Independence: Contexts and concepts

During the first decades of the 19(th) century the term Independence acquired particular and diverse connotations in the Iberian-American world, becoming what Koselleck calls a concept. It was not just an idea exclusively related to the Americas which, through their revolutions, legitimated the emancipation of the new nations as a result of the arrival of liberal ideas. The proposal of this text is precisely to analyze the contexts and meanings that the concept of Independence acquired in the Iberian-American world in that period, taking the Brazilian Independence as the central point of reference, but looking for links with Hispanic America. Through the analysis of dictionaries, History books and circumstantial literature - political flyers and journals - the author identifies the different languages that the elites as well as their contemporaries used in order to express the different political and social identities present in that historical situation, making a new reading of such processes of Independence possible.