridge University Press, 2016. 

Scott Eastman, and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea (eds.), The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World : The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution Of 1812. University of Alabama Press, 2015.(Especially Chapter 4 on Race in New Granada and Chapter 8 on Slavery in the US and Brazil)

Tom Farer (ed.) Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Sovereignty in the Americas. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Gargarella, Roberto. "The First Latin American Constitutions (1810–1850)." Latin American Constitutionalism, 1810-2010: The Engine Room of the Constitution. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Peter Guardino. The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850. Duke, 2005.

Brian R. Hamnett, The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770-1830. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Lynn Hunt. Inventing Human Rights. W. W. Norton, 2008.

Mallon, Florencia. Decolonizing Native Histories. Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 2012.

Eduardo Posada Carbó. Elections before democracy. the history of elections in Europe and Latin America. Basingstoke : Macmillan, 1996.

Eduardo Posada Carbó.Posada-Carbó E. (2017) "Translating the US Constitution for the Federal Cause in New Granada at the Time of Independence." In Hook D., Iglesias-Rogers G. (eds) Translations In Times of Disruption. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. 

Anthony McFarlane. War and Independence in Spanish America. Routledge, 2013.

Mirow, M. C. Latin American Constitutions: The Constitution of Cadiz and Its Legacy in Spanish America Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Paquette, Gabriel. Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, C.1770 -1850. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Mattias Rohrig Assuncao. Elite Politics and Popular Rebellion in the Construction of Post Colonial Order. The Case of Maranao, Brazil (1820-41). JLAS, 31:1 (1999), 1-38.

Sabato, Hilda. Republics of the New World. The Revolutionary Political Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Timo Schaefer. The Rise and Fall of Legal Rule in Post-Colonial Mexico 1820-1900. (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Joshua Simon. The Ideology of Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Whitney Nell Steward and John Garrison Marks (eds.) Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations. University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Camilla Townsend, “Half of my Body Free, the Other Half Enslaved: The Politics of the Slaves of Guayaquil at the End of the Colonial Era,” Colonial Latin American Review, 7:1 (1998): 105-28.

John Tutino (ed.) New Countries: capitalism, revolutions and new nations in Latin America. Durham NC; Duke University Press, 2016.

Victor Uribe Uran. “The Birth of the Public Sphere in Latin America During the Age of Revolution.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42:2, 2000. 

Richard Warren. Vagrants and Citizens: politics and the masses in Mexico City from Colony to Republic. Scholarly Resources, 2001.

 

Primary sources: 

Simon Bolivar, El Libertador: Writings of Simon Bolivar, Trans Fred Fornoff, David Bushnell (ed.) Oxford University Press, 2003.

Simon Bolivar, Address at the Congress of Angostura (1819) 

US Bill of Rights, 1789 (and the Declaration of Independence, 1776 and the Constitution of the United States)

Declaration of the Rights of Man, National Assembly of France, August 26, 1789  

Jose María Morelos, Sentiments of the Nation, Chilpancingo, 14 September 1813.

The Political Constitution of the Spanish Monarchy, 19 March 1812.

Practical Assignment Preparation: 

Take your pick of what you might be interested in thinking about for the reflecting on public history exercise: 

1 Look at this example of an online gallery. How effective is it as a piece of public history?

British Library Online Gallery: Spanish American Independence 

2 Look at the community-engaged digital history project, Gendering Latin American Independence, University of Nottingham, How effective is it as a piece of public history?

3 Look at the digital history resources, Women and Independence in Latin America, University of Nottingham 

and The Pronunciamiento in Independent Mexico, 1821-1876. How accessible are they and how easy to navigate?

Background Reading: 

Andrew Dawson, Latin America since Independence: A History with Primary Sources, 2011. (Chapter 1) 

Oxford Handbook, "Independence in Latin America"