Sources — Gran Colombia

General works

Lynch, John. Simón Bolívar: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. The standard biography in English, and the best single book on the subject. Sympathetic, sceptical and very well documented.
Lynch, John. The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. The continental frame, and still the clearest account of why the wars happened when they did.
Bushnell, David. The Santander Regime in Gran Colombia. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1954. The foundational study of how the republic was actually administered, as opposed to how it was proclaimed.
Bushnell, David. The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Masur, Gerhard. Simon Bolivar. Rev. Ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969. Older, still valuable, and more willing than most to be critical.
Arana, Marie. Bolívar: American Liberator. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. The most readable modern narrative; lighter on the institutional history than Lynch.

Chapters I–III

Thibaud, Clément. Repúblicas en armas: Los ejércitos bolivarianos en la guerra de Independencia. Bogotá: Planeta, 2003. In Spanish. The best study of the armies as social institutions, and of why men fought on the side they did.
Earle, Rebecca. Spain and the Independence of Colombia, 1810–1825. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. The royalist side, taken seriously — which most of the literature does not do.
Blanchard, Peter. Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. On the enslaved men who fought for both sides, and what they were and were not given for it.
Helg, Aline. Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Race, caste and the coast. Essential for understanding what the republic looked like from below.
Brown, Matthew. Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006. The British and Irish legions, without the romance.
Stoan, Stephen K. Pablo Morillo and Venezuela, 1815–1820. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974.

Chapters IV–VII

Bushnell, David, ed. El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar. Trans. Fred Fornoff. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. The essential documents in English: the Cartagena Manifesto, the Jamaica Letter, the Angostura Address, the letter to Flores.
Gutiérrez Ardila, Daniel. El reconocimiento de Colombia: Diplomacia y propaganda en la coyuntura de las restauraciones. Bogotá: Universidad Externado, 2012. In Spanish. How the republic sought and won recognition.
Dawson, Frank Griffith. The First Latin American Debt Crisis: The City of London and the 1822–25 Loan Bubble. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. The loans, the bubble and the 1826 default — the part of the story usually left out entirely.
Hamnett, Brian R. The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Sobrevilla Perea, Natalia. The Caudillo of the Andes: Andrés de Santa Cruz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. On the Andean federation project from the southern end.
Hoover, John P. Admirable Warrior: Marshal Sucre, Fighter for South American Independence. Detroit: Blaine Ethridge, 1977. The only English life of Sucre, who deserves a better one.

Chapters VIII–X

Bushnell, David, and Lester D. Langley, eds. Simón Bolívar: Essays on the Life and Legacy of the Liberator. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
Safford, Frank, and Marco Palacios. Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. The best account of how geography shaped the New Granadan state.
Van Aken, Mark J. King of the Night: Juan José Flores and Ecuador, 1824–1864. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Straka, Tomás. La voz de los vencidos: Ideas del partido realista de Caracas, 1810–1821. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 2000. In Spanish. What the losers thought, which the national histories have no room for.
Conniff, Michael L. Panama and the United States: The End of the Alliance. 3rd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Memory

Carrera Damas, Germán. El culto a Bolívar. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1969; many later editions. In Spanish, and the indispensable book on the subject: the classic anatomy of how a man became a state religion.
Conway, Christopher. The Cult of Bolívar in Latin American Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Castro Leiva, Luis. De la patria boba a la teología bolivariana. Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1987. In Spanish. On what the Bolivarian tradition did to Venezuelan political thought.
Ewell, Judith. Venezuela: A Century of Change. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984.
García Márquez, Gabriel. The General in His Labyrinth. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. A novel, about the last voyage down the Magdalena, and it caused a national scandal for showing him as a man. Read it after the history, not instead of it.

Contemporary sources

Bolívar, Simón. Obras completas. Ed. Vicente Lecuna. 3 vols. Havana, 1947; and the Escritos del Libertador, Caracas, 1964–. The full correspondence, in Spanish. Lecuna's editorial hand is heavy and has been criticised; use alongside the modern critical editions.
Bolívar, Simón. “The Jamaica Letter.” Kingston, 6 September 1815.
Bolívar, Simón. “Address to the Congress of Angostura.” 15 February 1819. The central statement of his constitutional thought, hereditary senate and all.
O'Leary, Daniel Florencio. Memorias del General O'Leary. 32 vols. Caracas, 1879–88. Abridged in English as Bolívar and the War of Independence, trans. Robert F. McNerney. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970. By his Irish aide-de-camp. Indispensable, and partisan in his favour throughout.
Ducoudray Holstein, H. L. V. Memoirs of Simón Bolívar. Boston, 1829. By a disaffected former officer, and hostile to the point of unreliability. Useful as the contemporary case against him.
Mollien, Gaspard-Théodore. Travels in the Republic of Colombia in the Years 1822 and 1823. London, 1824. A French traveller's account of the republic as a working country, roads and all.
Hall, Francis. Colombia: Its Present State. London, 1824.
Sáenz, Manuela. Correspondence, in Las más hermosas cartas de amor entre Manuela y Simón. Ed. Eduardo Posada Carbó. Bogotá, 1993. What survives of it; most of her papers were burned at Paita in 1856.