Bringing together experts across Latin America, North America, and Spain, The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence innovatively revisits Latin American independence within a larger regional, temporal, and thematic framework to highlight its significance for the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The volume offers a synthetic yet comprehensive tool for understanding and assessing the most current studies in the field and their analytical contributions to the broader historiography. Organized thematically and across different regions of the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish and Luso America, the essays deepen well-known conclusions and reveal new interpretations. They offer analytical interventions that produce new questions on periodization, the meaning of anti-colonialism, liberalism, and republicanism, as well as the militarization of societies, public opinion, the role of sciences, labor regimes, and gender dynamics. A much-needed addition to the existing scholarship, this volume brings a transnational perspective to a critical period of history in Latin America.

‘A truly essential companion, this book permeates the mutual isolation between Luso-Brazilian and Spanish-American historiography, reconnects the crisis of 1808 with the processes of the 18th century, and illuminates intellectual, political, military, commercial, and labor relations that intertwined local dynamics with global trends, actors of both genders and varied fields, and narratives of past and future.’

Margarita Garrido - author of Reclamos y representaciones: variaciones sobre la poliìtica en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1770–1815

‘The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence is a wide-ranging and innovative set of essays written by excellent historians. These essays both synthesize the most recent scholarship on the period and launch incisive new questions on many topics.’

Peter Francis Guardino - author of The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850

‘This is a refreshing and energizing companion to the study of Latin American independence. By challenging inherited approaches, raising new questions and making connections and comparisons across both time and space, its authors provide fresh perspectives on key questions and offer an indispensable point of departure for future debate on the origins, character and meaning of the transition from colonial rule. Highly recommended.’

Anthony McFarlane - author of War and Independence in Spanish America

‘This timely volume offers new insights into the history of Latin American independence, a vigorous field of study that has recently experienced path-breaking innovations in perspectives and interpretations. The editors have pulled together a prominent group of international scholars who tread new historiographical grounds on different aspects of that multidimensional historical process.’

Hilda Sabato - author of Republics of the New World: The Revolutionary Political Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Latin America