Liberators

Liberators is a collective history of the leaders who broke Iberian colonial rule across Latin America during the age of revolution. Robert Harvey centres the narrative on Francisco de Miranda, Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, Bernardo O’Higgins, Thomas Cochrane, Agustín de Iturbide and Pedro I of Brazil. Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and the collapse of established royal authority created the opening, but independence depended on local armies, shifting coalitions and campaigns conducted across immense distances.

The book moves from Venezuela and New Granada through the Andes to Chile and Peru, then to Mexico and Brazil, comparing very different paths to sovereignty. Harvey describes cavalry warfare on the llanos, naval operations on the Pacific coast, political purges, contested attitudes to slavery and the rivalries that divided republican leaders after victory. The seven liberators achieved the destruction of old imperial structures, yet most ended in exile, assassination, abdication or political disappointment as regional states replaced their wider continental ambitions.