Old Iron-Arse

Simon Collier

• Liberators: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, 1810-30 by Robert Harvey
  Murray, 561 pp, £25.00, May 2000, ISBN 0 7195 5566 3

Nine years from now there will be a longish round of spectacular jamborees in Latin America, as its various nations celebrate the bicentenaries of their independence from the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. The cycle will begin in 2010, two hundred years after the opening shots in the Spanish American wars of independence were fired on the bleak plateau of what is now Bolivia. It will end in 2025, with the bicentenary of the end of the wars and the independence of Bolivia. Robert Harvey’s splendid book gives us the first large-scale narrative of Latin America’s struggle for independence in English since – well, when exactly? It is hard to think of any comparable attempt to come to grips with the whole vast story, and in such vivid detail. Bits of it, of course, have been well written up before: there were some grand, spacious narratives by Latin American historians in the 19th century, and there was plenty of scholarly spadework in the 20th. But nobody in recent times, as far as I can recall, has tackled the story in Harvey’s way – as a drama of epic proportions.