The American Revolution and Latin America: An Essay in Imagery, Perceptions, and Ideological Influence

In: Journal of Interamerican studies and world affairs, Band 20, Heft 4, S. 421-441

Abstract

In 1929 the British scholar, Cecil Jane, published his classic,Liberty and Despotism in Spanish America. In it he wrote:The War of Independence was neither anti-Spanish nor non- Spanish. It was not the outcome of the spread of ideas recently imported from Europe or of some sudden awakening of political life, produced by the reception of eighteenth-century philosophic theories or by such events as the successful revolt of the English colonies in North America and the French Revolution [Jane, 1966: 81].Instead, Jane (1966: 79) argued that the War of Independence was an attempt to realize the most deeply felt ideals, "which were derived not from any external sources, but from the very hearts of the people." Similarly he argued that the political conceptions of Spanish Americans were (and continued to be) Spanish, not Anglo-Saxon, and he strongly suggested that the example of the British North Americans exerted little if any influence on the Spanish Americans of the nineteenth century. Jane (1966: 111-112, 168-172) also attacked with thinly veiled contempt the idea that the salvation of Latin America lay in emulating England or the United States.