On the morning of January 1, 1820, a lieutenant colonel of the Spanish infantry stood before his assembled regiment in the small Andalusian town of Las Cabezas de San Juan and refused an order. The order was to embark for the Americas ? to board the rotting, unseaworthy hulks that Ferdinand VII's corrupt camarilla had purchased from a Russian tsar at ruinous cost ? and fight a colonial war that could not be won. Rafael del Riego's refusal, and the proclamation of the Constitution of 1812 that accompanied it, ignited a revolution that overthrew the Spanish absolute monarchy within weeks and sent its consequences cascading across two continents and into the next century.

The Spanish Mutiny That Freed the Americas and Shook the World is the definitive narrative history of the Spanish constitutional revolution of 1820 and its global aftermath. Drawing on the full sweep of the political, military, diplomatic, and social history of the period, Barrett McMahon traces the origins of the revolt in the systemic failures of Ferdinand's absolutist regime, follows the constitutional experiment of the Trienio Liberal through its three turbulent years of governance, and assesses the revolution's extraordinary legacies: the permanent independence of Latin America, the inspiration of the Decembrist revolt in Saint Petersburg, the Monroe Doctrine's hemispheric order, and the establishment of the pronunciamiento as the defining institution of nineteenth-century Spanish politics. Vivid, rigorous, and panoramic in its reach, this is the story of the mutiny that remade the modern world.