ABSTRACT
In 1808, the peoples of the Spanish monarchy entered into a period of war and political convulsion that was without precedent in the history of the Spanish world. The great upheaval began within Spain itself, when Spaniards reacted against Napoleon's removal of the Bourbon King Ferdinand VII by fighting back against the French forces that occupied their country; it then spread across the Atlantic as Spanish Americans responded to the reverberations of the crisis in Spain. Thus, from 1810, Spain's war against France in the Iberian Peninsula was paralleled by the outbreak of wars of a different kind in Spanish America, where the crown's subjects fought among themselves to appropriate the authority of the displaced king.
