Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

by John H. Elliott

  Consequently, by the time of Carlos II's death in 1700, it was not only the economic ties between metropolitan Spain and its overseas possessions that were unravelling. Under the cover of continuing deference to the royal authority, the creole elites, taking advantage of the crown's continuing fiscal needs, had sidled into a semi-detached political relationship with Madrid. In principle, a highly regulated transatlantic trading system and a vast body of legislation belatedly codified in the Recopilacion de las leyes de Indias held Spanish America in a tight metropolitan grip. In practice, the spread of systematized corruption endowed the imperial structure with a flexibility that its rigid framework appeared to belie. Corruption facilitated social mobility in a hierarchically structured society, and enlarged the space in which the creole elites were able to manoeuvre.41

  It is not therefore surprising that the proclamation of a Bourbon successor to Carlos II, in the person of Louis XIV's grandson, Philip V, passed off almost without incident in America, in sharp contrast to the turmoil that the events surrounding the Glorious Revolution of 1688 brought to the British colonies, where the growing interventionism of the later Stuarts had awakened dark fears of tyranny. Only in Caracas did a small group of pro-Austrian supporters, incited by a Habsburg agent provocateur, proclaim the Archduke Charles, the rival, Austrian candidate to the Spanish throne, to be the rightful monarch under the name of `Carlos III'.42 While mainland Spain would soon be plunged into civil war by the conflict of loyalties, there seemed no good reason in the American viceroyalties to contest the terms of Carlos II's last will and testament. The creole elites already possessed much of the reality, if not the appearance, of power.

  Yet inevitably a question-mark hung over the new dynasty. Although the creoles constantly complained of the way in which they were treated by native-born Spaniards, they had generally fared well under the government, and misgovernment, of the House of Austria. Could they expect an equally benign treatment from a French-imported dynasty? The France of Louis XIV had already engineered for itself a dominant position in Spain's Atlantic trade. On top of this, French ministers and advisers were now descending on Madrid, carrying plans for radical reform in their baggage. Was Spain to become a mere appendage of its traditional enemy? Even if not, there was always the danger that it might be subjected to French notions of government. The auguries were far from promising in 1713 as Philip V emerged victorious over his Austrian rival at the end of the long and destructive War of the Spanish Succession.

  Over the course of almost two hundred years of government the Habsburgs had in general respected the innate diversity of the realms that made up their Monarchy. Philip V, by contrast, used his victory over his rebellious territories of the Crown of Aragon to sweep away those fundamental laws, liberties and institutions which had allowed them to retain their separate identities. The eastern provinces of the peninsula were now to find themselves incorporated into a nominally unified and centralizing state controlled from Madrid - a `vertical' Spain in place of the `horizontal' Spain of the House of Austria.43

  The forced incorporation of the Crown of Aragon between 1709 and 1716 contrasted sharply with another contemporary union, that of England and Scotland in 1707. Although the Scots negotiated from a position of weakness, they secured important advantages from their incorporation into the parliamentary monarchy of a United Kingdom of Great Britain. The disaster of the Darien expedition of 1698 had brought home the high price to be paid for any attempt to establish independent Scottish overseas settlements in an America to which the larger European powers had already laid effective claim. Instead, the Scots now obtained unrestricted access to the commercial and other opportunities offered by an empire that was henceforth to be not English but British. In this they had the advantage of the Irish, and of the North American colonies themselves, since their freedom of manoeuvre would cease to be limited by the Navigation Acts and other mercantilist legislation imposed by a United Kingdom parliament.44

  While the British colonies might chafe under the trading arrangements dictated from London, they at least possessed, unlike Spain's American territories, barriers against the intervention of the imperial state, in the form of their own representative institutions. In the absence of such assemblies, Spain's overseas territories had been forced to rely on the crown's continuing willingness to recognize the inherent diversity of the Monarchy, and on the opportunities for manoeuvre offered by the endemic rivalries between the organisms that competed for power under the Habsburg system of conciliar government. But how far would these opportunities continue to exist under a Bourbon regime determined to modernize the structures and administrative methods of an ancien regime society? While the Council of the Indies survived, even if its functions were gradually reduced to those of a purely judicial tribunal, much of the old conciliar system was dismantled, and power began to be concentrated in the hands of a new breed of secretaries of state, including, from 1714, a secretary of the navy and the Indies.45 Most significant of all, the new regime was adopting a French-inspired language of reform. The authoritarian terminology of Louis XIV and the centralizing mercantilist terminology of Colbert were now beginning to colour the traditional, contractualist language of composite monarchy inherited from the Habsburgs.

