Simn Bolvars Republican Imperialism

Simn Bolvars Republican Imperialism: Another Ideology of American Revolution

Abstract:

This article treats the political thought of Simn Bolvar, a leading figure in South Americas struggle for independence. It describes Bolvars ideas by reference to both their broadly Atlantic origins and their specifically American concerns, arguing that they comprise a theory of republican imperialism, paradoxically proposing an essentially imperial project as a means of winning and consolidating independence from European rule. This basic tension is traced through Bolvars discussions of revolution, constitutions, and territorial unification, and then used to frame a comparison with the founders of the United States. It suggests, in closing, that contextual similarities amongst the American revolutions make them particularly apt subjects for comparative study of the history of political thought.

Throughout this second decade of the twenty-first century, the nations that once comprised the Reinos de las Indias, later (and now better) known as the Spanish American Empire, will celebrate the bicentennials of their independence. From Mexico City to Buenos Aires, anniversaries will be marked with parades, presidential addresses, fireworks, and an enormous outpouring of literature, popular and scholarly, describing the movements that brought an end to more than three hundred years of Spanish rule in the Americas, the heroes that led these movements, and the ideas that inspired these heroes. Thus, it is a particularly apt moment for political theorists to investigate the ideological dimensions of the other American revolutions, which, like their famous British North American counterpart, gave rise to abundant and profound reflection on fundamental questions of legitimate authority, popular sovereignty, political institutions, and international relations.

The originality of the Spanish American revolutions political thinkers makes their ideas a rewarding study in their own right, but there is more to be gained than deeper knowledge of the period and place. In text after text one encounters recognizably republican, liberal, and conservative theories of politics, variations on nationalism and imperialism, and conceptions of human rights and natural laws, adapted for use outside the European context where these ideas emerged and where they have been so extensively documented and analyzed. The Spanish American revolutions and early period of independence also provide a fascinating mirror in which we can re-consider the defenses of rebellion, doctrines of representation, separated powers, and federalism, and hemispheric ambitions of the founders of the United States, long familiar subjects for political theorists interested in American public law.

Indeed, as I shall try to show here, in certain, important respects Spanish America provides a better touch-point for comparative inquiry into the political thought of the United States Revolution and early Republic than more traditional cases, like England and France. All too often, scholars identification of the British North American independence movement with the struggles of English parliamentarians and French revolutionaries, rather than with other American independence movements, has led to a problematic de-emphasis of the fundamental feature which the American revolutions share and the European ones do not: the American revolutions were, in the last instance, anti-imperial rebellions led by colonists that understood themselves and their rebellion as such. The colonial setting of the American revolutions contributed strongly to the nature of the claims made in defense of rebellion, the constitutional designs that emerged after independence, and the way in which political thinkers treated questions of territorial expansion and international relations. As comparison becomes a increasingly recognized approach in the field of political theory, political theorists will examine systematically the relation between political thinkers circumstances and their political ideas; here, I shall argue that contextual similarities can explain interesting ideological convergences amongst the American revolutions, making comparison between these revolutions a productive manner of gaining new insights into their ideologies.

In the present essay, I illustrate the fruits of this approach through an analysis of the ideas of Simn Bolvar, perhaps the most prominent political and intellectual leader of the independence movements in South America. My discussion is organized so as to highlight the three areas of convergence in the ideologies of the American revolutions indicated above: First, I describe Bolvars case for the independence of Spanish America, which, in both its classical republican premises and its ambiguous legal basis, bears a strong resemblance to well-known arguments made on behalf of independence in British North America. Second, I treat Bolvars constitutional thought, especially his views on the separation of powers and on the role of the executive in a republic, which compare well with those of the early American republics High Federalists, especially Alexander Hamilton. Third, and finally, I discuss Bolvars successively more expansive projects for unification of the former Spanish American Empire, which are, at a number of points, reminiscent of the arguments made in the Federalist Papers on behalf of the United States Constitution. In closing, I sharpen these comparisons and use them to pose some additional questions about the Americas political thought and development.

Throughout, I argue that at the center of Bolvars ideas lies a doctrine of republican imperialism, consisting in a defense of a renewed imperial project as a means of overcoming the legacies of Spanish rule and consolidating American independence. Bolvars passionate and appealing calls for freedom and equality for Spanish Americans contrast sharply with the exclusivist constitutional measures he thought necessary to compensate for Spanish Americas highly unequal, racially-stratified society. Bolvar was quite conscious of the elite social makeup of his movements leadership and of the difficulties this implied for both the prosecution of the revolution itself and the creation of an independent state. His writings are haunted by the spectre of pure democracy and its implication, which he termed pardocracia: rule by the free, mixed-race population that made up a plurality of Venezuelas inhabitants. He struggled with the possibility that this poor underclass, disdaining the legal equality his revolution offered, would demand absolute equality, both public and private, which would mean the extermination of the privileged class to which he himself belonged, and the abandonment of the enlightened projects that he hoped to undertake in independent America. Thus, Bolvar led armies of liberation across the continent, forcefully annexing royalist territories, and imposing a highly centralized constitution that concentrated authority in an American-born elite, defending these measures as indispensable means of establishing stable republican government in Spanish America.

In closing I will argue that this paradoxical doctrine of republican imperialism has bears a strong resemblance to the political thought of British North American revolutionaries, who like Bolvar sought freedom and popular sovereignty but worried that their societies would be incapable of sustaining them. Comparing the ideologies of these revolutions highlights this important convergence, and directs our attention to contextual similarities that can help us understand why it occurred. But this claim will be better left aside until after I have given a more detailed account of Simn Bolvars political thought and its particular paradoxes and tensions.

A Machiavellian Moment in the AndesThe year 1811 found the city of Caracas in a state of deep division. Three years had passed since Napoleon I deposed the Bourbon monarchs of Spain and the Indies and placed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the throne. Spaniards and Spanish Americans rose against the French imposition, denying the legitimacy of Bonapartes succession and denouncing the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution. Between 1808 and 1810, armed resistance spread from the Iberian Peninsula to the poles of Spanish America the Viceroyalties of New Spain (present-day Mexico) and the River Plate (present-day Argentina) where declarations of loyalty to Fernando VII and assertions of local autonomy mixed in an ideological atmosphere more clamorous than coherent. In 1810, Caracass municipal leaders joined their fellows on both sides of the Atlantic, forming a Junta to govern Venezuela in Fernando VIIs name during his absence. A young Simn Bolvar, scion of one of the citys most prominent families, was dispatched to London as part of a delegation sent to seek English support for Venezuelas fight against France.

