Morgan, Peter David; (2024) Empire and international order in Spanish American political thought during the age of revolutions, c. 1808-1830. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis approaches the anti-imperial thought of Spanish American independence through an international lens. Four semi-discrete modes of anti-imperial thought are distinguished, each loosely corresponding to a different set of political assumptions in revolutionary Spanish America. The thesis focuses on how these bodies of thought differed in the extent to which they rejected imperial hierarchy in itself, as distinct from the Spanish empire, specifically. Non-separatist critiques of imperial hierarchy by Spanish Americans inside the framework of the transatlantic Spanish Monarchy were, at times, radical in how they questioned certain intra- imperial hierarchies from an anticolonial standpoint. However, their tendency to base such arguments on an exceptionalist idea of Spanish constitutional law tended to limit the critique of empire, spatially, to the Spanish world. The pursuit of American independence from Spain, however, while requiring much more engagement with debates about international order, did not necessarily lead to a more universal critique of empire. A second mode of anti-imperial thought envisaged Spanish American independence in terms compatible with British imperial tutelage. But Spanish American separatists also developed a more rejectionist critique of empire. In a third approach, emboldened by the mobilisation of popular power in revolutionary América, it 2 was argued that all European empires were illegitimate. Often complementing this negative critique of empire tout court was a fourth approach, in which Spanish American thinkers developed a positive vision for a new international order in the Americas, to be founded upon anticolonial principles. Yet this ‘worldmaking’ project was limited spatially to the Americas. In its disavowal of the “Old World,” it explicitly foreclosed a more global confrontation with colonial empire. By approaching anti-imperial thought through an international lens, this thesis at once grasps the extent to which Spanish American critiques of imperial hierarchy could be remarkably ambitious, yet also significantly limited; a fragmented and ambiguous confrontation with empire.

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