Empires, merchants, and the origins of politics in the Iberian Atlantic

Resumen

This essay connects several fields of historical research about the age of revolutions in Latin America: the crisis of the Iberian Atlantic, the transformation of merchant capital, and the rise of new sources of political legitimacy.  It points to the importance of the slave trade in the South Atlantic, and how the crisis of empires had a fundamental effect on slave economies.  Warfare produced, therefore, a fiscal crisis of the empires and a social crisis of a regime of accumulation. The outcomes of the conjuncture were new social actors and new models of politics.  In the debate about whether the age of revolutions was one of continuity or discontinuity in Latin America, this essay makes the case for discontinuity.  It draws attention to the centrality of slavery to the nature of the regimes.  It also calls for attention to social and economic forces in the making of new political institutions and ideas.