![]() Directly in its wake came the massive slave uprising in St Domingue, where the ‘Black Jacobins’ ended slavery in the island and inspired black rebellion from New York to Sao Paolo. ![]() Most important was the French Revolution of 1789 which struck terror into the crowned heads, the religious leaders and the political establishment, and reverberated across the Atlantic. From Europe and North America came the ideas of the Age of Reason. In North America the colonists had revolted against the taxation without representation of the British and fought their war of independence in 1776. Deprived of political representation, these people found themselves with a growing identity but without power.ĭangerous ideas from abroad were knocking at the door of South America. There were the beginnings of manufacturing for export and trade and with it increasing autonomy from the centres of Spanish colonial rule. A creole (American born) faction had considerable wealth with some European and university learning and commercial links, especially with the British West Indies. There was also dissent among the local elite. There was a Spanish elite in charge, from the mainland and sometimes from the Canaries, with its local royalist collaborators. This was done mainly through imported black and indigenous labour, which was inefficient in production and low in consumption. ![]() ![]() Its economic function was, in the words of Simon Bolivar, ‘to satisfy the insatiable greed of Spain’ through the export of primary products from agriculture and mining. The Spanish Bourbon state had reasserted a heavy-handed control of its colonial possessions in South America. Spanish America at the turn of the 19th century was a society under pressure and ripe for change. It also reveals the political ideas of Bolivar’s generation and the eventual failure of his project in his own time. It is an excellent and exhaustive account of his career, especially the military campaigns. John Lynch’s new biography, Simon Bolivar: A Life, is very significant, being the first major work about him in English in decades. These were fundamentally important in Spanish America, but translate into the 21st century only with considerable difficulty. The legacy of Bolivar is key to the rhetoric of Chavez’s government in Venezuela, yet in reality little is known of his real life or his political ideas. ‘One cannot speak calmly of someone who never lived in peace of Bolivar one can speak with a mountain as a rostrum, or in the midst of thunder and lightning, or with a bunch of free peoples in one’s grip and the tyranny beheaded at one’s feet!’ The second quote is from the hero of Cuban nationalism, Jose Marti: ‘Those who studied Bolivar feel at the end of their task the same reverence one feels on leaving a sacred place, where the spirit has been under the influence of the supernatural and the sublime.’ The foreword is two quotes, one from historian Guillermo Sherwel: ![]() It is in English and for free distribution. The Communication and Information Ministry of the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela has recently published a short pamphlet called Simon Bolivar: Liberator of Nations, Homeland Creator. A review of John Lynch, Simon Bolivar: A Life (Yale University Press, 2006), £25 ![]()
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