The roughly two decades of war, beginning around 1808, in which Spain's vast American empire shattered into more than a dozen republics, won through many regional campaigns, above all those associated with Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, Antonio José de Sucre, and Mexico’s own insurgent and conservative leaders — a liberation that won independence from Spain yet largely preserved the old hierarchies beneath it, leaving the indigenous, the enslaved, and the poor still waiting for a freedom the American-born creole elite had claimed mainly for themselves.
In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain and seized its king, and across the ocean an empire that had stood for three centuries lost the one thing that justified it. Within two years, wars of independence erupted from Mexico to Argentina. By the mid-1820s the armies of Bolívar and San Martín had broken Spanish power on the continent, and more than a dozen new states stood where Spain’s mainland empire had been, while Brazil emerged separately as a monarchy. But the men who led these wars were creoles — American-born descendants of Spanish settlers — and the freedom they won was largely their own. Spain was gone. The great estates, the position of the indigenous and the enslaved, the rule of a landowning few: these mostly stayed. A continent changed its masters more than it changed its order.