We have only scant, and largely apocryphal, testimony to Bolvars political opinions prior to this trip, but it is clear that after he returned, Bolvar became a forceful advocate for a complete and final break with Spain. Importantly, Bolvars case for Venezuelan independence was unmixed with loyalty to Fernando VII, doubts about the legitimacy of Bonapartes accession, or opposition to the principles of the French Revolution, ideas which recent scholarship has sought to establish as the central motivations for the Spanish American revolutions. Nor did Bolvars adherence to the cause of independence clearly reflect an incipient nationalism Venezuelan, American, or Spanish as others have presumed. His argument was different: Why should it matter to us, he asked his comrades in the Sociedad Patritica, whether Spain sells her slaves to Bonaparte, or keeps them for herself, if we are resolved to be free? The half-measures adopted by the citys leadership evidenced the sad effects of ancient bondage, the reflexive loyalism of people long denied the right to rule themselves. Venezuelans ought to attend to the patriotic faction, the center of enlightenment and of all revolutionary interests, under whose leadership they might lay down the foundation stone of South American liberty! With this speech, Simn Bolvar, only twenty-seven years old, propelled himself into the vanguard of the struggle for independence in Spanish America; a week later, Venezuela became the first South American colony to declare independence from Spain.

To properly understand Bolvars ideology of Spanish American revolution, it must be considered by reference to the tradition of classical republicanism traced by intellectual historians from renaissance Italy, through the Glorious Revolution, the French Enlightenment, and the movement for independence in North America. In his writings, Bolvar was certainly more likely to cite eighteenth-century French philosophers Montesquieu and Rousseau being the most common references than Machiavelli or the Commonwealthmen, but even the terms his political theory routinely employed evidence his clear debts to these classical republican thinkers. In 1815, Bolvar explained to a correspondent that States are enslaved either by virtue of their constitution or through the abuse of it; a people is enslaved when the government, by its essence or through its vices, tramples and usurps the rights of the citizen or subject. As Quentin Skinner, amongst others, has established, the description of political marginalization as slavery, and the attribution of the term slave to an entire state or people, were distinctive attributes of English republicanism in particular. Bolvar was an adept student of this tradition; he modified its central theories and problems not only to make a case for Spanish American independence, but also to justify the regime he hoped to install once independence had been won.

The first argument begins with a characterization of the Spanish regime in the Americas. For Bolvar the primary problem with the Spanish American Empire had less to do with its being Spanish than its particular form of imperialism, which denied even elite Americans the opportunity to participate in their own governance.

The position of those who dwell in the American hemisphere has been for centuries purely passive, their political existence null. We were at a level even lower than servitude, prevented from elevating ourselves to the joys of freedom. America was not only deprived of its freedom but also of an active tyranny [una tirana activa y dominante].

Bolvar elaborates what he has in mind by active tyranny through a comparison of the Spanish and Ottoman Empires, describing the latter as a system of oppression in which subordinates participate according to the authority conferred upon them. The Spanish denied Americans even this consolation; in contrast to the politically active elites of the Ottoman periphery, Spanish Americans occupy no other place in society than that of servants suited for work or, at best, that of simple consumers. We have never been viceroys, or governors, except in extraordinary circumstances; rarely archbishops or bishops; never diplomats; always military subordinates. Thus, in Bolvars account, the Spanish Empire was a system of rule that intentionally and effectively denied a political role to Americans, thereby rendering them slaves, servants, or dependents, unable to enjoy the truly human freedom of the citizen.

There is a notable ambiguity in Bolvars efforts to specify a legal basis for his claim against the Spanish Empire. In most cases, he insists that the exclusion of Americans from political office is a violation of the rights of humanity, a natural law or laws that do not receive a systematic exposition anywhere in his writings. However, in a few instances Bolvar decries American exclusions as an abrogation of a pact made between the Spanish crown and the discoverers, conquerors, and settlers of America our social contract which guaranteed Spanish Americans a right to equal treatment as equal subjects of the Crown of Castile, or even, a right to preference for offices in their native lands. The space between these two kinds of claims is important, as they are made on behalf of different groups of Spanish Americans: while the rights of humanity would presumably include all human residents of the region, subjects of the Crown of Castile would likely be understood to exclude enslaved and even free African-descended Americans, and descendents of the conquistadors would encompass only the criollos, the European-descended, American-born elite of the Spanish colonies to which Bolvar belonged. I will argue later that this fundamental ambiguity, between natural law and ancient rights, was characteristic of American revolutionary ideology throughout the hemisphere, playing an important role in Creole revolutionaries attempts to defend American independence as a implication of universal principles of political right, while simultaneously limiting the extension of political privileges to the lower ranks of independent societies.

Bolvar employed a distinctively republican manner of reconciling invocations of universal rights with particular exclusions, premised upon an analysis of the effects of political dependency on the character of Spanish Americans:

Under the triple yoke of ignorance, tyranny, and vice we, the American People, have been unable to acquire, or even to know, either power or virtue. As disciples of these pernicious masters, we have only learned the most destructive lessons and studied the worst examples. Slavery is the daughter of darkness; an ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction: they adopt illusions for reality, take license for liberty, treachery for patriotism, vengeance for justice. A corrupt people can win its liberty, only to lose it once again.

Under the Spanish Empire, Americans lacked opportunities to develop the civic virtues which republicans thought requisite to the maintenance of self-government. Thus, Bolvar worried that even if they did manage, through momentary superiority of arms, to wrest independence away from the Spanish, they might be incapable of maintaining their liberty against internal or external threats. Here, we have Bolvars version of the classic Machiavellian dilemma of the new prince: peoples long accustomed to political subjection display none of the greatheartedness or manly virt that inspire acts of self-sacrifice for the common good in long-standing stable republics. Rather, they are consumed by petty, competitive bids for personal comfort and aggrandizement. This makes establishing and maintaining a republican constitution de novo a particularly vexed problem in republican thought. Compensating for the legacies of three centuries oppression forms, as we will now see, the central problem of Bolvars constitutional theory and the heart of his doctrine of republican imperialism.

Bolivarian ConstitutionalismRecently, political theorists have examined canonical liberal philosophers views on the imperial projects initiated by Britain in India and by France in North Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. These studies have shown that, far from condemning these projects, several of the periods great thinkers viewed the expansion of European overseas rule as an indispensable means of spreading liberal ideas throughout the non-European world. This liberal imperialism defended European imperial rule as a benefit to backward subjects, authorized the abrogation of sovereignty of many indigenous states, and licensed increasingly interventionist policies in colonized societies systems of education, law, property, and religion. As Uday Mehta has argued, liberal imperialism presents a definite paradox: One needs to account for how a set of ideas that professed, at a fundamental level, to include as its political referent a universal constituency nevertheless spawned practices that were either predicated on or directed at the political marginalization of various people. In order to accomplish this reconciliation, liberal defenders of empire in England depended upon strategies of exclusion: conditions placed upon the universal reach of liberalisms regard that made the subjects of imperial domination special cases to whom the general principle does not apply. In John Stuart Mill, famously, this kind of strategy can be found in the assertion that Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. In the broader liberal-imperialist tradition, the progressive theory of history discernable in Mills claim grounded a variety of similar strategies of exclusion.

