Creole revolutionaries sought to preserve parallelism, not to overthrow the Old World

Evidence

The doubleness of the Americas and the reasons for it, sketched out above, help to explain why nationalism emerged first in the New World, not the Old. They also illuminate two peculiar features of the revolutionary wars that raged in the New World between 1776 and 1825. On the one hand, none of the creole revolutionaries dreamed of keeping the empire intact but rearranging its internal distribution of power, reversing the previous relationship of subjection by transferring the metropole from a European to an American site. In other words, the aim was not to have New London succeed, overthrow, or destroy Old London, but rather to safeguard their continuing parallelism. … On the other hand, although these wars caused a great deal of suffering and were marked by much barbarity, in an odd way the stakes were rather low. Neither in North nor in South America did the creoles have to fear physical extermination or reduction to servitude, as did so many other peoples who got in the way of the juggernaut of European imperialism. They were after all ‘whites,’ Christians, and Spanishor English-speakers; they were also the intermediaries necessary to the metropoles if the economic wealth of the Western empires was to continue under Europe’s control. Hence, they were the one significant extra-European group, subjected to Europe, that at the same time had no need to be desperately afraid of Europe. The revolutionary wars, bitter as they were, were still reassuring in that they were wars between kinsmen. This family link ensured that, after a certain period of acrimony had passed, close cultural, and sometimes political and economic, ties could be reknit between the former metropoles and the new nations. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 720

Categorization

• XREF: The idea that anti-colonial nationalism aimed at a share of empire rather than its destruction is a surprising, transferable claim for thinking about how national liberation movements relate to the powers they resist. — connects to: Fear of lower-class uprisings drove creole bids for independence — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 216; Colonial birth itself, not behavior, barred creoles from imperial office — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 227; Early USA was just another creole-led revolutionary state, sometimes more reactionary. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 787 (+1 more)

Related

• Early USA was just another creole-led revolutionary state, sometimes more reactionary. (similarity 0.88)
• Fear of lower-class uprisings drove creole bids for independence (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial subjects imagined nations before most of Europe did (similarity 0.84)
• Nationalism was invented in colonial Creole societies, not Europe. (similarity 0.82)
• The creole nationalism that opposed Spain nonetheless embraced racism toward non-whites (similarity 0.82)
• Early American nationalisms did not depend on language difference (similarity 0.80)
• Latin American independence was led by landowners, not middle classes (similarity 0.80)
• Later European nationalisms differed from American ones in print-language centrality and visible models. (similarity 0.79)
• Creolite movements rejected African roots while embracing European cultural identity (similarity 0.79)
• Nationalism originated in the New World colonies, not in Europe’s ethnolinguistic movements (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial nationalists copied and adapted European national models (similarity 0.79)
• Material interests and ideologies cannot by themselves shape imagined communities (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial exclusion sustained empire by dividing colonizers against themselves (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Fear of lower-class uprisings drove creole bids for independence #contradicts (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 216
• Colonial birth itself, not behavior, barred creoles from imperial office #expands (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 227