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ranchers. Until the mid-eighteenth century, indeed, they had been the dominant forces in colonial life, but under King Charles III (1759-88) the so-called ‘second reconquest’ had imposed much tighter control on Spain’s American possessions. Control of the military and local government had passed to bureaucrats dispatched from Spain, while a determination to ensure that the empire did more to support the metropolis in financial and economic terms ensured that the criollos found themselves under great pressure on a number of different fronts. A further bone of contention was constituted by the Church: bishops were now Spaniards rather than criollos; the expulsion of the Jesuits from the domains of Charles III came as a heavy blow as the order had recruited very well in the American colonies; and, most recently, moves in the direction of disamortization (see below) had caused considerable economic disruption. Nor were they alone in this: a series of changes in the laws that governed trade between the empire, Spain and the rest of the world left local industries completely unprotected, undermined the position of many local merchant oligarchies and failed to satisfy the desire of planters and ranchers for wider access to the European market. Indeed, local manufactures were positively discouraged: on 17 June 1804Lady Holland, who was at this point living in Madrid, confided to her diary that ‘a cédula had lately been issued ordering all the cotton machines in Spanish America to be burned or destroyed’.19 Finally, all this was buttressed by racial prejudice: European Spaniards looked down on the criollos as a community that had been irremediably tainted by its environment and become genetically, sexually and morally corrupt.

By the early 1800s, then, there was much discontent with Spanish rule, fed by a degree of intellectual and ideological stimulation from the writings of the Enlightenment and the example of the American Revolution (the French example, by contrast, had little impact: from Buenos Aires to Mexico City it seems to have evoked universal horror). But discontent was one thing and revolution quite another. The criollos might have increasingly been conscious of themselves as Americans, but on neither a continental nor a proto-national level was there any semblance of political organization. For the most part, the modern states of Latin America existed in neither map nor imagination, while the native elites were divided by distance and economic interest. Though strained by the pitiful depths to which Spain had slid under the tutelage of Charles IV and Godoy, emotional ties with the metropolis often remained very strong. But, above all, there was the issue of race. The criollos might have outnumbered the peninsulares (i.e. European-born Spaniards) by almost ten to one, but they were themselves outnumbered by the Negroes, Indians and people of mixed race who constituted the vast majority of the population by at least five to one. And they were terrified of them. If Madrid persisted with the sort of policy that had enabled many pardos and mestizos to buy the status of pure whites, what would become of their social predominance? Yet social and economic superiority came at a terrible price: in 1781 a large part of the central Andes had been ravaged by the great Indian revolt of Tupac Amaru, while the fate of the European inhabitants of St Domingue at the hands of the followers of Toussaint L’Ouverture was an object-lesson in the consequences of political disunity. Discontented they might be, but at the moment when Sir Home Popham appeared off Buenos Aires revolt was unthinkable.

By the time of Whitelocke’s surrender, however, all this had changed. Britain’s intervention in the South Atlantic had completely upset the premises on which continued Spanish rule had been based: the criollo oligarchy had discovered that they could assume responsibility for their own fate without at the same time precipitating the end of the world as they knew it. If the British had been resisted, it had been no thanks to the Spanish viceroy: a