In Simn Bolvars constitutional thought, we encounter similar paradoxes. Though, as weve seen, Bolvar defended the Spanish American revolutions by reference to putatively universal republican ideals of independence and self-government, he favored institutions that would limit the access of particular groups to high office and repeatedly subjected cities and regions held by his opponents to military conquest and forced annexation. In this section and the next, I will describe Bolvars theories of representation, separated powers, territorial expansion, and federalism as a republican imperialism. Republican, because in Bolvars defense of imperial expansion, a lack of civic virtue, rather than economic and political backwardness, forms the basis of a strategy of exclusion analogous to those Mehta describes in the English liberals. In short, Bolvars argument will be that because, after years of Spanish domination, Americans lack the political virtues that characterize the true republican, their newly independent states should adopt constitutions that insulate government from popular control. In service to this end, Bolvar recommended hereditary legislative chambers, special authorities to control the press, education, and public morality, a lifetime executive, and other surprising constitutional innovations.

That Bolvars political thought encompassed such substantial concern with constitutions at all is in itself remarkable, illustrating an important point of convergence amongst the American revolutions. Given his deep reservations regarding the capacity of Spanish Americans to participate in their own governance, it is perhaps surprising that he did not join the ranks of Spanish Americans who viewed absolute monarchy as the only form of government capable of establishing order after the break with Spain. But Bolvar consistently denounced absolutism as solution, because the limits on popular participation in government he sought to establish were meant to buttress a transitional period during which Spanish Americans would undergo an education in civic virtue rendering more and more of them fit for self-rule. Nonetheless, it is clear that Bolvars constitutional thought provided a justification, however temporary, for the concentration of authority in the hands of a small, lettered, and largely creole elite. In this sense, it performed an ideological function similar to the one performed by European liberal imperialism, defending, in this case, creole rule as a benefit to vicious and illiterate descendents of Africans and Native Americans. I shall suggest below that a similar description could be applied to the framers of the United States Constitution.

In Bolvars constitutional thought, the fundamental problem was always to consolidate American independence with institutions that could compensate for the legacies of imperial rule. How, he asked, having broken the chains of our ancient oppression, can we perform the miracle of preventing their iron remnants from being re-forged as freedom-killing weapons [armas liberticidas]? In search of an answer, Bolvar studied classical precedents: Athens exemplified absolute democracy and evidenced the extreme weakness of this species of government. Spartas more limited participatory institutions produced better results than the ingenious work of Solon, but ultimately neither city-state could provide a model for Spanish America. Rather, Rome and Great Britain are the nations that stand out amongst the ancients and moderns; both were born to rule and to be free; but both were constituted, not for brilliant forms of Liberty, but on solid foundations. Notably, both Rome and Great Britain were, like Bolvars Venezuela, societies characterized by stark social hierarchies, divided between a small, learned elite and a large, occasionally insurrectionary populace. Bolvar, conscious as he was of the precarious position of his enlightened revolutionary cadre within a population mostly indifferent when not actively opposed to his projects, could not have failed to grasp this similarity, or to be attracted by the classic balance of the Roman Republic and the model of gradual, elite-led liberal reformism that Great Britain in particular represented.

From his study of these precedents, Bolvar derived a number of specific institutional recommendations: If our Senate, instead of being elective, were hereditary, it would serve as the base, the bond, the soul of our Republic. During political tempests, this institution would deflect lightening from the government and repulse waves of popular dissent. Such a barrier against the populace was necessary, because after long experiencing political domination, men do not know their own true interests. Thus, they would best served by a system in which their protection is entrusted to a neutral body, owing nothing to either the election of the government or the people, by virtue of its being staffed by inherited right. The proper occupants of this office were also clear: the leaders of the liberation and their descendents deserved to occupy forever an exalted position in the republic which owes them its existence. Bolvars Senate was a republicanized version of Britains House of Lords; a bulwark against the whims of the general population, composed of those who have proved their virtuosity through service to the republic.

As for the Executive authority, in a republic, it must be all the stronger, because everything conspires against it; a republican magistrate is an isolated individual in the middle of a society, charged with containing the impetuosity of the people. Thus, though one wants to contain the executive authority, the bonds should be strong while not being too tight. Bolvar thought it important that the constitution suit the needs of Venezuelan society in its present state: Let us concentrate the executive power in a President, and confer upon him sufficient authority that he will be able to continue to fight against the difficulties that attend upon our current situation, the state of war that we face, and the sorts of internal and external enemies that we will long battle. As with the hereditary senate, then, the strong executive functions in Bolvars constitutional thought as a mechanism meant to compensate for the legacies of imperial domination, in the realms of both foreign and domestic affairs.

Finally, Bolvar thought that the conscious cultivation of virtue in Spanish America was of such central importance that he suggested adding new branch of government to the traditional tripartite system, a fourth power [quarta potestad] whose dominion is childhood and mens hearts, the public spirit, good customs, and republican morality. Citing the Athenian Areopagus and the Roman Censors as precedents, Bolvar thought this institution could restore to the world the idea of a people who is not contented by being free and strong, but also wants to be virtuous. The idea of a fourth branch, or poder moral as Bolvar sometimes referred to it, was an innovation in American constitutionalism; it was held in high esteem by other Spanish American constitutional thinkers in Bolvars own time, and has ever since represented a point of special interest amongst his interpreters. Here, I think we can see Bolvars fourth branch as exemplary of his republican imperialism: a constitutional provision, overtly authoritarian in its design, but intended, in a sense, to bring about its own obsolescence, becoming unnecessary once its function of creating a virtuous population has been discharged. This clearly fraught attraction to educative despotism, to imperialism itself as a means of overcoming the legacies of empire, runs through all of Bolvars political thought.

In 1826, Bolvar had an opportunity to put his constitutional ideas into practice. After fifteen years of near-continuous campaigning, his armies defeated the last royalist holdouts of South America, high in the mountainous region known then as Charcas or Upper Peru. A hastily-assembled congress named the newly-independent country Bolvar (and later changed it to Bolivia) to honor its liberator, and asked that he himself prepare a constitution for the new state. Bolvar, flattered, took on the project pronouncing himself overtaken by confusion and timidity at the prospect of assuming the role of the legislator, in which he would have to tame two monstrous enemies that reciprocally combat one another, and which both attack at once: tyranny and anarchy. With his favorite Lieutenant he was rather less modest, declaring when he had finished that in the Bolivian Constitution he had achieved a perfection almost beyond what could be hoped for, a synthesis [transaccin] of Europe with America, of the army with the people, of democracy with aristocracy, and of imperialism with republicanism.

The Bolivian Constitution of 1826 was distinguished by a number of interesting features: a multi-level system of indirect election, which we shall consider in greater detail below; a three-chambered legislature, adopted because two chambers inevitably lead to perpetual combat, and including a Chamber of Censors, elder citizens serving a life-term, charged with regulating morality, the sciences, the arts, education, and the press. More appealing, perhaps, were the provisions that Bolvar recommended but which were not adopted by the Constituent Congress: the abolition of slavery, which he deemed a violation of every law a contradiction that impugns only our reason more than our justice,; and the disestablishment of religion, which, being a question of conscience lying within divine jurisdiction, makes all attempts at legal coercion both sacrilegious and null. These ideas place Bolvars credentials as an enlightened, reformist, and even liberal thinker beyond reproach, but the means he thought necessary to achieve these ends can only be described as imperial.

