This chapter offers a narrative and an analysis of the process of independence in Brazil between 1807 and 1831 from a general perspective, but with a still little-known focus: the influences this process received from Spanish America, which, during the same period, was also becoming independent. The narrative follows the flow of the most relevant political and social events in both realms, revealing how Spanish America as a whole and its many regions in particular were “read” in Brazil, and how the country created its political options, among other factors, from its continental neighborhood, then becoming independent from Portugal and starting its formation as a sovereign state and nation. Far from the traditional – and still current – idea of Brazil as an exception in the American context of the nineteenth century, the ways in which Brazil and Spanish America shared a scenario and historical unity are shown, which cannot be properly understood separately. In addition to that, the drawing of this common plot will be developed with a general description of the inverse movement, lesser known in the historiography, i.e., of how Brazilian independency impacted parts of Spanish America.

City-republics have traditionally served as exemplars of participatory government. Their bottom-up organization would seem to suggest an alternative path to representative emergence. The three chapters of Part II address this challenge of equifinality; this chapter does so in two ways. First, it points out that republics are different forms of governance than representative polities, as they eschew a central executive and don't involve the integration of varied social groups. Second, despite such differences, republics and municipal governance can also be shown to reflect the basic logic of this book, as they were preceded by a period of centralized rule under conditional relations. These enabled the institutional learning that was necessary for participatory institutions to consolidate. The absence of an executive, however, also meant that they did not survive over the long term. These points are demonstrated by an examination of Italian city-states and of the Low Countries. Both Flanders and Holland had a thriving urban sector, but they retained their participatory institutions longer because the exective authority of the count was comparatively greater. The Swiss Cantons are briefly considered. The role of trade emerges as endogenous to political organization.

This chapter looks at elective monarchy and also the way dynasties interacted with powers of a non-dynastic nature. The papacy is a notable example of elective monarchy but the most important case of elective kingship is the Holy Roman Empire, where the long-term dynasties of the tenth to thirteenth centuries never completely eroded the elective principle, and where the later Middle Ages saw seven different dynasties in power. Although the Church offered the chance of ecclesiastical office to members of the aristocracy throughout Europe, the ruling dynasties did not follow their practice of placing younger sons in the Church to any extent, though royal women were placed in monasteries. Republics, though rare, could be found in Venice and Iceland, and embryonic republican institutions arose in many of the larger cities, and this often led to conflict between towns and their nominal dynastic overlords, notably in the case of the Holy Roman Emperors and the Lombard Leagues of northern Italy. Relations might also be tense between dynasties and the kingdoms they ruled, where the community of the realm, perhaps organized in representative estates, might well decide it had its own interests distinct from and possibly antagonistic to its dynastic sovereigns.