This book takes a bold new look at both Spain's and Portugal's New World empires in a trans-Atlantic context. It argues that modern notions of sovereignty in the Atlantic world have been unstable, contested, and equivocal from the start. It shows how much contemporary notions of sovereignty emerged in the Americas as a response to European imperial crises in the age of revolutions. Jeremy Adelman reveals how many modern-day uncertainties about property, citizenship, and human rights were forged in an epic contest over the very nature of state power in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic offers a new understanding of Latin American and Atlantic history, one that blurs traditional distinctions between the "imperial" and the "colonial." It shows how the Spanish and Portuguese empires responded to the pressures of rival states and merchant capitalism in the eighteenth century. As empires adapted, the ties between colonies and mother countries transformed, recreating trans-Atlantic bonds of loyalty and interests. In the end, colonies repudiated their Iberian loyalties not so much because they sought independent nationhood. Rather, as European conflicts and revolutions swept across the Atlantic, empires were no longer viable models of sovereignty--and there was less to be loyal to. The Old Regimes collapsed before subjects began to imagine new ones in their place. The emergence of Latin American nations--indeed many of our contemporary notions of sovereignty--was the effect, and not the cause, of the breakdown of European empires.

"Adelman's book is based on his mastery of the extensive secondary literature on the political economy of the empires of Spain and Portugal and his own research in the archives of both empires. This is Atlantic history as it should be written, with an eye to small detail and an ability to reconstruct the broad sweep of history over a vast area."--Stuart Schwartz, Yale University

"A splendid book. Jeremy Adelman's stimulating and important work should shake up the study of nationalism, while contributing to a recent body of scholarship that emphasizes the long-lasting importance of empire."--Frederick Cooper, New York University, author of Colonialism in Question

"Jeremy Adelman has written a book of impressive architecture, offering a broadly researched and sophisticated interpretation of the independence era in Spanish South America and Brazil. Adelman's innovative interpretation is likely to spark a lively debate on ways of understanding the independence process in Latin America."--Frank Safford, Northwestern University