Histories of the old empire : the Americas in the historical thought of Spain and Great Britain (1824-1850)

Abstract

The thesis studies the impact of the disintegration of the Spanish Empire in the Americas in the historicist thought of Spain and Great Britain during the transitional epoch that followed the first cycle of liberal revolutions in the Atlantic world (1824-1850). For that purpose, it addresses the historical and mnemonical representations which, in the wake of the overseas emancipations, burst into the public sphere of both monarchies, modelling the transatlantic imaginaries of the political cultures of the period. The exercises of interpretation of the imperial past of the Spanish Monarchy, and of the contemporary developments of the republics that had departed from its sovereign body, became a very relevant field for the production of governmental and colonial knowledge, collective myths and geopolitical expectations. The central hypothesis is that the direct experience of the independence of the Spanish Americas triggered a wave of transatlantic retrospection in Spain and Great Britain which had an enormous impact on the configuration of the political imaginaries of both spaces. The interpretation of the overseas past permitted the intellectual actors of these imperial monarchies to produce coherent diagnoses about the political contemporaneity of the Euroamerican world. It also allowed them to articulate their ideas about metropolitan governability and colonial rule, to produce symbolic fuel for their respective versions of imperial, republican or monarchial patriotism, and to design scenarios of the future that contributed decisively to the planning of the geopolitical strategies of both monarchies in the Americas and the imperial worlds. The thesis exposes how a very relevant mnemonic dimension crossed these symbolic and performative functions. The discourses about the experiences of the past played a central role in the transatlantic retrospections of the period. Through them, the intellectual and political actors that had taken part in the breakdown of the Spanish Empire - either in the royalist or the independentist side - historicized their living memories, subsuming them in their narratives about the collective past and legitimating, heroizing and victimizing themselves.

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English