Date of Award
Spring 2020
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
History
First Advisor
E. Gabrielle Kuenzli
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on a group of South American revolutionaries and the ways they shaped and challenged the precepts of the Age of Revolutions that rocked Latin America, Europe, and the Atlantic World in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates revolutionaries like Vicente Pazos Kanki, an indigenous journalist and diplomat, who traveled throughout South America, the United States, and Europe in an effort to form republican governments that brought together indigenous, African, and European citizens into multiethnic republics. I call these revolutionaries the chasquis of liberty. A chasqui was the rapid-traveling foot messenger of the Andean preconquest and colonial worlds. I use this metaphor to illustrate the ways revolutionaries connected disparate struggles for independence and made hemispheric republicanism a reality by forming alliances with other nation states’ luminaries, like the U.S. politician Henry Clay. More than simple messengers, the chasquis of liberty envisioned an inclusive republicanism that stood in contrast to other republics in the Atlantic World that defended slavery and racial exclusion.
Rights
© 2020, Caleb Garret Wittum
Recommended Citation
Wittum, C. G.(2020). The Chasquis of Liberty: Revolutionary Messengers in the Bolivian Independence Era, 1808-1825. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/5676