Brian R. Hamnett

I’ve read enough about the American War of Independence that books on the subject have no dramatic tension. I know its roots, inciting incidents, flashpoints, battles, personalities and — most importantly — outcome. My country’s founding will never bore me, but it’s also not likely to surprise me.

Much different was my experience reading about the Mexican War of Independence. While I still knew the outcome, the events that transformed New Spain into Mexico have long been a blank show more space for me. I have much yet to learn, but Brian R. Hamnett of the University of Essex has given me a great head start with “Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750–1824.”

I initially regretted this as my entrypoint. Hamnett doesn’t provide a full history or even an outline of the war, offering instead inadequate maps and the barest sketches of its most important people and events. He assumes enough familiarity with the subject that the Internet had to be my wingman, especially in the chapter on the struggle for Puebla. Without Google Maps, that chapter — crucial for understanding why the war dragged on for ten years — would have been a sea of meaningless place names.

By the end, though, I had reconsidered my regret. Hamnett’s monograph is narrowly focused on the roots of the sporadic and splintered rural insurgency that characterized most of the conflict. Hamnett pulls in data from across the war zones to try to understand why insurgents found support here but not there, or why these villages supported the rebels but those towns formed self-defense units under a Royalist umbrella. This tight focus gave me three insights that a more fully-orbed history may not have.

First, insurgencies are hard to get going. On the surface, the famine of 1809-10 seems an adequate reason for an unemployed, dislocated, and starving rural population to invade the cities and attempt to topple elites they saw as parasites. But as Hamnett notes, New Spain experienced multiple and severe famines in the 18th century with no revolution. Why was this one different?

The same applies to the sense of the rural population that rights, lands, and livelihoods were threatened by powerful merchant or European interests. Cycles of such pressure had built and released for a century and more, again without expanding into revolution. Populations are actually quite reluctant to initiate or invite geopolitical violence, to such an extent that part of Hamnett’s purpose is probing the tricky question of what catalyzed a mix of routine grievances into a very large explosion in 1810.

The second insight I gained is that, once rolling, insurgencies are hard to stop. The Bourbon military in Mexico was shockingly small and weak for a dynasty bent on imposing unpopular reforms. Stable government depends on perception: not only that the center is an impartial arbiter of justice, but that it’s strong enough to impose its will with irresistible force. Puncture that image by undermining basic public safety, keeping your rebel bands alive and active regardless of counterinsurgency campaigns, and insurgencies take on a life of their own as ever fewer people believe the fiction of state authority.

This collapse of public safety distinguishes the Mexican War of Independence from the American one thirty years prior. Because Hamnett is piecing together a collage of causes, my reading experience of the war was as fragments of maneuver and episodes of shocking brutality — probably a fair approximation of what it was to participants. Wars are always more chaotic and ugly than we like to remember them, but this one was hell. If insurgents weren’t extorting your village at gunpoint, Royalists were burning it, moving you to a green zone, and executing rebels in the public square for your education and improvement. Of course, maybe you didn’t mind that so much if the rebels had already executed your friends for being too rich.

The war eventually disintegrated into a bloody mess of independent warlords and autonomous officers, a decentralized conflagration that left everyone worse off. Mexico entered its first years of independence bankrupt and broken, incapable of recovering all of its own territory from paramilitary fiefdoms or of preventing the United States from slicing off limbs down the road.

This contrast between the two wars of independence leads to my final insight, which I admittedly import into my reading. Though Hamnett effectively explores regional roots of the insurgency, he never gets to what I think is one reason Mexico’s war was what it was. Where North Americans fought to secure the rights and liberties of Englishmen, the subjects of New Spain had no such body of self-evident or natural or unalienable rights. Spanish rights were derived from God, mediated through pope and king, encoded in law, and enforced by judges and bureaucrats. Thus while Spanish society lived and died by the rule of law, there was little room for inherent human rights safe even from a king.

I think this partly explains why the Mexican War of Independence became multiple insurgencies shaped by local conditions. Rebel armies drew from a rural population running out of land and water, crushed beneath unpayable debts to outsider elites, and alienated by activist Bourbons determined to extract full imperial value from their domains. Some leaders had nationalist views on self-governance, but your average rebel seems driven by regional or racial or personal grievances that bore no resemblance to the political philosophy of 1776. The leadership of rebel priests throughout the war provided a permission structure, but nothing approaching the comprehensive ideology that drove the northern war.

I have more books lined up to give me an aerial view of the war, but it was good to start on the ground. At that level, for the longest time, the rebellion looked like a failure. The insurgents never took Mexico City or Puebla, never permanently held a regional capital, never set up an alternative government capable of contending for legitimacy, and frequently lost fighters to Royalist amnesty programs.

And yet, somehow, ten years of simply refusing to quit ended in independence. I find nothing so symbolic of this war than the fact that two of its most important leaders, Hidalgo and Morelos, were captured and executed well before its end; and that two Mexican states now bear their names. History truly is written by the victors, even if the victors don’t live to see it. show less