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In 1895, the Cuban patriot José Martí launched a rebellion against the last Spanish toeholds in the Americas. The anti-Spanish struggle continued until 1898, when Spain withdrew its last forces from Cuba and Puerto Rico. Martí hoped to bring freedom to a new Cuban nation and republican equality to all Cubans regardless of race or class. But if Martí’s efforts helped secure freedom from the declining Spanish empire, he could not prevent Cuba’s military occupation and political domination by the world’s newest imperial power, the United States. Even while American involvement introduced new laws and investment into the former Spanish colonies, it frustrated the hopes of sovereign nation-states in the Caribbean. Martí’s hopes and frustrations found parallels around the world. After 1850, both nation-state building and imperial expansion changed the map of the world. This remapping stemmed, in the first place, from the great political and economic upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that had battered the old regimes. American revolutionaries, Haitian slaves, and Napoleon’s armies had embraced the concept of popular sovereignty (of power residing in the people themselves) and challenged the legitimacy of kings and conservative elites. Simultaneously, new forms of production were bringing to the fore persons of wealth and merit to rival older aristocratic groups whose high status rested on the ownership of land. Close on the heels of these transformations came the upsurge of charismatic leaders, radicals, peasant rebels, and anti-colonial insurgents who clamored for their alternative visions of power and community. These developments prepared the way for the rise of new rulers and elites in the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly in the Americas, Japan, and parts of Europe. These individuals embraced the nation-state organization at home and fostered territorial empires overseas.
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