By far the most notorious feature of the Bolivian Constitution, and the one that receives the most attention both from Bolvar himself and his students, is the presidente vitalicio, or life-term president empowered to choose his own successor. Even though, as Bolvar insisted, the authority of the Bolivian executive was to be subject to the severest constitutional limitations ever known, the institution became the subject of fierce criticism and even open rebellion in its own time, and has lain ever since at the heart of analyses that question the sincerity of Bolvar republican commitments. Most commentators hasten to observe that Frances Constitution of the Year X (1802), which established Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul for Life, must have inspired the presidente vitalicio, but Bolvar himself named precedents from closer to home. The life-term president, he noted, also featured in the most democratic republic in the world, the southern Republic of Haiti, which had adopted the institution under Alexandre Ption in 1816. After winning its independence, he explained, the island of Haiti found itself in a state of constant insurrection. After experiments with all of the known forms of government, and even some unknown ones, its people was forced to appeal to the illustrious Ption for salvation. Once Ption was made president for life, Bolvar claimed, the islands destiny was placed on more secure ground, and all had gone well since. Haiti, then, provided triumphant proof that a lifetime President, with the power to choose his successor, is the most sublime innovation in the republican system. Of course, the Haitian example carried a very powerful resonance for Bolvars audience, which was eager to avoid the islands experience of destructive and bloody race warfare.

For the principle of succession, Bolvar cited an even more surprising model: the United States, which had recently observed a practice of naming the first Minister to succeed the President. He thought that no other method could be as convenient in a Republic; having the President choose his successor not only assured that the office would be held by someone experienced in the management of the State, but also avoided elections, which produce the great scourge of republics, anarchy. The executive authority quite clearly occupied a central place in Bolvars thought, and he hoped the same would be true in his society:

Under our Constitution, the President of the Republic will be like the Sun, unmoved at the center, giving life to the universe. .... [A] fixed point around which magistrates and citizens, men and materials, revolve. Give me a fixed point, said an ancient, and I will move the world. For Bolivia, this point is the Presidente vitalicio.

In these subtly mixed metaphors, Bolvars basic argument emerges. The dilemma he perceived in Bolivia, and indeed, all Spanish America, the dilemma of Machiavellis new prince, receives a more famous formulation from Rousseau:

For a young people to be able to relish sound principles of political theory and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be created by these institutions, would have to preside over their very foundation, and men would have to be before law what they should become by means of law.

Rousseau suggested that this problem could only be overcome by the intervention of a mystical Legislator, a founding father, possessed of superior knowledge and virtue, who attracts the adherence of his people with a quasi-religious authority. Bolvars presidente vitalicio was a constitutional adaptation of this idea, a permanent institutionalization of Rousseaus Legislator, the only means by which young peoples of Spanish America could sustain their independence. The presidente vitalicio is Bolvars republican emperor, who rules in order that his subjects will learn to rule themselves. In this sense, Bolvars most infamous constitutional innovation exemplifies again the undeniable paradox at the center of his political thinking.

Imperialism against Empire

It might reasonably be asserted that the term imperialism has been employed thus far as a description of Bolvars constitutional thought only in a rather loose fashion, having little to do with territorial expansion, unequal relations between a metropole and its peripheries, or other definitive qualities of empires. If Bolvars presidente vitalicio is a republican emperor, what was to be the nature of his empire? Bolvars political projects also displayed these territorial features of imperialism: during and after the wars of independence, he sought to unify progressively more expansive portions of the former Spanish Empire, to consolidate authority over vast reaches of South America in a powerful national government. Again, paradoxically, Bolvar defended both territorial expansion and political centralization precisely as means of winning and maintaining American independence. His thought was, then, in the most basic sense of the terms, both republican and imperial.

An early formulation appears in Bolvars famous Cartagena Manifesto of 1812. The circumstances surrounding the production of this document are worth briefly recalling: Bolvar, aged twenty-nine, is in the patriotic redoubt of Cartagena explaining the recent demise of the First Republic of Venezuela. He tells his audience that The most consequential error Venezuela committed was undoubtedly the fatal adoption of a policy of toleration toward a royalist rebellion originating in the in the city of Coro. Instead of subjugating that defenseless city, the republican regime allowed it to fortify itself so that it was later able to subjugate the entire confederation. This error, Bolvar declares, was grounded upon poorly understood principles of humanitarianism, which barred the government from liberating by force a people too stupefied to recognize the value of its own rights. Here we have a clear expression of the central argument in Bolvars republican imperialism, applied to make a case for territorial expansion and peripheral subjugation. The people of Coro, after years of domination, are stupefied: corrupt, unable to recognize their own true interests and lacking the virtues that sustain republican government. Because their corruption, and the actions and inactions that follow from it, threatened the stability of the First Republic, it was not only acceptable but vital that their allegiance to the patriotic cause be won by force.

Even at this early stage, Bolvar recognized that this doctrine would carry his revolution across the continent. He submitted a telling syllogism to his audience: Coro is to Caracas as Caracas is to the whole of America; in other words, Caracas, in this moment under Spanish military occupation, now poses a threat to the rest of South America similar to the one Coro posed to independent Venezuela. Thus, he presents as an indispensible measure for the security of New Granada [present-day Colombia], the re-conquest of Caracas. The basic argument made here with respect to Coro, attributing inaction or reaction to corruption, and making corruption a rationale for conquest, would remain fundamentally the same as the scope of Bolvars territorial ambitions expanded with the war effort. The result was a progressively larger series of projected states, culminating in a proposal for a pan-Spanish American Congress, which has earned Bolvar deserved plaudits as an early cosmopolitan, but which I shall treat here as the blueprint for a republican empire.

Notably, as late as 1815, Bolvar still espoused a more conventional republicanism, holding that the interest of a republic, properly understood, is circumscribed by the sphere of self-preservation, prosperity, and glory. Unmoved by an imperial will, because it is precisely its antithesis, the republic has no reason to extend its boundaries, and diminish its own resources, merely in order to force its neighbors to participate in a liberal constitution. In this period he thought that the former Spanish American territories would divide into 15 to 17 independent states. But he already envisioned his own native Venezuela as part of a larger entity, engaged in an internal civilizing mission:

New Granada will unite with Venezuela if they can agree to form a central republic, whose capital might be Maracaibo. Or perhaps a new city named for the philanthropic hero, Las Casas, will be built near the magnificent port of Baha-Honda. The savage inhabitants would become civilized, and our possessions would grow with the acquisition of the Goajira. This nation would be named Colombia in fair and grateful tribute to the creator of our hemisphere.

Bolvar proved willing to employ military means to see this vision made reality, deploying Venezuelan troops across the mountains dividing Venezuela and New Granada and defeating a large royalist force at Boyoc in August, 1819, thereby assuring New Granadas incorporation into what would become the Republic of Colombia.

