The Power of Dissent
Urban Political Culture and the Fall of Spanish Rule in Charcas

A wide-ranging political history of the demise of Spanish rule in the Andean world from a local perspective.

Sergio Serulnikov (Author)

9781009610070, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 August 2025

370 pages
23.5 x 16.1 x 2.4 cm, 0.68 kg

'Sergio Serulnikov is a superb historian. His powerful new work has the potential to revamp prevailing thinking about the political impacts of Bourbon reform, creole and American identity formation, the emergence of the public sphere, the crisis of Spanish colonialism, the entanglements of Enlightenment and empire, and the recasting of tradition in times of revolution.' Sinclair Thompson, New York University

The Power of Dissent examines the crisis of Spanish rule through the changing political culture of Chuquisaca (Bolivia), the most important city in the southern Andes. Sergio Serulnikov argues that in the four decades preceding the nineteenth-century wars of independence, a vibrant political public sphere emerged, both patrician and plebeian. It manifested itself in a variety of social domains: protracted legal battles, collective petitions, popular revolts, the culture of manly honor, disputes over the rights of city council members and university faculty to hold free annual elections to choose their authorities, clashes between urban militias and Spanish soldiers, and contested public ceremonies and rituals of state power. In the process, a discernible aspiration took shape: the full participation of the local population in public affairs. The culture of dissent undermined the very premises of Bourbon absolutism and, more broadly, imperial control.

Introductory essay: politics and society in the late colonial world, historiographical dialogues
1. Citizens and magistrates
2. Public dissension
3. The paradoxes of loyalty
4. The revolt against the company of savoy
5. The revolt against the company of Extremadura
6. The election of a rector
7. Suppressing politics
8. Contentious autonomies
9. The crisis before the crisis
10. The uses of carlotism
11. The uprising
which revolution? final considerations
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]