Spanish American wars of independence

The Spanish American wars of independence (Spanish: Guerras de Independencia Hispanoamericanas) were a series of conflicts fought across Spanish America during the early 19th century. Beginning shortly after the outbreak of the Peninsular War, the conflicts were fought between Royalists, who favoured rule from a unitary Spanish monarchy, and Patriots, who supported either autonomous constitutional monarchies or independent republics, separated from Spain and each other. These struggles ultimately led to the independence and secession of most of Spanish America from Spanish rule, which, beyond this conflict, resulted in a process of Balkanization in Hispanic America. If defined strictly in terms of military campaigns, the time period in question ranged from the 1809 Battle of Chacaltaya in present-day Bolivia, to the 1829 Battle of Tampico in Mexico.

These conflicts were fought both as irregular warfare and conventional warfare. Some historians claim that the wars began as localized civil wars, that later spread and expanded as secessionist wars to promote general independence from Spanish rule. This independence led to the development of new national boundaries based on the colonial provinces, which would form the future independent countries that constituted contemporary Hispanic America during the early 19th century. Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish rule until the 1898 Spanish–American War.

The conflict resulted in the dissolution of the Spanish Empire in the region and the creation of new states. The new republics abandoned the formal system of the Inquisition and noble titles, but in most of these new countries, slavery was not immediately abolished. Total abolition did not come until the 1850s in most of the Latin American countries. The Criollos of European descent born in the New World, and mestizos, of mixed Indigenous and European heritage, replaced Spanish-born appointees in most political offices. Criollos remained at the top of a social structure that retained some of its traditional features culturally, if not legally. For almost a century thereafter, conservatives and liberals fought to reverse or to deepen the social and political changes unleashed by those rebellions. The Spanish American independences had as a direct consequence the forced displacement of the royalist Spanish population that suffered a forced emigration during the war and later, due to the laws of Expulsion of the Spaniards from the new states in the Americas with the purpose of consolidating their independence.

Events in Spanish America transpired in the wake of the successful Haitian Revolution and transition to independence in Brazil. Brazil's independence in particular shared a common starting point with that of Spanish America, since both conflicts were triggered by Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, which forced the Portuguese royal family to flee to Brazil in 1807. The process of Hispanic American independence took place in the general political and intellectual climate of popular sovereignty that emerged from the Age of Enlightenment that influenced all of the Atlantic Revolutions, including the earlier revolutions in the United States and France. A more direct cause of the Spanish American Wars of Independence were the unique developments occurring within the Kingdom of Spain triggered by the Cortes of Cadiz, concluding with the emergence of the new Spanish American republics in the post-Napoleonic world.