Gustavo Vaamonde’s paper probes deep into Miranda’s early years by recovering his life as a military officer in the Spanish army’s colonial war in North Africa in the 1770s, a subject seldom treated in historiography. The examination of the Venezuelan’s diary of the Siege of Melilla reveals his budding military genius but also the outlines of his enlightened thought. María Bárbara Zepeda Cortés reconsiders a foundational episode in Miranda’s revolutionary life: when Spanish authorities accused him of being a smuggler in Cuba, a situation that eventually led him to flee to the newly independent United States. Traditionally told from the perspective of Miranda himself, this paper examines the original judicial record, leading to a larger reflection on the “art of deception” in eighteenth-century politics. Edward P. Pompeian reassesses the emancipatory character of Miranda’s 1806 Leander Expedition by focusing on Venezuelan Captain General Manuel Guevarra’s mobilization against the revolutionary project and its defeat in Coro, where memories of slave rebellion and anti-slavery republican plots were fresh. Finally, Olga Gonzalez-Silen's paper asks how the paradigm of the Hispanic Revolution has challenged our approach to the eve of independence. In her work, she examines the extent to which Venezuela’s military mobilization against the 1806 Miranda Expedition influenced the captaincy general’s response to the Spanish Monarchy’s crisis.

By looking at events at the ground up from where they occurred, this panel will privilege the local contexts of key transatlantic events: the Bourbon Reforms, the Enlightenment, emancipatory projects following the Haitian Revolution, and Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808. Instead of isolating events in 1774, 1781, 1806, or 1808, this panel considers continuities in places ranging from Africa to the Americas and Europe. Presenters will emphasize the responses of Spanish royal officials to the multi-faceted imperial crises that the Spanish Monarchy confronted, and to the exigencies the Crown’s colonial subjects experienced at the revolutionary turn of the nineteenth century.

Focusing on the transatlantic dimensions of Miranda and his revolutionary time, the panel will appeal broadly to historians of the Atlantic World, the Iberian Empires, Latin America, and the United States.