Thinking beyond Borders: The Global Scope of Spanish American Historical Discourse in the Chilean Laboratory, 1830–1860

This article revisits the scholarly consensus that historical discourse in nineteenth-century Spanish America was primarily focused on nation building and state formation. Without denying the interest of post-colonial intellectuals in the histories of their home countries, it argues that the most urgent matters of concern for Spanish Americans who wrote about history, at least from the 1830s to the 1860s, were how to dismantle the legacies of colonialism at a transnational level and how to position Spanish America as a pivotal agent of change in world history. Focusing on the writings of a series of intellectuals from today’s Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela, the article analyzes the emergence of the lexicon of decolonization, Spanish American challenges to Eurocentric approaches to “universal history,” and the proposal of narratives on global historical development alternative to the ones promoted from Western Europe and the United States during the Age of Revolutions.