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The Accidental Foundry: How Napoleon Broke Spanish America and Forged Latin America

Napoleon did not set out to invent Latin America. He wanted Europe, and the way to Europe ran through Madrid. Yet in toppling the Spanish monarchy, seizing Louisiana and flipping it to the United States, wrecking Spain's fleet, and turning sovereignty into a traveling mask with no face behind it, he shattered the imperial grammar that had ordered the New World for three centuries. From the shards came juntas, constitutions, caudillos, republics—an atlas of new futures. If Spain's empire died under French boots, Latin America learned to walk in the noise.