Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Seven Years' War (1756–63), sometimes described as the first global war, left the belligerent powers with an enormous burden of debt. Like the British and French, Spain's rulers reacted by decreeing a series of controversial new measures to raise revenue and revamp administrative structures. Designed to strengthen the Spanish empire, the Bourbon Reforms (named after the ruling family) wound up weakening it. “War is the mother of revolution,” Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) noted at the end of World War I. The same may be said of the events leading to the struggle for independence of Spanish colonies and the formation of the Bolivian republic. The crown created Creole army units and expanded the colonial militias, many of whose officers and men would join the independence struggle. It separated Upper Peru from the Viceroyalty of Peru and made it part of a new Viceroyalty governed from Buenos Aires. It created a new layer of colonial administrators ( intendants ), mainly Spanish-born peninsulares , seemingly limiting the upward mobility of Creole elites. And it launched a limited liberalization of trade while blocking local entrepreneurs from pushing through commercial policies designed to further their own interests. It was the Napoleonic Wars that brought the latent conflicts to the surface and rang the death knell of Spanish rule. In 1808 Napoleon deposed ... log in or subscribe to read full text