For Bolvar, however, the liberation and unification of Colombia did not represent an end in itself, but a mere first stage in a more expansive revolution destined to establish a new model of politics for the entire world. With the passage of time, Colombia would establish itself as the heart of the universe, serving as the unifier, center, and emporium of the human family. Along with its precious metals and agriculture, it would export the precious secrets of enlightened government to the corners of the world. In 1819, Bolvar could already see [Colombia] seated upon the Throne of Liberty, grasping the scepter of Justice, crowned by Glory, demonstrating to the old world the majesty of the new. Thus, in Bolvars thought, American independence assumes a world-historical importance, initiating a transition from the epoch of European anciens regimes to an enlightened era of global unity bound together by a new, American metropole.

Before Colombia could conquer the world, however, it first had to consolidate authority in its own territory; even as a Constituent Congress assembled at the border city of Ccuta to frame a constitution in 1821, the southern-most regions claimed by the new state (present-day Ecuador) remained mostly under royalist and opposition control. After being elected President, Bolvar prepared to take his armies south, toward Guayaquil, which, while independent of Spain did not welcome annexation into Colombia. Bolvar had no patience for this dissent. He argued that the most secure way of assuring the Colombias independence, was to cultivate, extend, and multiply the relations that exist between the various governments and show them the reciprocal advantages that Union offers them. Finding the residents of the highland city of Pasto particularly reluctant to enjoy these advantages, Bolvar addressed them as wayward children in need of direction by custodial arms before leading his armies into their midst. The peoples of Guayaquil and Pasto were to be made Colombians whether they wished it or not; their incorporation into the larger union was indispensable, in Bolvars mind, to the latters success.

As both cases demonstrate, the primary obstacles Bolvar had to confront on his way to generating a unified South American struggle for independence were the local allegiances of the population and the jealousy of their leaders, who claimed that solid legal precedents supported their provinces autonomy: When Napoleon deposed Fernando VII in 1808 the Spaniards and Spanish Americans who denied the legitimacy of Joseph Bonapartes accession organized themselves into local governing bodies, or Juntas, citing a traditional provision that in the absence of a legitimate King, sovereignty returned to the constitutive kingdoms of the realm. When the Spanish American independence movements began, these too were originally carried out in the name of constitutive kingdoms, and legal theorists of the time, relying on the Roman legal doctrine of uti possidetis, projected that if and when independence was won, the territories of these kingdoms would become sovereign states. Some ambiguity surrounded the question of which administrative boundaries of the Spanish American empire delimited the constituent kingdoms, but the limit possibility was that these were the Viceroyalties, the seats of the Kings personal representatives in America. By the end of 1822, with Quito relatively free of royalists, and Colombian unity assured from Angostura to Guayaquil, Bolvar had achieved the liberation of the entire former Viceroyalty of New Granada and stretched the claim of uti possidetis as far as it could be plausibly maintained. His decision, at this point, to take the battle to the last royalist holdouts on the continent, in the Viceroyalty of Peru and the Audiencia of Charcas, previously a province of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, presented, then, a novel legal and philosophical problem.

Bolvar himself was aware of this distinction, lamenting that The war in Peru presents difficulties that appear insuperable the difference is that this is not Colombia and I am not Peruvian. However, he understood the push into Peru as a continuation of his general campaign, and justified it, when the Colombian Congress demanded an explanation, by reference to his own doctrine of republican imperialism:

I should be permitted to advance on territories occupied by the Spanish in Peru, because the enemy will come here if I do not contain him there, and because enemy territory should not be considered foreign territory, but conquerable territory, just as New Granada was for Venezuela. Anyone who denies this is a fool, and a fool is no authority.

Once again, Bolvar hoped that unification would follow conquest. After finishing his Constitution for Bolivia in 1826, he wrote out plans for a union of the three republics, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, that his armies had liberated. The Constitution itself would be adopted by each component state with Colombia re-divided into Venezuela, New Granada, and Quito and, with some modifications, by the federal state itself. In this great act of founding, Bolvar declared, I am giving to the peoples who the army has liberated a code that joins permanency with liberty, in the highest degree attainable in a government of men aspiring toward greater perfection would only bring us ruin. He himself would assume the title of Liberator-President, and in this role ride on an annual circuit throughout all of the states, calming their disorders by his very presence.

In each, progressively larger formulation of Spanish American unity, Bolvar confronted the critical question of how to organize sub-national levels of government, and how much authority to grant them, vis--vis the center. From the first, he was a fervent opponent of federalism, insisting that only centralized government could consolidate American independence. Advocates of federalism in Spanish America were fond of pointing to the example of the United States, where, they claimed, a federal system was transforming a former group of colonies into a powerful independent state. Bolvar stood ready to rebut this argument, insisting that although the population of the United States was singular model of political virtue and moral enlightenment, and although liberty has been its cradle and its nourishment, it is a miracle that a system as weak and as complicated as federalism has been capable of governing in such difficult and delicate circumstances. In Spanish America, he thought, where one could not count on the same advantages, the federal system was a clear folly.

Thus, Bolvar produced an interesting range of mechanisms for diminishing the authority of the component parts of his states: in Gran Colombia, a strongly centralized constitution, with local officials appointed by the central government, and subject to removal by the same; in the Bolivian Constitution, an Electoral Power or system of indirect elections, in which every ten citizens chose representatives, who in turn named representatives, who would take part in the election of national Senators and Tribunes. Through this system, with attributes that approximate those of a federal system Bolvar hoped to recoup some advantages of federalism, and the support of federalists, while simultaneously undermining the traditional provincial political leaders that so often resisted his plans for unification. As for the projected federation of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, the absence of a systematic description makes it impossible to say exactly what Bolvar meant when he noted that the intention of this pact should be the most perfect unity possible under a federal form of government, but we can safely conclude, I think, that Bolvar would have preferred to institute the greatest degree of centralization he thought would be politically feasible.

Indeed, the only occasion on which Bolvar seems to have conceded any ground to federalism was in connection with his most expansive projection of Spanish American unity, the Congress of Panama. From Lima, in December 1824, Bolvar penned an Invitation to the Governments of Colombia, Mexico, Rio de la Plata, Chile and Guatemala to form a Congress at Panama. This assembly of plenipotentiary representatives would, he hoped, give the unity of interests between the American republics, former colonies of Spain, a firm foundation that will maintain in eternity, if such a thing is possible, the duration of these governments. Here, Bolvar seems to describe nothing more than a defensive alliance, but there are grounds for supposing, as one prominent historian has done, that in his heart he clearly wanted something much more cohesive than a loose confederation. Thus, Bolvar proposed that member states be bound by a common law fixing external relations, guaranteed by a permanent general congress, that would conserve internal order between the States and within each one against external enemies or anarchical factions, specifically mentioning within the ambit of the latter the monster that has devoured the island of Santo Domingo, or slave revolt, and the numerical preponderance of primitive inhabitants, the indigenous peoples of Spanish America. In sum, he wrote, the consolidated authority of the Panama Congress would assure that in Spanish America, social reform will be achieved under the holy auspices of liberty and peace, rather dissolving into the chaos of race warfare and popular revolution.

