Quotes from Robert Harvey

A further feature that distinguished the experiences of South and North America was the absence of a racialist prohibition on intermarriage and interbreeding, which prevailed particularly in the slave states of the southern British colonies. In part this was because very few white women travelled across from Spain to Latin America; and in part because the Spanish did not suffer from the same type of racism and puritanism as northern European Protestantism.

By the late eighteenth century, such seditious ideas, challenging authority, were commonplace in schools, universities and in upper-class salons, but they were still a long way from active revolt.

In his continent-spanning achievement his record perhaps even exceeded those of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Clive of India and Napoleon.

Latin America evolved as a collection of imperial viceroyalties and subdivisions, established and maintained by an overseas empire. For 300 years an often impenetrable geography of mountains, deserts, jungles and huge distances divided these units of empire, ensuring their evolution into different city-based states united by culture but each with their own particular history, racial mix and different interests.

The old Spanish revolutionary slogan, 'un pueblo unido jamás será vencido' ('a people, united, will never be defeated') applies less to the divided countries of the continent than to almost any other.

Simón Bolívar was born on 24 January 1783 to an enormously wealthy and distinguished Venezuelan family that had aristocratic roots in the mountainous and windswept region of Vizcaya (Biscay) in northern Spain.

Juan Vicente did not marry until the age of 46 when he chose María Concepcion Palacios y Blanco, the beautiful 15-year-old daughter of another prominent family.