how did colonial governments in north america differ from those in south america?
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To begin with, we should note that the independence drive was not hemispheric in scope. Not only were there, everywhere, those who supported the continuity of the colonial government, but in some colonies their cause was successful. British Canada did not follow the example of its southern neighbors, and Spain's Cuba and Puerto Rico became safe bases for the actions of the royalist forces operating on the American continent. In the French West Indies the flashes of the revolutionary events in Paris were often felt, but finally only Haiti achieved its independence. Neither did the British Antilles (or the Dutch, Danish or Swedish i.e. the Swedish Antilles of Saint Barthelemy, which only finally passed into French rule in 1877) broke ties with their respective metropolises, although they were deeply affected by the different independence movements. Canada became a target of revolutionary armies from the south, and the small islands of the Caribbean served as supply posts for patriots and royalists alike, as well as having given key figures such as Alexander Hamilton to the American cause and Luis Brion to the Spanish American cause. From a comparative point of view, the non-independence of certain colonies undoubtedly illuminates what happened in the others and raises interesting questions - for example, what did Canada have in common with Cuba or Puerto Rico with St. Kitts that made them lag behind? - but these kinds of questions are beyond the scope of this chapter.
What all the colonies had in common - even those that at this time did not achieve their independence - was a process of social, economic and cultural growth that created, to varying degrees, a sense of regional identity very different from that of the mother river ( as that which the English colonies evidently enjoyed) and made it easier to accept the option for independence when other circumstances made it available to them.
Another common feature, however of different intensity, was the impact of all those currents of social and political thought that are conventionally ascribed to the intellectual influence of the Enlightenment. Of course, the English colonies cared less about the Encyclopèdie than about Locke's concepts of individual rights and limited government, which they absorbed directly from their own traditions and not through French philosophers, while the intellectual authorities to those who the Latin American reformists and revolutionaries appealed were predominantly French. In the case of Spanish America specifically, there is a school of thought that attenuates Enlightenment in favor of the residual influence of Spanish Catholic thought from the school of Francisco Suárez. However, the name of the latter is a clear absence among the authors cited by publicists of the independence era, and it is likely that the Suarezian concepts of popular sovereignty and the like served as subconscious reinforcement of the new ideas associated with the homeland revolution, or even a set of Anglo-American and French intellutions
What did not change, however, was that the new republics (and the new monarchy of Brazil) were ultimately controlled by a relatively small upper class with interests linked to agro-export or, depending on the region, to large estates. more traditional land. This upper class was not as small as it had been before, but as an effect of the political fact of independence, certain decision-making and administrative functions fell into their hands that previously belonged to a distant monarchy and its colonial agents. This achievement certainly mattered more than the need to share power with other locals. In a comparative perspective, it could still be argued that the direction of social change in Spanish America - and also that of Portuguese, although Brazil has been somewhat neglected in this part of the discussion - was comparable to that of Latin America. English, and it can even be said that the degree of change was comparable. The main difference is in the starting point, both politically and socially the English colonies were much closer to achieving the goals of bourgeois liberalism than the Spanish ones. For the former, the War of Independence in a last analysis brought more of the same; for Latin America what it brought was something different, but still mixed with much of the same.