355. Liberator of Latin America: Napoleon & The Legions of Hell (Part 2)

Hello and welcome to Empire for the second part of our series on Simon Bolivar. Now, if you want to hear all the episodes, you don't want to wait, you just go and join Empire Club at empirepoduk.com. That's empirepoduk.com. But let me just uh remind you all and uh Willie where we left off in the last episode.

So Bolivar, this young man, aged 22, he'd experienced a lot of personal tragedy. We talked about that in the last episode. And we we sort of found him on top of uh the sacred mound, Monte Sacro Hill in Rome, vowing to remove the Spanish colonial power from his homeland. And we described the huge vastness of the Spanish Empire and how it was managed. And it

key part of how the Latin American colonies were kept under Spanish control. So just to recap a little bit, you had a local Creole elite that were doing all the work of senior civil servants. And just a reminder that Creole doesn't necessarily in this instance mean mixed race as it does today, but people born in the colonies, like Bolivar himself, Spanish parents, but born in what is now called Venezuela. And this is going to be a tension that runs through this episode.

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