CHAPTER XXVIII AMERICA, AUSTRALASIA, AFRICA, AND ASIA TO 187 T We have now to turn our attention to the regions outside Europe, and first to those which, having been under European control, severed themselves politically from the domination of the Old World. A detailed account of the establishment of the various states of South and Central America will be unnecessary. With the ex- 1 South and ce Ption of Guiana and British Honduras, the whole Central of this region at the opening of the nineteenth America. century was under the supremacy either of Spain or of Portugal. The populations consisted in part of pure Spaniards or Portuguese, but the great bulk of them were either of actual native descent, or of mixed blood, the government being entirely European. The example of the North American British colonies, followed by the Revolution in France, awoke revolu- tionary and democratic ideas; but the effective impulse to separation from Europe was given by the overturn of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies by Napoleon 1. The Portuguese royal family itself took refuge in Brazil ; the restoration after Waterloo threatened to make Portugal into an outlying province of a state which had been its own great colony ; and it was rather Portugal which separated itself from the Brazilian Empire than Brazil which cut itself loose from Portugal. In the Spanish provinces revolution was encouraged by the uncertainty as to where true authority was to be found when the people of Spain were defying the Bonaparte monarchy. The restoration of the Bourbon king Ferdinand, with the absolutist
