Building on the revisionist historiography of Latin American independence, Bassi’s An Aqueous Territory provides an innovative interpretation of the territories along the Caribbean coast of New Granada (roughly modern-day Colombia) at a time of revolutionary upheaval. Bassi begins with a peculiar story involving the legislature of the nascent Republic of Cartagena in October 1815. To retain Cartagena’s recently proclaimed independence from the Spanish monarchy, a group of political leaders endeavored to place the new republic under British protection. To their disdain, Britain refused to offer support, and the young Republic of Cartagena eventually surrendered to Spanish forces on December 6, 1815.
Although Cartagena’s attempt proved to be unsuccessful, Bassi sets out to reconstruct the political, economic, and geographical context that made Cartagena’s request possible and thinkable. Rather than dismissing the request as an aberration of no real consequence for the history of Nueva Granada, Bassi questions the insidious idea that...