A New World of Revolutions

Popular Imaginations and Movements across the Americas

Arturo Chang

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9780691283623
  9780691280998
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691286648
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The hemispheric politics that shaped popular revolutions against European colonial rule

In A New World of Revolutions, Arturo Chang reconstructs the histories, politics, and legacies of the Age of Revolutions (c. 1770–1850) from the vantage point of popular movements in the Americas. Challenging narratives that center the nation-state, Chang emphasizes the hemispheric politics, practices, and cultural production that connected revolutionary movements from the United States to Argentina. He draws on marching songs, poems, pamphlets, manifestos, plays, proclamations, constitutions, and other archival objects to show that hemispheric imaginaries were critical to the development of postcolonial republicanism in the Americas.

Chang shows that marginalized groups, especially Indigenous, Mestizo, and Pardo communities, contributed to and benefitted from narratives of American emancipation. Armed with hemispheric discourses, they were able to argue for such egalitarian reforms as the abolition of slavery, the elimination of colonial tribute, the protection of Indigenous lands, the end of the Spanish caste system, and the establishment of civic equality. Countering assumptions that actors in popular movements followed elite leaders or had little to say during moments of revolutionary change, Chang shows how each of these campaigns influenced republican principles in ways that reflected their own cultures and histories—and how each produced concrete interventions in the legal, social, and material realities of their communities. Chang links popular movements in New Spain (Mexico), the United States, New Granada (Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador), and the postcolonial Andes (Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina), arguing that, together, they constituted an American tradition of resistance against European rule.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Popular Imaginations and Hemispheric Attachments in the Age of Revolutions
• Chapter 1: The Anáhuac Republic: Indigenous Genealogies and Restorative Revolution in Postcolonial México
• Chapter 2: The Republicans of Nacogdoches: Anti- and Neocolonial Politics from Filadelfia to San Antonio de Béxar
• Chapter 3: Taxonomies of Citizenship: Variegated Republicanism and Racial Emancipation in New Granada
• Chapter 4: Naming the Postcolonial Public: Indigenous Sovereignty, Hemispheric Assimilation, and Citizenship in the Andes
• Conclusion: Colonial Legacies and the Study of “Failed” Movements
• Notes
• References
• Index