National Consolidation

Abstract

Nation-states began to be consolidated in the Gran Colombian region in the years 1833–1839. Historians have studied these processes in isolation, tracing the regional reconstruction of Antioquia, for example, separately from the national development of Venezuela. This chapter highlights the way imperial formations linked and shaped these processes. Certainly, lessons had been learned from the previous period. Formal imperial influence was relatively weak, and imperial gestures were ineffective—most notably here the 1836 Russell Affair, which included a rather pointless blockade of Cartagena.¹ British influence was instead transmitted through nonimperial actors, who had no formal link to the metropolis—as in the cases of Thomas Murray, who became the governor of a New Granadan province, Rupert Hand, who fought in a Venezuelan civil war, or Daniel O’Leary, who served Venezuela as a diplomat. The continued involvement of foreigners in the lives of the new states gave credence to calls for popular sovereignty that rallied against foreigners. Indeed, in this period ideologies of nascent nationalism were radicalized and hardened by such discourse.² Sovereignty in New Granada and Venezuela was fought over by internal actors and local people, as the existing literature has shown. But they did so alongside imperial formations, under the shadows cast by foreigners like Murray, Hand, and O’Leary, by naval power sailing on the Caribbean, and by commercial activity and its demands (most notably in Venezuela in these years). The lives of the El Santuario veterans take us under the radar and into the realm of the new imperial formations as they coalesced in the 1830s.