Emerging States

This chapter explores the complicated pressures under which new states emerged in Spanish and Portuguese mainland America and in Haiti and Santo Domingo, and shows that a commitment to establishing constitutional rule and representative government persisted through many discouraging circumstances—though these circumstances ensured that constitutions and representative systems were constantly challenged and often proved fragile. Armed conflicts associated with the initial struggle to establish independence, clashes of political vision and personal rivalries, and tensions between powerholders at the center and their critics in the localities combined to make new states difficult to stabilize. The chapter surveys the powers they did amass and how legislative power was deployed, but stresses that power in practice remained heavily dependent on cooperation from the localities: a context in which it made sense to build broad-based political alliances, even if that was not always achieved.