What social and political factors led to the independence of spanish america and portugese brazil?

[Dayne L]

what social and political factors led to the independence of spanish america and portugese brazil? Did 'home rule' mean the same thing for everyone who desired independence? Were the new nations able to reach a consensus after independence was achieved?

[purringscarecrow340]

- These were, however, minor local problems compared to the great rebellions which took place in the early 1780s, when administrative and fiscal reorganisation triggered the uprising of the Comuneros in New Grenada and the insurrection of Tupac Amaru in Peru. Coming at the very moment that Spain was embroiled in a Franco-Spanish alliance on the side of Britain's rebellious colonists, these rebellions naturally aroused fears for the stability and integrity of Spain's empire. It was, however, only in British North America that protests against new policies were converted into a general assault on imperial authority, leading to the overthrow of the colonial state and the rapid transformation of its political structures.

At first, its seems paradoxical that the reformist measures introduced by the British government should have provoked such a serious response in its colonies. Compared to the Bourbon reforms in Spanish America, British policies were relatively innocuous and unambitious. However, because social and political conditions in Anglo-America were very different from those which prevailed in Hispanic America, the impact of imperial reform was more disruptive, and the colonial response was more coherent, co-ordinated and radical.

From its inception, Anglo-American society diverged from the patterns of colonialism laid down by earlier European settlement in the Americas. In the territories of the Iberian powers, colonial settlement rested on the exploitation of non-European peoples in social structures which were both hierarchical and authoritarian. The Spanish-American colonies were created by the conquest of large Amerindian societies, and had developed social and economic structures in which superordinate white minorities dominated a subordinate mass of Indian and mixed-race peasants and workers. In Portuguese Brazil (and later in the Caribbean also), colonial society took another form, distinct from that of Hispanic America, but also divided between a dominant white minority and an exploited mass of people of colour. In Brazil, as in Spanish America, the great estate was a basic cell of social and economic organisation; but in Brazil it was geared to the production of sugar for world markets rather than foodstuffs for domestic markets, and was worked by imported African slave labour rather than semi-servile Indian labour.