In the end, then, the enlightened defense of exclusion and expansion that throughout this essay Ive described as a republican imperialism, receives its limit formulation in Bolvars plan for Spanish American political unification, a model he thought might, with the right patrons, evolve into a single, federal, nation covering the world (una sola nacin cubriendo al universola federal). Here we have the characteristic dilemma of Bolvars thought brought into focus: though he dedicated his life to the overthrow of the Spanish Empire, and much of his thought to making a case for American independence to the world, even before he had won, he had already set about building a new empire, defending his conquest and centralism as means of spreading independence and republican government throughout the hemisphere and, indeed, the world. Bolvar and the American RevolutionsA first encounter with the life and thought of Simn Bolvar is perhaps more likely to leave an impression of idiosyncrasy than familiarity. Bolvar is a singular figure, the Liberator amongst liberators, and his doctrine of republican imperialism is a distinctive contribution to American political thought. But there are strong analogies between Bolvars ideas and those of revolutionaries across the hemisphere, including the United States. Since Bernard Bailyns landmark study of the influence of English country opposition thinking on the pamphleteers of the American Revolution, we have known that, like Bolvar, supporters of British North American independence denounced English rule as tantamount to slavery, decried the corruption that the Crowns extensive patronage produced in England and her colonies, and viewed independence as a path to moral renewal as well as political reform. Even more interestingly, these British colonists also appealed to both ancient rights contained in an original English constitution and their colonial charters and universal principles, self-evident truths, or natural laws as grounds for their rebellion. The American revolutions, then, share a notable quality: while they denounced empires and sought independence, they did not base their claims on the justice of national self-determination, but rather an ambiguous mix of ancient rights and universal principles, bound together in a re-nascent classical republicanism. Throughout the hemisphere, precisely this ambiguity allowed revolutionaries to simultaneously proclaim American independence while leaving many Americans in a decidedly dependent condition.

The ideologists of the American Revolution were also as apt as was Bolvar to attribute a world-historical significance to their cause, and to expect that their success would have ramifications far beyond the boundaries of the American colonies. The first number of the Federalist Papers famously asserts that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice. American failure, Publius thought, would deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind. The Federalist also anticipates a closely related idea, that it fell to Americans to disturb Europes longstanding global hegemony, to demonstrate to the old world the majesty of the new in Bolvars terms: Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the European. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother moderation. Thus, in both North and South America, independence was viewed as a kind of double vindication, a shift in the global balance of power away from Europe, and an associated shift in political ideas, ushering in an era of enlightenment and inclusion.

But however convinced they were of Americas special providence, and however egalitarian their rhetoric at times appeared, the founders of the United States were as skeptical of its populace as was Bolvar of Spanish Americans, and for similar reasons. As Gordon Wood has shown, these revolutionaries feared the traditional deference of the people to their established leaders, finding that the poorer commonalty seemed strangely apathetic to their appeals, too habitually accepting of the traditional authority, and attributing this deference to the fact that ideas of government in the past had too long been rather aristocratical than popular. Bolvar, of course, could have fully assented to this analysis; as we saw above, a similar line of thinking provided the basis for his entire constitutional theory. British North Americans disillusioned with the virtues of the people availed themselves of similar innovations, as well, creating a system of separated powers in the federal government that would check and balance the most immediate representatives of the people. There is a marked resemblance between the Bolivian Constitution of 1826 and the high-toned Plan of Government Alexander Hamilton recommended to the Constitutional Convention in 1787: both incorporate a life-term chamber of the legislative branch, a life-term executive, indirect elections by specially-empowered Electors, and a radical reduction of the autonomy of the state governments. Like Bolvar, Hamilton insisted that his plan, far from representing a break with the ideas of the Revolution, was a means of consolidating its achievements, going as far in order to attain stability and permanency, as republican principles will admit.

Of course, Hamiltons plan of government was never adopted in the United States, and it is clear that the institutional preferences he shared with Bolvar lay somewhat outside the North American mainstream. But the basic premise of Bolvars constitutional thought, that in order to achieve stability within newly independent societies the direct influence of the masses upon politics would have to be limited, was widely shared by Hamiltons contemporaries. James Madisons tenth Federalist, perhaps the best known text in early American political thought, celebrates the capacity of an extended republic one characterized by large territory and population to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country. Indeed, the Federalist Papers as a whole, in advocating territorial expansion and political centralization as a protection against foreign invasion, a spur for economic development, and damper on factional politics, might be read as a doctrine of republican imperialism, a defense of a renewed empire as a means of consolidating the achievements of an anti-imperial revolution. With the adoption of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, the United States provided the hemispheres first model of a metropole that gradually prepared its periphery for self-rule, establishing military governments in newly-conquered territories to oversee a transition to statehood, and George Washington proved as willing as Bolvar to use force to assure the prerogatives of the federal government in the face of provincial resistance.

It must be conceded that this convergence of both North and South American revolutionaries on territorial expansion and a centralized constitution as remedies for the disorders that succeeded independence was accompanied by an important divergence in the fundamental aims of their systems. Bolvar, as we have seen, conceived of the deficits of civic virtue amongst Spanish Americans as a legacy of Spanish despotism and sought to correct this problem through education, institutional innovation, and personal example. He hoped to create the virtuous citizenry that he believed was necessary for stable, independent, self-rule. In North America, by contrast, the foremost proponents of constitutional reform had resigned themselves the fact that Americans, like all men, were ambitious, vindictive and rapacious, and concluded that Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. That is to say, they viewed their constitutional innovations as mechanisms for stabilizing republican government by economizing on virtue, by aligning personal interests with public goods or by balancing personal interests against one another, rather than as an educative regime designed to inculcate virtue in the populace. As a prominent scholar has argued, in this important difference, Bolvar and the Framers of the United States Constitution can be seen as representatives of distinctly ancient and modern modes of republican thought, respectively. The comparison prompts us to ask whether, and to what extent, this point of political-theoretic divergence can account for the much more enduring tenure achieved by the United States Constitution.

But not only the divergences between the political thought of North and South America produce problems deserving further study: it is not obvious that wars fought in the name of inclusion should have given way to constitutions premised on exclusion, that anti-imperial revolutions should have been succeeded by expansionist ambition. What features of these revolutions produced this fascinating, and problematic, ideological convergence? Their writings reveal that fundamentally, Bolvar and the Federalist advocates of the Constitution of the United States shared a similar conception of their own relation to the societies that their revolutions had created. Both conceived of themselves as a natural aristocracy, an elite class distinguished not by titles, connections, or even necessarily wealth, but by competence, wisdom, education, and virtue. Of course, in the context of colonial societies, whose populations were composed by immigration and the forced transfer of persons across the Atlantic, this sense of superiority was inevitably entangled with race and national origin. In describing the unique character of his own revolutionary cadre, Bolvar wrote:We are not Europeans, nor Indians, but a species halfway between aboriginal and Spanish. Americans by birth and Europeans by law, we find ourselves contending with the natives for titles of ownership and at the same time trying to maintain our rights in our birth country against the opposition of invaders; thus our case is most extraordinary and complex.

