Chapter 1 opens with a description of the different peoples of the Americas in 1492 and the earliest contacts with Europeans, and outlines the process of Spanish penetration and settlement. It then explores indigenous reactions to Europeans at first contact, and analyzes the roots of the apotheosis of Europeans in Spanish America, arguing that it is misleading to distinguish too sharply between religious and rational considerations, and indicating that native peoples did not bow before the strangers as gods. The chapter then shifts the focus to the intellectual framework employed by Europeans to situate native peoples within a European worldview (European Mythology of the Indies I). Europeans interpreted indigenous peoples according to their own mythological concepts, such as the myth of the Earthly Paradise, the myth of the Reconquest of Jerusalem, the myth of the Marvelous East, and the myths of the Classical Tradition. The chapter ends with a summary of Spanish expansion into the Pacific.

The revolutionary processes that led to the dissolution of the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas formed an entangled process. The states that emerged from these processes built their new national identities around the heroes and the deeds of the independence period from roughly 1760-1830. These hero myths are still important markers of identity today. The chapter explores the main interpretations of Spanish American independence, presents conflicting periodizations, and then discusses the events from the crisis of the empire, colonial reactions to the different phases of independence (1810-1814 and 1814-1830). Finally, it demonstrates that many revolutionary promises remained unfulfilled. Everywhere in the Spanish possessions the motivation for revolution was the problem of legitimacy arising from the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. The individual experiences of revolution, however, were very different and ranged from popular uprisings to elite-led exchanges of ruling oligarchies. The ethnic dimension, which overlapped with the social problem, was a unique feature of the Spanish American revolutions of independence. It contributed to boosting the ideas of freedom, equality and self-determination. Until 1830 and long after, this explosive force could not yet unfold. What remained was the promise of the revolution.

The reinstallation of liberal constitutionalism in Spain in 1820 was the first major challenge to the conservative political system of the Restoration, with far-reaching effects on the European and American continents. Spanish liberals endeavored to continue a political program based on the constitution of Cádiz (1812), although they encountered many obstacles in the form of inner discord and, especially, a local robust counterrevolutionary movement which enjoyed external support. The Trieno Constitucional was a moment of rapid and intense politicization, which surpassed the social elites to reach into a wider public that included popular sectors. A vigorous public opinion was developed and elections with mass participation were held at various administrative levels. The reverberations of the Spanish revolution were felt abroad. Naples-Sicily, Portugal and Piedmont-Sardinia soon adopted the Cádiz constitution. Moreover, during the Triennium the American possessions of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies secured their independence, at a critical moment in which the Iberian metropoles were unable to delay the process anymore. Ultimately, the return of liberalism to Southern Europe was short-lived. The constitutional regimes fell after interventions accorded by the continental powers endorsed the local reactionary interests.

It is habitual among scholars to suggest that European nations were formed during, and to some degree because of, the colonial expansion.1 Many argue that this expansion, which placed colonizers in opposition to the natives they sought to control, to other Europeans with whom they competed, and to the large African population that they enslaved, led to the emergence of new identities. In the Spanish case, it enabled the move from multiple local distinctions to a unitary national designation, allowing individuals originating from the different Iberian kingdoms (Castile, Navarre, Aragón, and so forth) to assume a single identity as Spaniards. While some scholars pointed to the formation of nations (or proto-nations), others concluded that the colonial experience led Europeans to think of themselves as participants in a community, members of which belonged to a particular race. Imagining themselves to be distinct from both natives and Africans, these Europeans refashioned themselves as “white.”2