Between 1808 and the mid-1820s, Spaniards struggled to liberate their country from French rule while also fighting to retain control over their vast American empire. Spain's War of Independence eventually led to the French evacuation of the Iberian peninsula and the restoration of the Bourbon monarch Ferdinand VII in 1814, but the wars in the Americas were much more tortuous. A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon's Empire, an edition of the diary of Lieutenant Fernando Blanco White, gives us personal insight into how people in Europe and across its global empires experienced,...
Between 1808 and the mid-1820s, Spaniards struggled to liberate their country from French rule while also fighting to retain control over their vast A...
