Biography
Anthony McFarlane is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Warwick, UK.
Drawing upon archival and printed primary sources as well as a broad array of secondary literature, McFarlane's thoughtful, detailed, and clearly written work will appeal to both specialists and general readers. A valuable complement to Jaime E. Rodrl}guez's stress on political revolution in The Independence of Spanish America (CH, Dec'98, 36-2319), McFarlane's book belongs in all academic and major public libraries. Summing Up: Essential.
-CHOICE
Anthony McFarlane has written a distinguished modern history of the revolutions for independence in Spanish America, adding a new factor, war and armed conflict, to the traditional themes of political and social change. He takes the study of war beyond campaigns, battles and armies into a wider terrain and shows that war and military mobilization profoundly affected society and conditioned the process of state building in the aftermath of empire. The book takes a leading place among the histories of Spain’s loss of empire and the formation of a new Spanish America.
– John Lynch, author of Simón Bolívar and the Age of Revolution
McFarlane has produced a stirring narrative of insurgency, counter-insurgency, and grand campaigns that never loses sight of its political context and implications. The result is an impressively controlled description and analysis of a prolonged conflict with profound consequences for global history.
– Sir John Elliott, author of Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830
An important study of wars that had more long-term significance than those of Napoleon. A deft approach, skilfully linking war, politics and society. Deserves wide attention.
– Jeremy Black, author of An Introduction to Global Military History
This magnificent narrative of the processes of independence between 1808 and 1826 across Spanish America fills a hole that has gaped in the English-language historiography ever since the end of the armed conflicts that brought formal Spanish colonialism to an end in the republics that today are Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, as well as large swathes of the present territory of the United States of America.
-Matthew Brown, Univeristy of Bristol in War in History