  The Indies, however, were to secure a reprieve that would last for half a century. The new dynasty was too preoccupied with the problems of domestic reform, and with the recovery of the European territories lost to Spain in 1713 at the Treaty of Utrecht, to be able to devote itself to any systematic programme of reform in America. Such changes as did occur, like the creation of a third viceroyalty, that of New Granada, fleetingly in 1717, and then definitively in 1739, were responses to immediate problems of defence and administration, rather than part of a larger strategy of reform.46 The crown's military commitments in Europe meant that it remained as short of money as ever, and, in spite of its attempts to return to the practices of an earlier age, offices in the Indies, including the judicial posts in the Audiencias, continued to be put up for sale, almost as if Carlos II were still the King of Spain.47

  Yet there was also a growing awareness in Madrid that the Indies held the key to Spain's recovery. Salvation lay in the command of both silver and trade, and each had largely slipped from the grasp of the crown. Although the War of the Spanish Succession ended with Spain retaining its American empire territorially intact, it left the French pulling the strings of the transatlantic trade.

  In the aftermath of the Treaty of Utrecht, this French dominance was subject to growing challenge from the British, to whom the treaty had awarded the extremely valuable slave-trade contract, the asiento de negros, previously held by the Portuguese and the French. The concession included the famous annual 'permission ship', a South Sea Company vessel authorized to unload its cargo in Vera Cruz or Portobelo at the time of the arrival of the Seville/Cadiz fleet and the resulting trade fair. This represented the first breach of the Spanish Atlantic trading monopoly officially authorized by the crown itself.48

  The authorization vividly symbolized the new economic realities. As the Spanish Atlantic became internationalized, Spain's closed world of the Indies was rapidly being cracked open. If not yet offering unrestricted access to European goods, it seemed to be headed in that direction, unless the new dynasty could find ways of reversing the trend. Not only were Spanish America's ties to the peninsular economy unravelling, but the southward advance of the British mainland settlements was creating new openings for the development of an illicit hemispheric trade between the colonial possessions of the two imperial powers. In 1717 oranges grown in Spanish Florida were being shipped to Charles Town, and by the 1730s they were being enjoyed by the residents of Philadelphia and New York .41

  In Spain itself there was mounting resentment at the foreign penetration of the Indies trade. The Colbertian mercantilism that the French were attempting to establish in the peninsula stopped short of policies, such as the encouragement of Spanish manufacturing, that were likely to
prove prejudicial to France's national interests.50 Understandably, reform-minded Spaniards like Geronimo de Uztariz, the author of a highly influential treatise published in 1724 on `the theory and practice of trade', wanted their own comprehensive Colbertian programme, with no selective omissions favouring the British and the French .51

  The extraordinary buoyancy of Britain's commercial empire during the first half of the eighteenth century galvanized reform-minded ministers and conscientious royal officials like Uztariz, and prompted vigorous debate about ways in which Spain's American possessions might be made more profitable to the imperial metropolis. One outcome of this debate was a decision to charter a number of monopoly trading companies, on the model of those of France, England and the Dutch Republic, as a means of checking the flow of American contraband goods to foreign merchants. These companies, of which the first was the Royal Guipuzcoa Company for trade with Caracas, founded in 1728 and with its seat in Bilbao, were also intended to benefit the economies of the Iberian periphery, judged to have been prejudiced by the restriction of the transatlantic trade to Seville and Cadiz. Since, however, the new companies were only allowed to trade with marginal regions of America, like Venezuela, which were not directly supplied by the transatlantic convoys, the Andalusian monopoly - considered essential for the retention of control over the silver remittances - remained largely intact. -52

  While changes might be introduced on the margins of the transatlantic trading system, the debate really concerned the whole character of Spain's American empire and its relationship to Spain itself. Uztariz himself devoted little direct attention to this, although the question was implicit in his treatise. In 1743, however, Jose del Campillo, a man with personal experience of American administration who had been appointed secretary of the navy and the Indies in 1736, composed a manuscript in which he attempted a full-scale reassessment of Spain's system of government in America.53 `A new method of government', Campillo argued, was needed `in that great portion of the Spanish Monarchy', in order that ,such a rich possession should give us advantages'. At present the islands of Martinique and Barbados brought more benefits to their imperial owners, the French and the British, than all its vast American territories brought to Spain. Why should this be? `Our system of government', he wrote, `is totally vitiated.' `Economic government', as distinct from `political government', had been neglected, and the `spirit of conquest' had been intemperately maintained, with its preference for dominion taking precedence over the advantages and utilities of trade. The empires of England and France, unlike that of Spain, had realized the need to give their colonies `freedom and space, removing the shackles and restrictions oppressing their industry, and first giving them the means to enrich themselves before enriching their mother'.54

  Campillo's interpretation of the colonial policies of France and Britain was no doubt excessively rose-tinted, but his treatise, for all the ambiguities of its recommendations and the circumspect terms in which it was couched, is an indication of the way in which Spain's empire was coming to be conceptualized by ministers in Madrid in terms of its potential as a British-style empire of commerce. Sooner or later the new priorities would lead to a systematic reforming effort in the Indies, especially if military and naval expenses generated by continental and overseas wars continued to mount.

