UCI Department of History: FACULTY

My work seeks to explain Spanish America's failure to modernize in the early nineteenth century. At the time Western Europe and the United States were being transformed into modern industrial societies, the newly independent nations of Spanish America were crippled by economic depression and extreme political instability. Scholars generally have argued that this failure to modernize stemmed from the feudal Spanish colonial structure which did not prepare Spanish Americans for self-government. According to this view, after independence Spanish American leaders rejected colonial traditions and adopted foreign systems of government unsuited to their nations' needs, causing Spanish America's nineteenth-century crisis.

I examined some of the problems of nation-building in Spanish America in a series of studies and concluded that independence was not a sharp break with the past and that Spanish American leaders had not blindly accepted alien forms of government. Instead, I demonstrated the continuity of the Spanish and Spanish American reform tradition and its influence upon the leaders of the new countries. With Colin M. MacLachlan, I examined Mexico;s colonial epoch to test the validity of the neo-feudal thesis. We concluded that colonial Mexico had not been a feudal but a capitalist society; that the region developed a complex, balanced, and integrated economy which transformed it into the most dynamic part of the Spanish empire; and that it was one of the few regions in the world where recently, I reexamined the process of Spanish American independence concluding that it did not constitute an anticolonial movement, as many assert, but formed part both of the revolution within the Spanish world and the dissolution of the Spanish Monarchy. Indeed, Spain was one of the new nations that emerged from the breakup of that worldwide polity. The collapse of the Spanish Monarchy following Napoleon's invasion of the Peninsula led to the creation of a parliament, the Cortes, and the Constitution of 1812, which established a representative government for the worldwide Spanish Nation in which all free men, regardless of the race or status, became Spaniards. Despite the unparalleled democratization of the political system, civil war erupted in the New World ultimately shattering the new revolutionary order. As a result of the great political revolution that led to the dissolution of the Spanish Monarchy, however, Spain and the new nations of Spanish America developed a unique political culture.

Currently, I am engaged in two studies of the period 1780 until 1830, one of Mexico--the former Viceroyalty of New Spain--and the other of Ecuador--the former Kingdom of Quito--in an effort to understand how those two very different regions made the transition from kingdoms of the Spanish Monarchy to independent nations.