ABSTRACT
HOW MUCH DIFFERENCE did political independence from Spain and Portugal make in the lives of most Latin Americans? Th e social class structure stayed largely intact; the majority of Latin Americans remained mired in poverty; and various cultural institutions, including the Catholic Church, remained in place. In much of Spanish America, the disappearance of the colonial power left a vacuum of power that was not fi lled for many decades. Internal civil war was not unknown in the colonial era, but for most of that time, the Crown provided a degree of political stability. Th e aft ermath of independence saw the rise of caudilloism , a tendency that continues to mark Latin American politics today. On the other side of the ledger, independence did result in Latin Americans achieving a sovereign status denied to peoples subject to nineteenth-century European imperialism in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and it opened the way for a degree of economic and social development in the later 1800s.
