31 - From Religious Nationalism to Political Consciousness: The Bourbon Reforms in Spanish America, 1750–1790

Summary

The historical half century in Spanish America (1750–99) that overlapped the War of Independence by the English colonies of North America can be characterized as a period of gestation. Beginning with the implementation in 1750 of the first in a series of rigorous reforms in the spirit of the Enlightenment and ending in 1799 with the ascension to power of Napoleon in France, this period marked the development of a new and revolutionary religious, cultural, and political awareness that would create independent Latin American republics.

Religion played an important role during this process in Spain's colonies. America's Christianity had been planted by the Spanish as early as 1493 and had set down firm roots for a flowering of Spanish American Catholic identity during the seventeenth-century baroque era. And although the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment pruned back religious growth during a winter of repression that began in 1750, it left behind “seeds of nationalism” that would begin to gestate the new national identities that appeared at the dawn of the nineteenth century with complete political independence for Spanish America.

GEOPOLITICAL BACKGROUND

Religion does not operate in a vacuum but responds to political and social forces that shape particular historical circumstances. The context of Spanish American societies differed notably from the North American experience. For instance, the English colonies' population was crowded along the Atlantic coast, and – except for Pennsylvania's German population and the South's many plantation slaves – was relatively homogeneous.