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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 remind you all and, Willie, where we left off in the last episode. So Bolivar, this young man,

age 22, he'd experienced a lot of personal tragedy.

We talked about that in the last episode.

And we sort of found him on top of the sacred mound, Montesacro 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 a 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,

the struggle for control over this incredibly wealthy colony between the local Creole elite,

which is what Bolivar is part of, and the Spanish crown, which is trying to claw back control.

And this is the background to everything that we're going to be describing in this episode.

But Anita, tell me, how did Spain at this point hold on to such a vast empire

with such a small population back in Europe and its own economy in decline at this period?

...