The process of extinguishing the legitimacy of empires would take more than two more centuries and was generally ‘conflictual and contingent’, though never quite complete. Our world is still marked by post-imperial legacies: for example, ‘the fiction of sovereign equivalence, and . . . the reality of inequality within and among states’. And imperial practices still remain – for example, in the treatment of indigenous peoples or in the promotion of multiculturalism – but now they are the policies of states, not the procedures of the empires they have universally replaced. The first Atlantic crisis, better known as the American Revolution, foreshadowed many of the complexities and conflicts in Iberian America and then later in the creation of a world of states that now encompasses the whole globe.

Conjuring states out of colonies had been the single most radical act of the American Revolution: indeed, that process began the transformation of the Atlantic world into an arena hospitable, first, to independent states on its western shores, then to republicanism (in the sense of non-monarchical government), and finally to the creation of federal republics – the United States, Venezuela and Mexico, for instance – on a scale undreamed of by classical and early modern thinkers. It may therefore be instructive to consider the American Revolution not as an isolated process, of little relevance causally or comparatively to the revolutions in Spanish and Portuguese America, but as their precursor in the Atlantic world.