As shown by the recent literature on the revolution of independence, the articulation of a national identity, contrary to the assertions of the traditional national histories, was not the starting point but the end point of the process of rupture of the colonial ties. And this will have critical consequences for historiography, insofar as it raises the question of what was, then, what triggered that process. However, we must say that the criticism of the so-called revisionist school paves the way to this interrogation only at the price of declaring it unsolvable. The statement that the persistence of traditional 252 imaginaries results into a view of the revolution of independence as a consequence of a series of accidents and circumstances, without managing to explain why those circumstances had the consequences they had. No doubt, some idea of nation was then at work; otherwise, royal vacancy shoud not have had the effects it did. Lastly, if trying to explain that process on the basis of a concept of nation that, as a matter of fact, only in the second half of the nineteenth century would become available is anachronical, so is the denial of the existence of any notion of nation (as if the above mentioned concept of it were the only possible one). The previous question can thus be translated as follows: what ideas of nation and self-determination could have developed in that political and conceptual context, without which the kind of political rupture then occurred would not have possibly happen; in short, how could have emerged the ideas that the American territories of Spain and Portugal were nations, and that they could, therefore, postulate the possession of sovereign rights as such. The present paper intends to recreate the series of politico-conceptual reconfigurations that have preceded the revolution in Latin America which, albeit they did not anticipated it, indeed opened the doors for it to become conceivable.
Independence; Latin America; Revolution; Politicoconceptual history