| Summary/Abstract |
By bringing the Napoleonic Wars to an end, the Battle of Waterloo gave the last impetus to an ongoing upheaval that, in little over a decade, dislocated a centuries-old global Iberian world. To a limited extent, it also contributed to the unleashing of an era of civil war that resulted in the secession of most of the Spanish American dominions and fuelled the ideological battleground between conservative and progressive, centralist and decentralist forces. Portugal fared no better, troubled by domestic crises and the eventual unravelling of the Lusitanian Empire through the emergence of an independent Brazil.
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