The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781

In this volume, the author reexamines a well-known but long misunderstood event in eighteenth-century Colombia. When the Spanish colonial bureaucratic system of conciliation broke down, indigenous groups resorted to armed revolt to achieve their political ends. As the author demonstrates in these pages, the crisis of 1781 represented a constitutional clash between imperial centralization and colonial decentralization. The author argues that the Comunero revolution was not, as it has often been portrayed, a precursor of political independence, nor was it a frustrated social upheaval. The Comunero leaders and their followers did not advocate any basic reordering of society, the author concludes, but rather made an appeal for revolutionary reform within a traditionalist framework.