Between 1810 and 1825, Latin America was engulfed in a wave of revolution that destroyed the Spanish empire in the Americas. This book studies the process of imperial collapse in one of these Spanish colonies: the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the future Republic of Colombia. Rebecca Earle makes extensive use of previously unexplored Spanish documents to offer a new account of Colombia's struggle for independence from Spain, suggesting that Spanish royalists inadvertently engineered their own defeat." "The book provides a revisionist explanation of how and why Spain lost its colony in Colombia. The details of Spain's failure form the subject of this study.