A revisiting of the independence revolutions as preventive revolutions: effects of “disobedience and equality” in South America at the late 18th century

Abstract

In the critical juncture that is located between 1780 and 1795, a considerable number of social conflicts occurred in a territorial space that covered South America (regions of the Captaincies of Chile and Venezuela, the viceroyalty of Peru, New Granada and the Río de La Plata) and the Caribbean (the French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti), thus a plurality of conflicts presented challenges to the colonial order by subordinate social sectors. Two ideas were triggers for the present communication, one that challenges the historiographic tendency of think of the social movements of the late 18th century not as mere precursors of independence, nor as uprisings against and in response to the eighteenth-century reforms implemented in the colony of La Otra, which were movements that expressed the starting point of a cycle of. revolts against domination and the colonial system that broke out in the situation of 1780-1795, but whose revolutionary potential would be occluded precisely by the Creole/peninsular sectors in the political revolutions of independence and in the institutionality of the new postcolonial order. The revolutions of independence were expressed as preventive acts against, on the one hand, the potential Spanish liberal current and, on the other, those exploited classes capable of subverting the order, not with a spontaneous or unforeseen action but from a collective action and with awareness of their capacity for action. In any case, the Creole revolution was primarily a disciplinary act, disciplining the subaltern rebellion.