That is to say, the American revolutions were creole revolutions, formed and led by a colonial upper-class, the descendants of European settlers in a New World characterized by a deep socio-racial heterogeneity. Creoles were placed, as Bolvar explains, in the difficult position of attempting to rise above the marginal status they were accorded as Americans within European empires without conceding the advantages they enjoyed as Europeans within American colonies. The structural contradiction that characterized the position of creoles within the American empires corresponds rather well to the ideological paradoxes Ive described in Bolvars thought, and briefly highlighted in that of the founders of the United States. While further elaboration of this relation between the shared context of the creole revolutions and their shared ideas will have to await another essay, this one will, I hope, have made clear that political theorists interested in one or another of the American revolutions have much to gain from study of the others.

See: Publicaciones de artculos, trabajos y comunicaciones presentadas en congresos, ponencias y revistas con nmeros especiales y relacionados con las independencias americanas, Accessed 6 November 2010, http://www.cervantes.es/lengua_y_ensenanza/ independencia_americana/bicentenario_independencia_publicaciones.htm

Classic comparisons include Burkes 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, Tocquevilles 1835 Democracy in America, and Arendts 1963 On Revolution. The same grouping of these exemplary bourgeois or democratic revolutions appears in political history and historical sociology; see: Barrington Moore, Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966) and R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, 2 Vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959 and 1964). Even as present interest in Atlantic and Global history has led some historians to include Spanish America within these broad categories see: Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009) and David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840 (Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010) studies of the American revolutions and early independence, as a distinctive category, remain rare. Exceptions include Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), Roberto Gargarella, Los fundamentos legales de la desigualdad: Constitucionalismo en Amrica, 1776-1860 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2005), and J.H. Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 255-402.

The de-emphasis of the American revolutions colonial context is perhaps most apparent in the intellectual histories which have, over the last fifty years, re-discovered the ideological origins of the American Revolution in the English Civil War, Glorious Revolution, and country opposition, and the Spanish American Revolutions in the crisis of the Spanish Monarchy attendant upon Napoleons invasion of the Iberian peninsula. Thus, Gordon Woods magisterial Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972) repeatedly insists that the American Revolution was no simple colonial rebellion against English imperialism (p. 91; see also pp. 128, 395) and Jaime E. Rodriguez O.s comparably important The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) deliberately shuns words that might suggest colonial status, such as colony, colonial, empire, or imperial (p. xii, emphasis in the original).

Unfortunately, Comparative Political Theory has yet to evolve into much more than a call for the study of Non-Western political ideas. See: Fred Dallmayr, ed., Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory (Lanham: Lexington, 1999). For promising alternative perspectives, see: Michael Freeden, Editorial: The Comparative Study of Political Thinking Journal of Political Ideologies Vol. 12, No. 1 (February 2007), pp. 1-9; and Andrew F. March, What is Comparative Political Theory?, The Review of Politics Vol. 71, No. 4 (2009), pp. 531565.

For an extended account of Bolvars life and accomplishments, see: John Lynch, Simn Bolvar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). The best work on the political history of the period is still David Bushnells 1954 The Santander Regime in Gran Colombia, 2nd ed. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970). For Bolvars importance, as both a political thinker and an icon, in subsequent intellectual history, see: Germn Carrera Damas, El Culto a Bolvar: Esbozo para un Estudio de la Historia de las Ideas en Venezuela (Caracas: Biblioteca de la Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1973) and Luis Castro Leiva, De la Patria Boba a la Teologa Bolivariana: Ensayos de Historia Intelectual (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1991).

With this term, as will become clear, I do intend to reference the recent and very interesting literature on liberal imperialism and on the political theory of empire and imperialism in general. For a recent review, see Jennifer Pitts, Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism, Annual Review of Political Science No. 13 (2010), pp. 211-35.

Simn Bolvar to Francisco de Paula Santander. Lima, 7 April 1825. In Obras Completas, ed. Vicente Lecuna and Esther Barret de Nazaris, 2nd edition, 3 vols. (Havana: 1950) (Hereafter OC) vol. III, p. 535. All translations from Spanish are my own, unless otherwise indicated. For an excellent selection of Bolvars major works in translation, see: El Libertador: Writings of Simn Bolvar, ed. David Bushnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). On Bolvars concerns with pardocracia, see: Germn Carrera Damas, Venezuela: Proyecto Nacional y poder social, [1986] 2nd ed. (Mrida: Publicacines Vicerrectorado Acadmico, 2006) and Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770-1835 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2004).

See Rodriguez, Independence of Spanish America, and Franois-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e Independencias: Ensayos Sobre las Revoluciones Hispnicas Revised and Expanded Edition (Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 2009).

The expression incipient nationalism appears in John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808-1826, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), see especially pp. 24-37. Lynchs work was the central source for Benedict Andersons claim that the American independence movements pioneered nationalism; See: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 47-65.

Discurso pronunciado en la Sociedad Patritica de Caracas, 4 July 1811, OC III, pp. 535.

An English translation the Acta Solemne de la Independencia of Venezuela can be found in David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 199-207.

See: Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), J.G.A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), and Paul Anthony Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1992). For republicanism in Spanish America, see: Jos Antonio Aguilar and Rafael Rojas, eds., El Republicanismo en Hispanoamrica: Ensayos de historia intellectual y poltica (Mexico City: CIDE, 2002) and Rafael Rojas, Las Repblicas de Aire: Utopa y Desencanto en la Revolucin de Hispanoamrica (Mexico City: Taurus, 2009). For Bolvars republicanism see: Luis Castro Leiva, Gran Colombia: una illusin ilustrada (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1985), Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 133-54, and David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp. 603-620.

Bolvars aide-de-camp recorded a fascinating encounter, interesting in this connection: a few months before his death, Bolvar visited me in Cartagena, and seeing on my table a volume of a new edition of the works of Machiavelli, observed that I should have better things to do with my time. We discussed the merits of the work, and noticing that Bolvar seemed to know its contents very well, I asked him whether he had read it recently; he responded that he had not read a line of Machiavelli since he left Europe 25 years ago. Daniel Florencio OLeary, Memorias, 3 vols. (Caracas: Imprenta de El Monitor, 1883) I, pp. 66-7.

Bolvars Contestacin de un Americano Meridional a un Caballero de esta Isla, is better known as the Jamaica Letter. Kingston, 6 September 1815, OC I, p. 165.

Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, pp. 25-30. Bolvars metaphorical use of the term slave is particularly remarkable, given that he himself was an owner of chattel slaves.

Contestacin de un Americano Meridional Kingston, 6 September 1815. OC I, p. 165.

Ibid., p. 165. By presenting the Spanish Empire as even more despotical than the Ottoman, Bolvar consciously played on contemporary stereotypes, in which the Ottoman Empire was considered the very epitome of oriental despotism.

Ibid., p. 166. Bolvars claims here are exaggerated, but they reflect a notable shift during the eighteenth century from a Spanish-American bureaucracy populated by numerous Americans to one in which peninsular Spaniards dominated the highest posts. See: Mark A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, From Impotence to Authority: The Spanish Crown and the American Audiencias, 1687-1808 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977).

Contestacin de un Americano Meridional Kingston, 6 September 1815. OC I, p. 166. See also: Guerra, Modernidad y Independencias, pp. 78-112.

Discurso pronuciado Ante el Congreso de Angostura 15 February 1819, OC III, p. 677.

Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli on the Maintenance of Liberty Australian Journal of Political Science Vol. 18, No. 2. (1983), pp. 3-15.

Pitts, Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism, pp. 216-18.

Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 21.

Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 46.

From his 1859 On Liberty, cited in Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, p. 85.

Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, pp. 46-114.

Memoria dirigida a los ciudadanos de la Nueva Granada Cartagena, 15 December 1812, OC III, pp. 543-4.

Perhaps the most extensive advocacy of monarchy in the independent Americas emerged in Mexico, following a war with the United States that resulted in the cession of over half of the new nations territory. See: Elas Jos Palti, La Poltica del Disenso: La Polmica en Torno al Monarquismo, Mxico, 1848-1850, y las Aporas del Liberalismo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1998).

Discurso pronuciado ante el Congreso de Angostura 15 February 1819, OC III, p. 683.

Ibid., p. 683-5.

See: Karen Racine, Simon Bolivar, Englishman: Elite Responsibility and Social Reform in Spanish American Independence in David Bushnell and Lester Langley, eds., Simon Bolivar: Essays on the Life and Legacy of the Liberator (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).

Discurso pronuciado ante el Congreso de Angostura 15 February 1819, OC III, pp. 685-8.

Ibid., 688-91.

Ibid., 691-2.

See: David Pantoja Morn, El Supremo Poder Conservador: El Diseo Institucional en las Primeras Constituciones Mexicanas (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico, 2005) for an account of Bolvars influence in Mexican constitutionalism.

The Constitution itself and Bolvars important prefatory Address are collected in El pensamiento constitucional hispanoamericano hasta 1830: Compilacin de Constituciones Sancionadas y Proyectos Constitucionales, 5 vols. (Caracas: Academia Nacional de Historia, 1961), Vol. I, pp. 171-221. Unabridged English translations of both can be found in Bushnell, ed. Writings of Simn Bolvar, pp. 54-85.

Pensamiento constitucional hispanoamericano, pp. 171-2.

Bolvar to Antonio Jos de Sucre, Magdalena, 12 May 1826, OC II, p. 364, emphasis added.

Pensamiento constitucional hispanoamericano, pp. 173-4.

Ibid., pp. 181-2.

Ibid., pp. 182-3.

Ibid., p. 177.

See: Matthew Brown, Enlightened Reform after Independence: Simn Bolvars Bolivian Constitution in Gabriel Paquette, ed. Enlightened Reform in Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750-1830 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 339-60 and Helg, Liberty and Equality, pp. 195-236.

The classic source here is Salvador de Madariaga, Bolvar (Mexico City: Editorial Hermes, 1951); see also Vctor Andrs Belaunde, Bolvar and the Political Thought of the Spanish American Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938) for a more balanced presentation which nonetheless presents the Bolivian Constitution as a product of Bolvars late decadence, p. 232.

Ibid., p. 175, original emphasis removed.

Ibid., p. 177. By first minister, Bolvar seems to have had in mind the Secretary of State. When he wrote, the last four presidents had been John Quincy Adams, who was secretary of state to his predecessor James Monroe, who was secretary of state to his predecessor James Madison, who was secretary of state to his predecessor Thomas Jefferson, himself secretary of state to his predecessor, once removed, George Washington.

Ibid., pp. 178-9.

Ibid., p. 175, original emphasis removed.

The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter VII in Victor Gourevitch, ed. The Social Contract and other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 71.

See: Luis Castro Leiva, La Gran Colombia: Una Illusin Ilustrada (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1985) and Jos Antonio Aguilar Rivera, En Pos de la Quimera: Reflexiones sobre el Experimento Constitucional Atlntico (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 2000), p. 174.

Memoria dirigida a los ciudadanos de la Nueva Granada Cartagena de Indias, 15 December 1812. OC III pp. 541-4, emphasis added.

Ibid., pp. 545-6.

See: Simon Collier, Nationality, Nationalism, and Supranationalism in the Writings of Simn Bolvar The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 63, No. 1 (1983), pp. 37-64.

Contestacin de un Americano Meridional Kingston, 6 September 1815. OC I, p. 169.

Ibid., p. 171. The indigenous inhabitants of the Goajira Peninsula, which forms the extreme northern part of the border between present-day Venezuela and Colombia, were never fully subjugated by the Spanish. That Bolvar singles out this region for special mention demonstrates, as well as any part of the passage, the continuity of his imperial thinking with that of the former regime.

Discurso pronuciado Ante el Congreso de Angostura 15 February 1819, OC III, p. 696.

By convention, historians refer to this political entity, encompassing present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador, as Gran Colombia. For an English translation of the text of the Colombian Constitution of 1821, see: William M. Gibson, The Constitutions of Colombia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1948).

Credencial a favor de Sucre, 21 January 1821. OC III pp. 711-712.

A los Colombianos del Sur!, Cali, 17 January 1822. OC III p. 722.

See: John H. Elliott, A Europe of Composite Monarchies Past and Present, No. 137 (1992), pp. 48-71; Guerra, Modernidad y Independencias.

See: Suzanne Lalonde, Determining Boundaries in a Conflicted World: The Role of Uti Possidetis (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002), pp. 24-60.

Bolvar to Francisco de Paula Santander, Lima, 11 September 1823. OC I, pp. 803.

Bolvar to Francisco de Paula Santander, Lima, 12-14 March 1823. OC I, pp. 724-7.

Bolvar to Antonio Jos de Sucre, Magdalena, 12 May 1826, OC II, pp. 363-6.

See: Bushnell, The Santander Regime, pp. 15-17.

See: Belaunde, Simn Bolvar, pp. 235-40.

Bolvar to Antonio Jos de Sucre, Magdalena, 12 May 1826, OC II, p. 364.

Invitacion al Congreso de Panam , 7 December 1824, OC III, p. 738-40.

Collier, Nationality, Nationalism, and Supranationalism, p. 51.

Un Pensamiento Sobre el Congreso de Panam, undated, OC III, p. 756-7.

Ibid., p. 757.

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). See also Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern.

Bailyn, Ideological Origins, pp. 66-77.

The Federalist No. 1, in Terence Ball, ed. The Federalist with Letters of Brutus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2003), p. 1.

The Federalist No. 11, Ibid., p. 52.

Wood, Creation of the American Republic, p. 89.

Alexander Hamilton, Plan of Government, in Writings, ed. Joanne Freeman (New York: Library of America, 2001), pp. 149-59.

The Federalist No. 10 in Ball, ed., The Federalist, p. 44.

See: Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

See: William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels who Challenged Americas Newfound Sovereignty (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).

The Federalist Nos. 6 and 51, Ibid..

For economizing on virtue see Bruce Ackerman We The People: Foundations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 198-9; see also: Wood Creation of the American Republic, pp. 428-467.

Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination, pp. 133-153.

Wood, Creation of the American Republic, p. 495.

Discurso pronuciado Ante el Congreso de Angostura 15 February 1819, OC III, pp. 676-7.

See: Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 47-65. For an excellent recent work which describes the British North American Revolution using a closely related term settler revolution see: Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

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