Spanish American wars of independence

The Spanish American wars of independence are the numerous wars against Spanish rule in Spanish America with the aim of political independence that take place during the early ninteenth century, after the French invasion of Spain during Europe's Napoleonic Wars.

These conflicts start in 1809 with short-lived governing juntas established in Chuquisaca and Quito in opposing the government of the Supreme Central Junta of Seville.

In 1810, numerous new juntas appear across the Spanish domains in the Americas when the Central Junta falls to the French invasion.

While some Spanish Americans believe that independence is necessary, most who initially support  the creation of the new governments see them as a means to preserve the region's autonomy from the French.

Over the course of the next decade, the political instability in Spain and the absolutist restoration under Ferdinand VII persuade many Spanish Americans of the need to formally establish independence from the mother country.

These conflicts are fought both as irregular warfare and conventional warfare, and as wars of national liberation and civil wars.

The conflicts among the colonies and with Spain eventually result in a chain of newly independent countries stretching from Argentina and Chile in the south to Mexico in the north in the first third of the 19th century.

Cuba and Puerto Rico remain under Spanish rule until the Spanish–American War in 1898.

The new republics from the beginning abolish the formal system of racial classification and hierarchy, casta system, the Inquisition, and noble titles.

Slavery is not abolished immediately but ends in all of the new nations within a quarter century.

Criollos (those of Spanish descent born in the New World) and mestizos (those of mixed American Indian and Spanish blood or culture) replace Spanish-born appointees in most political governments.

Criollos remain at the top of a social structure that retains some of its traditional features culturally, if not legally.

For almost a century thereafter, conservatives and liberals fight to reverse or to deepen the social and political changes unleashed by those rebellions.

The events in Spanish America are related to the wars of independence in the former French colony of St-Domingue, Haiti, and the transition to independence in Brazil.

Brazil's independence, in particular, shares a common starting point with that of Spanish America, since both conflicts are triggered by Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, which forces the Portuguese royal family to flee to Brazil in 1807.

The process of Latin American independence takes place in the general political and intellectual climate that emerges from the Age of Enlightenment and that influences all of the Atlantic Revolutions, including the earlier revolutions in the United States and France.

A more direct cause of the Spanish American wars of independence are the unique developments occurring within the Kingdom of Spain and its monarchy during this era.

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