* Includes primary source documents to illustrate major themes and provoke discussion * Covers the most recent scholarship on the social, cultural, gendered and subaltern histories of the period * Incorporates the voices of women, indigenous people, and Afro-Latinos

* Includes primary source documents to illustrate major themes and provoke discussion * Covers the most recent scholarship on the social, cultural, gendered and subaltern histories of the period * Incorporates the voices of women, indigenous people, and Afro-Latinos

In this debut work, Scott Eastman tackles the complex issue of nationalism in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish Atlantic empire. Preaching Spanish Nationalism across the Hispanic Atlantic challenges the idea that nationalism arose from the ashes of confessional society. Rather, the tenets of Roman Catholicism and the ideals of Enlightenment worked together to lay the basis for a "mixed modernity" within the territories of the Spanish monarchy.

Drawing on sermons, catechisms, political pamphlets, and newspapers, Eastman demonstrates how religion and tradition cohered within burgeoning nationalist discourses in both Spain and Mexico. And though the inclusive notion of Spanish nationalism faded as the revolutions in the Hispanic Atlantic world established new loyalty to postcolonial states, the religious imagery and rhetoric that had served to define Spanish identity survived and resurfaced throughout the course of the long nineteenth century.

Preaching Spanish Nationalism across the Hispanic Atlantic skillfully debates the prevailing view that the monolithic Catholic Church -- as the symbol of the ancien r?gime -- subverted a secular progression toward nationalism and modernity. Eastman deftly contends that the common political and religious culture of the Spanish Atlantic empire ultimately transformed its subjects into citizens of the Hispanic Atlantic world.

A Missionary Nation focuses on Spain's crusade to resurrect its empire, beginning with the so-called War of Africa. Fought in Morocco between 1859 and 1860, the campaign involved more than forty-five thousand troops and led to a long-lasting Spanish engagement in North Africa. With popular support, the government backed French invasions of Indochina and Mexico, and many veteran soldiers from the African war were reenlisted in the brutal and protracted conflict following the reannexation of the Dominican Republic in 1861. In addition, expeditions to West Africa built a colonial presence in and around the island of Fernando Po. Few works in English have examined the impact of these nineteenth-century imperial ventures on Spanish identity, notions of race, and culture. Agents of empire-from journalists and diplomats to soldiers, spies, and clerics-took up the mantle of the "civilizing mission" and pushed back against those who resisted militarized occupations. In turn, a gendered, racialized rhetoric became a linchpin of Spain's growing involvement in North Africa and the Caribbean in the 1850s and 1860s. A Missionary Nation interrogates the legacy of Hispanic identities from multiple axes, as former colonies were annexed and others were occupied, tying together strands of European, Mediterranean, and Atlantic histories in the second age of global imperialism. It challenges the prevailing notion that secular ideologies alone informed imperial narratives in Europe. Liberal Spain attempted to reconstruct its great empire of old, but the entangled issues of nationalism, race, and religion frustrated its efforts.

In recent years, the historiography of nineteenth-century Spain and Latin America has been invigorated by interdisciplinary engagement with scholars working on topics such as empire, slavery, abolition, race, identity, and captivity. No scholar better exemplified these developments than Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, a specialist on Spain and its Caribbean colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico. A brilliant career was cut short in 2015 when he died at the age of 48. Rethinking Atlantic Empire takes Schmidt-Nowara's work as a point of departure, charting scholarly paths that move past reductive national narratives and embrace transnational approaches to the entangled empires of the Atlantic world.

In March 1812, while Napoleon's brother Joseph sat on the throne of Spain and the armies of France occupied much of the country, legislators elected from Spain and its overseas territories met in the Andalusian city of Cadiz. There, as the cornerstone of a government in exile, they drafted and adopted the first liberal constitution in the Hispanic world, a document that became known as the Cadiz Constitution of 1812.
The 1812 Constitution was extremely influential in and beyond Europe, and this collection of essays explores how its enduring legacy not only shaped the history of state-building, elections, and municipal governance in Iberian America, but also affected national identities and citizenship as well as the development of race and gender in the region.
A bold blueprint for governing a global, heterogeneous monarchy, the Constitution represented a rupture with Spain's "Antiguo Regimen" (Old Regime) in numerous ways--in the limits it placed on the previously autocratic Bourbon monarchs, in the admission to its governing bodies of deputies from Spain's American viceroyalties as equals, and in its framers' vociferous debate over the status of "castas" (those of mixed ancestry) and slaves. "The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World" covers these issues and adopts a transatlantic perspective that recovers the voices of those who created a vibrant political culture accessible to commoners and elite alike.
The bicentenary of the Constitution of 1812 offers scholars an excellent moment to reexamine the form and role of constitutions across the Spanish-speaking world. Constitutionalism remains a topic of intense debate in Latin America, while contemporary Spain itself continues to seek ways to balance a strong central government with centripetal forces in its regions, notably the Basque and Catalan provinces. The multifaceted essays compiled here by Scott Eastman and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea both shed new light on the early, liberal Hispanic societies and show how the legacies of those societies shape modern Spain and Latin America.