Territorial organization of the states-nations in southern america: continuities and changes

Abstract

Portugal and Spain constituted in the beginning of the Modern Age the so called Portuguese and Spanish Empires of America. The disappearance of these two great Iberian empires in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, due to the political independence, brought the necessity of definition of the new republic’s national identity; the same is valid for Brazil, the only American constitutional monarchy. That implicates the consideration of the role of the territory in the organization of that group of modern States, particularly in Brazil. In parallel, it is investigated in what measure the Iberian colonization interfered in the territorial organization of the States-nations in Southern America, in order to analyze the continuities and changes related to the process of emancipation in the context of the liberalism.