ABSTRACT
The events that took place, first in France and later in the whole of Europe, between 1789 and 1815 filled contemporaries with dismay and drastically changed the political and social realities in Europe. The ideas of popular sovereignty, freedom and nationalism that had spread throughout Europe during the years of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars continued to flourish. Liberalism and nationalism became the two great movements of the nineteenth century. The British Empire was by far the largest of the colonial empires. Its foundations had been laid in the seventeenth century and consolidated in the eighteenth century, the end of which had seen the loss of America, its most important colony. Caribbean saw the blossoming of the plantation economy, which focused on the production of tropical cash crops and was based on slavery and the slave trade. The region was colonized by various European countries, of which Spain, France, England and the Netherlands were the most important.
