On 19 March 1812, after much deliberation, the Spanish parliament, the Cortes, promulgated Spain’s first written constitution, the celebrated Constitution of Cádiz.1 Seen in the context of the Age of Revolutions, a time when political revolutions in the Thirteen Colonies, France, and Haiti were accompanied by written constitutions, the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz was not exactly at the vanguard of the Atlantic world. Nonetheless, the importance and peculiarity of this constitution lay not in the content or nature of the document but in who was involved in its design. The constitution of the United States of America, the many French constitutions during the revolutionary period, and the various Haitian constitutions written beginning in 1801 were primarily a product of one hemisphere or the other, but not both. In contrast, Spain’s Constitution of 1812 came about as a result of an imperial parliament with deputies representing the multiplicity of territories of Spain’s oceanic empire.

This introductory chapter offers a synthetic approach to the current state of the field of study about Latin American independence and outlines the Companion’s contributions to that field. It does so by presenting a historical narrative of the process of independence to frame the Companion’s chapters and their specific thematic approaches to the intellectual, social, political, and economic changes brought about by the independence of Brazil and Spanish American in the nineteenth century.

In the spring of 2015, I found myself standing outside the walls that led to a courtyard in front of a local church. The doors were supposed to be open according to the hours provided by the tourist office; after waiting a while, I went in search of help. Around the corner was a municipal library, where a librarian offered assistance. As he attempted to find more up-to-date information about the church (which was in the custody of a confraternity), he asked: “Why do you want to go inside the church?” I told him that I was writing a book about black saints and that I wanted to see the image of Benedict of Palermo inside. Before I finished talking, the man began shaking his head: “No, no, no, there is no black saint in that church.