The breath of freedom which seemed to sweep across the world during these last decades of the eighteenth century, might well have filled the sovereigns of Europe with fear for their possessions and prerogatives. Although Carlos III. was the most liberal monarch that Spain had had in a long time, he still clung to a rigorous paternal regime in the relations of the court to the colonies, the population of which began to resent the rule of officials sent to them from Madrid, and rarely concerned with their welfare. He had had more cause than other European sovereigns to dread the consequences which the American Revolution might bring in its wake. For an insurrection, headed by Tupac-Amaru, who called himself an Inca, had broken out in Peru, and was directed against the exactions of the corregidores; and though it was suppressed by the year 1782, incipient revolt seemed everywhere to be ready to break out. As Garcia Calderon says of that period in his book on Latin America: "The revolution was not merely an economic pretext; it nourished concrete social ambitions. An equalizing movement, it aimed at destruction of privileges, of the arbitrary Spanish hierarchy, and finally, when its levelling instinct was aroused and irritated, the destruction of authority to the profit of anarchy. The Creoles, deprived of all political function, revolted; in matters of economics they condemned excessive taxation and monopoly; in matters of politics they attacked slavery, the Inquisition, and moral tutelage. Charles III. had recognized, in 1783, in spite of the counsels of his minister Aranda, the independence of the United States, which were to serve his own colonies as precedent, and he expelled the Jesuits from America, the defense of the Indians against the oppression of Spanish governors. The corruption of the courts, the sale of offices, and the tyranny of the viceroys, all added to the causes of discontent, disturbance and poverty." The insurrection in Peru was but the tocsin sounding the alarm. It was to be followed by a number of revolts that shook the very foundations of Spain's colonial empire in America.