Well .. you're describing "sort of" what happened in India in your first paragraph.
You didn't quite get my point - the Napoleonic wars were a later instance of the same thing you mention - a rebellion against spain. That rebellion by Pizzarro failed. Mainly because most of his supporters ditched him, he was leading one single band of people, backed by a few other like minded feudal landlord types, most of whom deserted him when it came to actually facing a much larger army of king's troops in the field and being proclaimed rebels etc. Moreover, Spain controlled the seas in that region, and had several colonies in what was largely jungle with some small settlements, predominantly militarized (or at least feudal) rather than civilian governments, it could choke off the army of rebels and field troops from surrounding colonies at a much faster pace than one smalltime rebel, even a Pizzarro, could cope with. The o'higgins rebellion was mostly in a more sophisticated and self sufficient society - a Spanish colony with a thriving though certainly white dominated, local economy (muzo emeralds, rubber, chocolate ..), people who were several generations away from Spain in some cases, though of Spanish ancestry, a largely weakened spain rather than the paramount power in Europe it was in the Pizzarro days .. In other words, that's not 100% about education, or some heroic Indian uprising against oppressive Spanish masters. No Toussaint l'overture, rani of Jhansi etc type stuff here. -----Original Message----- From: silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus....@lists.hserus.net [mailto:silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus....@lists.hserus.net] On Behalf Of Srini RamaKrishnan Sent: 24 February 2012 22:21 To: silklist@lists.hserus.net Subject: Re: [silk] Spanish conquistadores etc RE: aqvavit On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian <sur...@hserus.net> wrote: > Pizzarro's brother Gonzalo did try - and defeated and killed a viceroy that > the king sent to replace him. Rebellion to form a feudal state is some thing else - we are talking in hypotheticals here - the reality is the monarchy prevailed - however I can imagine a scenario where better educated leaders with access to resources of a state 9 times the size of Spain could have worked to gain the support of the locals, the mulattoes, the criollos, the mestizos and other mixed peoples and establish a state where democratic freedom of the self was the rule. Of course they didn't - and there ends the matter. There's a lot of speculative intellectual debate among the Latin American literati on this topic - it's a favorite conversation topic in fact - could have, should have, would have territory - when I have the time I'll try do dig it up - my spanish isn't very good, and I'll have to rely on google translate quite a bit to get at it again. The Napoleonic wars and all the related stuff you mention is unfortunately far too late to be of relevance.
