It is difficult to make sense of the cultural history of Latin America in the nineteenth century without an understanding of the age of revolutionary struggle and independence with which it begins. This would be true even if the Latin American experience at the time had not itself been so firmly inserted within the context of international events following the revolutions of 1776 and 1789, the incipient industrial revolution in Europe and the spread of liberalism following the century of enlightenment. The historical transition from European colony to independent republic (or, in the case of Brazil, from colony to independent empire), corresponds broadly to the beginning of a transition from neo-classicism, which itself had only recently replaced the baroque, to romanticism in the arts. Triumphant romanticism is the characteristic mode of the new era, particularly in literature – though the continuing influence of neo-classicism in the other arts, especially painting and architecture, is much more persistent than is generally appreciated. Hugo's equation of liberalism in politics with romanticism in literature applies more forcefully, though even more contradictorily, in Latin America than in Europe, where much of the romantic impulse was in reality an aristocratic nostalgia for the pre-scientific, pre-industrial world. This brings the historian, at the outset, up against an enduring problem in using labels for the arts in Latin American cultural history. Terms such as neo-classicism and romanticism are often inaccurate approximations even in Europe where they originated, yet critics frequently assume that they designate entire historical periods of artistic development, rather than denote the formal and conceptual contradictions of historical processes as these are reproduced in art.