An intellectual and cultural history which examines the process of national identity formation in a foreign environment, this dissertation argues that Great Britain provided more than just military backing, commercial opportunities and financial support to Spanish American independence leaders, it also offered a powerful social and cultural model for the construction of post-independent nationhood. Francisco de Miranda and Andres Bello emerge as the central figures of London's Spanish American community. Through their house on Grafton Street passed virtually all the major military and intellectual figures of the three creole movements for independence: Bernardo O'Higgins, Simon de Bolivar, Jose de San Martin, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Bernardino Rivadavia, Antonio Jose de Irisarri, Vicente Rocafuerte, Juan Garcia del Rio, Agustin de Iturbide, Jose Joaquin de Olmedo, Miguel Garcia Granados and many others. London was the nexus at which members of Spanish America's regional independence movements first met each other; it was there that they discovered their common interests and began to work together on projects that concerned them all. Furthermore, these Spanish Americans sought advice and assistance from important British reformers including Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce and Joseph Lancaster whose ideas all contributed to the intellectual and cultural milieu that produced a particular type of creole Americanism It is important that Spanish America's independence leaders began to imagine their future societies while residing in dynamic, Anglican, industrial Britain during the Napoleonic era. Besides its overwhelming material culture, England's historical position as the enemy of both Spain and revolutionary France allowed Spanish Americans of the era to reject both their colonial heritage and Jacobin-style social revolution by providing them with a positive alternative model. Education, constitutions, laws, a free press, public opinion, History, language, patriotic civic culture and the idea of usefulness to the nation emerge as the central themes of interest to this generation. This dissertation is the first to examine Latin American national identity as a product of foreign residence and treats this group as a coherent, unified intellectual generation / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_25528 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Contributors | Racine, karen Louise (Author), Yeager, G. M (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
Page generated in 0.0098 seconds