This book offers a fresh and comprehensive look at the creation of the South American states that broke away from the Spanish Empire.

Five distinguished historians from Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Colombia unite to explore the complex reality of independence and early republic formation. With a regional purview spanning the Andean regions, Caribbean coast, and Río de la Plata territories, the book focuses on the vast South American territory where the Spanish crown dominated. It explores and examines independence as well as the process through which new republics were created without naturalising the nation-states that exist today. The five chapters that make up this volume reveal the diverse experiments carried out through the period and show how these republics emerged from repeated trial and error. This perspective allows for the complexity of these processes to shine through.

This book will be of interest to the wide community of students and scholars working on independence and the revolutionary era in the Americas and the Atlantic world.

Natalia Sobrevilla Perea is a researcher at the Instituto Riva Agüero, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru. She was Professor of Latin American History at the University of Kent and from 2015 to 2018 led an international network of scholars researching the wars of independence.