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20 - Rights in the Americas

from Part III - Rights and Empires

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

By
Joshua Simon
Edited by
Dan Edelstein  and
Jennifer Pitts
Dan Edelstein
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Jennifer Pitts
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

The theories of rights articulated in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were innovative in their own time and have exerted widespread influence ever since, but they were marked by profound contradictions that spurred generations of critical engagements. This chapter offers an explanation for these dynamics by considering the social position occupied by rights theorists within the Americas. It begins with the British and Spanish American independence movements, considering the roles of universalist and particularist rights claims within the ideologies of the movements’ European-descended leadership. Next, it explores how, in the instances where Americans that occupied less privileged social positions took over the leadership of struggles for independence, the kinds of rights claimed, the grounds upon which these rights were claimed, and the range of persons on behalf of whom rights were claimed varied in such a manner as to reflect the difference of leadership. Finally, it traces the ways that Americans initially excluded from enjoyment of the rights claimed by the independence movements and enumerated in the Americas’ early constitutions sought both recognition as equal rights-bearers and revisions to the rights that they and other Americans bore over the course of the nineteenth century.

Keywords

Spanish Americaindependence movementsBritish Empireconstitutions
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 481 - 498
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Allen, D., Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (New York, Norton, 2014).Google Scholar
Dubois, E. C., Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
Dubois, L., Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eastman, S., and Sobrevilla Perea, N. (eds.), The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World: The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812 (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2015).Google Scholar
Echeverri, M., Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gargarella, R., The Legal Foundations of Inequality: Constitutionalism in the Americas, 1776–1860 (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunt, L., Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, Norton, 2007).Google Scholar
Lavrin, A., Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Rakove, J. N., “The Madisonian Theory of Rights,” William & Mary Law Review 31/2 (1990), 245–66.Google Scholar
Reid, J. P., Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority of Rights (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Simon, J., The Ideology of Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, R., Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

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