Brazil, Colombia, and the Continental Balance: Elements for an International History of South America, 1819–1854

What happened to empire after independence? This talk argues that the collapse of Iberian rule did not simply replace empires with nation-states. It produced a contested South American international order in which new republics and the Brazilian Empire sought to transform inherited imperial geographies into sovereignty, borders, and continental power. Focusing on Colombia and Brazil between 1819 and 1854, the talk reconstructs a largely overlooked history of diplomatic encounters, territorial disputes, military crises, and competing projects of continental equilibrium. From London and Rio de Janeiro to Bogotá, the Río de la Plata, Chiquitos, and the Amazon basin, Colombian and Brazilian policymakers learned to read South America as an interconnected geopolitical space. The Cisplatine War, the dissolution of Gran Colombia, conflicts in the Andes, river navigation, and disputes over Amazonian boundaries were not isolated episodes. They formed part of a broader struggle to determine how the continent would be politically organized after the collapse of Spanish and Portuguese imperial rule.

The talk advances two interconnected arguments. First, South American international politics developed through imperial matrices of territorialization—colonial jurisdictions, eighteenth-century treaties, maps, settlements, fortifications, river systems, and inherited diplomatic languages—that independent governments appropriated and transformed rather than simply abandoned. Second, the idea of a continental balance emerged as a political grammar through which states interpreted territorial expansion, revolutionary instability, diplomatic recognition, and the rise or fragmentation of neighboring powers. By shifting the scale from bilateral diplomacy to the continent as a whole, the talk proposes a different geography of nineteenth-century international history: one in which the Andes, the Caribbean, the Río de la Plata, and the Amazon constituted interconnected arenas of state formation and geopolitical experimentation. South America did not enter an international order created elsewhere after independence; its states were actively constructing one of their own.

Daniel Rojas is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American History at Université Grenoble Alpes. A Franco-Colombian historian, his research explores Latin America’s place in the world through diplomacy, war, political ideas, and transnational circulations. His work brings together international and global history, with particular attention to imperial and Iberian history, South American interstate relations, the formation of post-imperial political orders, and the circulation of people, knowledge, and political practices across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. His current research examines the international history of nineteenth-century South America, particularly relations between Colombia and Brazil and the emergence of new continental balances in the aftermath of independence. A second research project investigates trans-Pacific circulations, focusing on the connections between the northern Andean countries, Southeast Asia, and East Asia from the nineteenth century through the Cold War. He also teaches international cooperation, with a particular interest in humanitarian mine action and the intersections of international cooperation, conflict, and peacebuilding.