Two Revolutions: France 1789 and Mexico 1810

• Published in: The Americas
• Main Author: Rodríguez O., Jaime E.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 1990
• Subjects: History; Cultural Studies; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1007370; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003161500016333

It is sometimes alleged that “history is written by the victors.” Perhaps, it is more accurate to say that “history is written by the rich.” The wealthy nations of the North Atlantic world, which have tended to dominate scholarship in modern times, have molded events in their own image. Thus, when considering the eighteenth century transformations, scholars with “global” vision such as Peter Gay, Jacques Godechot, and R.R. Palmer have interpreted the “Enlightenment” and the “Age of Democratic Revolutions” broadly, including both the experience of the United States and of select Western European nations. Yet these cosmopolitan scholars find no place for Spain or Latin America in their works. Gay describes Spain as the “other side of the eighteenth century,” while both Godechot and Palmer end the age of revolutions in 1799, thus excluding the Spanish and the Spanish American revolutions which occurred in the early nineteenth century.