Introduction

Napoleon's takeover of Spain in 1808 did not simply trigger the events which in Caracas led to the struggle for independence: it caused them. There was little presage of the conflict to come in the pre-1808 Caracas which has emerged in this study, nor was there anything inevitable about the collapse of the colonial order after 1808. Caracas during most of the late-colonial period had grown, prospered and matured as a society within the confines of the empire. The province's ruling elite had not broken up into warring factions defending inimical economic and political interests. Internal political, social and racial tensions were, if anything, on the decline when the crisis of 1808 and its ensuing ramifications destabilized Spain and the rest of the imperial order.

This is not to say that a potential for conflict did not exist in late-colonial Caracas. Tensions of all kinds – economic, social, racial, political – can be found in any society. The question is whether they are so strong that they throw the given society into disequilibrium, or whether they are contained enough by the fabric of commonly held social, political and cultural values to be seen as no more than part of the normal give and take of societal interaction. By the latter measure, and certainly in comparison with other Spanish possessions in the same period, late-eighteenth-century Caracas was a well-balanced and relatively tranquil society. This is not to say that the balance could not be disrupted; but when it was, from 1808 onwards, the principal catalysts were not internal tensions or latent liberationist, separatist or nationalist tendencies inside the colony.