Bøker av Brian R. Hamnett

Brian Hamnett examines key historical novels by Scott, Balzac, Manzoni, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Fontane, Galdos, and Tolstoy, revealing the contradictions inherent in this form of fiction and exploring the challenges writers encountered in attempting to represent a reality that linked past and present.

The study traces the struggles of the Spanish Metropolitan Government and the local episcopal authorities in Oaxaca to secure observation of the law. The effects of the eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms and of the Mexican Independence movement of 1810-21 are discussed.

This book conflicts, chiefly in the Mexican provinces of Puebla, Guadalajara, Michoacan and Guanajuato from the middle of the eighteenth century, and assesses their relationship to the widespread insurgency of the second decade of the nineteenth century.

In this new work, Brian R. Hamnett offers a comprehensive assessment of the independence era in both Spanish America and Brazil by examining the interplay between events in Iberia and in the overseas empires of Spain and Portugal. Most colonists had wanted some form of unity within the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies but European intransigence continually frustrated this aim. Hamnett argues that independence finally came as a result of widespread internal conflict in the two American empires, rather than as a result of a clear separatist ideology or a growing national sentiment. With the collapse of empire, each component territory faced a struggle to survive. The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770-1830 is the first book of its kind to give equal consideration to the Spanish and Portuguese dimensions of South America, examining these territories in terms of their divergent component elements.

This book discusses responses to the challenges faced by two different Iberian imperial systems in their struggle to sustain territorial integrity and economic interests in the face of international competition. During a so-called period of 'Enlightened Despotism', absolutist governments in Spain and Portugal sought to harness Enlightenment ideas to their policies of reform. The Iberian Enlightenment, however, did not rely exclusively on government sponsorship - it had existing foundations in sixteenth-century Spanish humanism and subsequent attempts at reform, and educated individuals in major cities frequently operated independently of government. The Enlightenment contributed greatly to the availability of potential political solutions to the urgent matter of political status, in the attempt to transform absolutist governments into constitutional systems and drawing in the process on the structures of medieval foundations, contemporary revolutions or less radical constitutional monarchies, or a combination of sources more closely aligned with Ibero-American realities.