Colombia's Military and Brazil's Monarchy: Undermining the Republican Foundations of South American Independence

This important new study relates the origin of the decline of republican politics in South America to the existence of monarchic rule in Brazil. Millington suggests that if the European-oriented monarchy in Brazil had been overthrown at the time of independence—something that the South American republics, led by Colombian power, had within their power to accomplish—the independence movements in Spanish South America would have been able to collaborate with emergent republican forces in Brazil in the construction of a continental, American-style system. By failing to challenge the monarchy in Brazil, the South American republics lost an important opportunity to disavow European-oriented principles of elitism in the New World.