“This excellent book offers genuinely new evidence and interpretations on how print media, manuscripts, the reading practices and performances around these objects, and the circularity between print and oral cultures (including rumors and songs) shaped conspiracies and revolts in late colonial Venezuela. . . . This is a very important work on the history of books and newspapers in colonial Latin America and on print media in a place that lacked printing presses.—Alex Borucki, Journal of Latin American Studies
“Cristina Soriano makes an innovative argument about the emergence of the public sphere in Latin America through a fascinating and groundbreaking study of media, culture, and political movements in late colonial Venezuela.”—Edward P. Pompeian, Hispanic American Historical Review
“Tides of Revolution constitutes an important contribution to the scarcity of research on information circulation in the Americas. One of Soriano’s main merits is to document the relevance of multimedia sources in a territory without a printing press. She thus goes well beyond the more limited conception that privileges printed and written materials only.”—Kevin Sedeño-Guillén, New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century
“The book’s major contribution (and argument) stems from late colonial Venezuela’s apparent absence of ‘formal centers of debate,’ such as printing houses, literate societies, and bookshops. Using neglected Venezuelan, Spanish, and US sources such as contraband books, pasquinades, pamphlets, and songs, she [Cristina Soriano] reconstructs the development of what she terms ‘semiliterate forms of knowledge,’ including rumor, visual media, and orality.”—Jesse Zarley, Latin American Research Review
“Soriano demonstrates that coastal Venezuela suffered profound transformations in the wake of the French Revolution in the Caribbean. She thus recovers older narratives that had long connected the Latin American wars of independence to the wider late eighteenth-century Atlantic radical politics and texts.”—Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina
“Engaging and thought-provoking.”—Alejandra Dubcovsky, H-LatAm
“Soriano pored through the archives across three countries and dug through documents that most scholars pass over to shine light on historical events that are at once terribly important but almost entirely obscured. This book unveils the turbulent underbelly of what was otherwise a stable colonial world and thereby exposes critical new insights not only into the late colonial world but also into why the independence movements shattered that world.”—Reuben Zahler, author of Ambitious Rebels: Remaking Honor, Law, and Liberalism in Venezuela, 1780–1850
