The Ideology of Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought

Problems of International Politics

by Joshua Simon

The American and Latin American independence movements emerged from distinctive settings and produced divergent results, but they were animated by similar ideas. Patriotic political theorists throughout the Americas offered analogous critiques of imperial rule, designed comparable constitutions, and expressed common ambitions for their new nations' future relations with one another and the rest of the world. This book adopts a hemispheric perspective on the revolutions that liberated the United States and Spanish America, offering a new interpretation of their most important political ideas. Simon argues that the many points of agreement among various revolutionary political theorists across the Americas can be attributed to the problems they encountered in common as Creoles - that is, as the descendants of European settlers born in the Americas. He illustrates this by comparing the political thought of three Creole Alexander Hamilton of the United States, Simón Bolívar of Venezuela, and Lucas Alamán of Mexico.

Genres: History

284 pages, Hardcover

Published June 7, 2017

Reviews

[JRT · Rating 3 out of 5]

The "American Revolution" is often held up as part of what makes the United States "exceptional." But as author Joshua Simon shows in this detail comparative history, its philosophical underpinnings and ideologies were strikingly similar to the other so-called "Creole Revolutions" that took place throughout the Western Hemisphere during that period. Simon contends that all of the revolutions led by "Creoles" (i.e. descendants of European--in this case English and Spanish--settlers born in the Americas) were based upon the peculiar position of these individuals within their particular settler-colonial society. Put another way, these Creoles were both semi-subjugated colonial subjects of specific European empires, and ultra-oppressive settler-colonizers of Indigenous land and African labor. This colonizer-colonized social position animated the Creole revolutionaries' desire to both break the yoke of European domination, while at the same time maintaining their own white supremacist position in their colonial societies. Simon calls this contradictory but revolutionary dichotomy "anti-imperial imperialism."

Throughout the book, Simon analyzes the ideas and works of three different Creole revolutionaries from different parts of colonial America--Alexander Hamilton, Simon Bolivar, and Lucas Alaman. He shows how their positions as Creoles led to them all proffering astoundingly similar forms of post-independence constitutional governance--governance that was intended to both ensure Creole independence from external forces, and Creole domination over internal threats. In reading the comparative accounts of post-independence statecraft, I was struck by just how systematically anti-democratic each Creole revolution was. In the United States, South America, and Mexico, each post-independent state sought to consolidate Creole rule by severely limiting voting rights and popular rule, centralizing power, and expanding borders via imperialism. It is no wonder that in each corner of the Western Hemisphere, social and racial stratification and limited "democracy" still exists.

Simon concludes the book with an analysis of why the United States was able to "succeed" in its statecraft, while South America and Mexico was not. His answer is somewhat confounding and incomplete (he essentially says it was "good fortune"). Further, while the book was explicitly about Creoles (i.e. whites), more could have been done to shed light on the central history of Indigenous dispossession and African enslavement on the formation of these "post-colonial" societies. Nevertheless, Simon does a good job showing the various commonalities between these Creole-bourgeoisie revolutionary projects, adding a valuable account to the history of modern Western Hemispheric statecraft.