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1 - Building Nation-Empires in the Eighteenth-Century Iberian Atlantic

from Part I - Imperial and Postcolonial Settings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2023

By
Fidel J. Tavárez
Edited by
Cathie Carmichael ,
Matthew D'Auria  and
Aviel Roshwald
Cathie Carmichael
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew D'Auria
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Aviel Roshwald
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

On 19 March 1812, after much deliberation, the Spanish parliament, the Cortes, promulgated Spain’s first written constitution, the celebrated Constitution of Cádiz.1 Seen in the context of the Age of Revolutions, a time when political revolutions in the Thirteen Colonies, France, and Haiti were accompanied by written constitutions, the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz was not exactly at the vanguard of the Atlantic world. Nonetheless, the importance and peculiarity of this constitution lay not in the content or nature of the document but in who was involved in its design. The constitution of the United States of America, the many French constitutions during the revolutionary period, and the various Haitian constitutions written beginning in 1801 were primarily a product of one hemisphere or the other, but not both. In contrast, Spain’s Constitution of 1812 came about as a result of an imperial parliament with deputies representing the multiplicity of territories of Spain’s oceanic empire.

Keywords

Iberian AtlanticSpanish EmpirePortuguese EmpirePolitical EconomyImperial Reforms
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism , pp. 3 - 23
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Adelman, Jeremy, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feros, Antonio, Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fradera, Josep M., The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamnett, Brian, The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuethe, Allan, and Andrien, Kenneth J., The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maxwell, Kenneth, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750–1808 (New York: Routledge, 2004 [1973]).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paquette, Gabriel, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Portillo Valdés, José M., Crisis atlántica: Autonomía e independencia en la crisis de la monarquía hispana (Madrid: Fundación Carolina; Centro de Estudios Hispánicos e Iberoamericanos; Marcial Pons Historia, 2006).Google Scholar
Schultz, Kristen, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (New York: Routledge, 2001).Google Scholar

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