  The War of Jenkins' Ear, arising in 1739 out of Spanish efforts to cut down on contraband in the West Indies, began as an Anglo-Spanish naval conflict in the Caribbean before being swept up in the wider European conflict over the Austrian succession. On both sides, the costs of war would encourage already existing attempts to tighten the bonds of empire and rethink imperial relationships. In Britain, the war unleashed a patriotic frenzy that turned to triumphalism as the news arrived in March 1740 of Admiral Vernon's capture of Portobelo. Britain's empire of the seas was resoundingly confirmed, and fittingly commemorated in the first singing of Thomas Arne's rendering of `Rule Britannia'.55 The War of Jenkins' Ear, however, generated more than a localized patriotism. It reinforced the sense of a British transatlantic community, by giving the colonies the conviction that they were participating in a joint enterprise, both Protestant and free. In so doing, it strengthened the psychological and emotional bonds that were at least as powerful as the influence of interest groups and the bonds of patronage and commerce in tying them to the mother country.56 Yet at the same time it raised awkward questions about whether the existing structure of empire was adequate to meet the expectations, and satisfy the aspirations, of either the imperial metropolis or the colonies.

  In the Spanish Atlantic community, the period of warfare which ended in 1748 with very mixed results could hardly be expected to generate such positive emotional responses. But it brought with it important changes, including the licensing, in response to the hazards of wartime shipping, of transatlantic sailings by single ships in place of the traditional fleets. Even if the monopoly-minded merchants of Seville and Cadiz succeeded in 1757 in reviving the flota to New Spain, the days of the great transatlantic convoys were over. So too were the days of the American trading fairs which traditionally followed the arrival of the fleets.17 Policy and circumstance had combined to introduce a new, if still limited, flexibility into the commercial arrangements of Spain's Atlantic empire.

  Except where matters of commerce and war were involved, however, the governments of both Britain and Spain showed no great disposition during the first four decades of the eighteenth century to tamper with the prevailing political and administrative relationship between the imperial centre and its transatlantic possessions. Inertia, bordering on neglect, appeared to be the order of the day - a neglect that was salutary or pernicious according to the perspective adopted.58 But the growing appreciation in both Britain and Spain of the commercial benefits of their Atlantic empires, coupled with the growing costs of imperial defence in an age of great-power conflict on land and sea, meant that the neglect could not continue indefinitely.

  Yet change imposed from the imperial metropolis was likely in both instances to aggravate the latent tensions that had existed between the colonial communities and the mother country ever since colonization began. These communities saw themselves, and were seen by the metropolitan societies from which they derived, as constituent parts of polities that spanned the Atlantic - polities more closely integrated in some areas than in others, but none the less united by a common heritage and a whole complex of loyalties and interests. Over their mutual relationship, however, hovered a puzzling question. Were these overseas communities respectively British and Spanish, or were they really something different?

  Creole communities

  In 1567 Lope Garcia de Castro, the interim governor of Peru, informed the President of the Council of the Indies: `Your Excellency should understand that the people of this land are different from what they were before, because most of the Spaniards who depend on it for their livelihood are old, and many are dead and have been succeeded in the repartimientos [of the Indians] by their sons, and have left many children. As a result, this land is full of criollos, who are those who were born here ...'S9 To the new generation which succeeded that of the conquistadores, the Indies, not Spain, was the only home they knew They were criollos -'native-born'- a word first used in the mid-sixteenth century of black slaves born in the Indies, rather than in Africa.60 In the last twenty or thirty years of the century criollo, as applied to American-born Spaniards, began to catch on in peninsular Spain, to some extent displacing indiano, a term also used to describe someone who returned home from the Indies, having made his fortune. Its growing popularity reflected the existence in America of a new breed of Spaniards, who in some respects might differ from their Spanish-born relatives.

  By the early seventeenth century, some form or other of the word criollo had entered the English language, but it was still an unfamiliar term. William Strachey found it necessary to explain its meaning in his The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania of 1612, when, writing of `the Indian-Crollos', h
e added in parenthesis `(Spaniards born there) 1.61 In the middle years of the century Thomas Gage's racy account of his experiences in Mexico no doubt helped popularize the word among English readers, while also acquainting them with the antipathy between creoles and new arrivals from Spain, the so-called gachupines or penin- sulares.62 It seems, however, to have been only in the 1680s that English officials, or newly arrived immigrants, began to apply the term creole to their own compatriots born either in the Caribbean or the mainland colonies, or long settled there. Even then, there was some uncertainty about the usage, since creole could equally be applied to American-born blacks.63

  Criollo and creole were words more likely to be employed by others to describe European settlers and their descendants, than used by native-born white Americans as a form of self-description. In a famous pamphlet of 1764 the Boston lawyer, James Otis, appended an explanatory note: `Those in England who borrow the term of the Spaniards, as well as their notions of government, apply this term to all Americans of European extract; but the northern colonists apply it only to the islanders [i.e. the West Indies settlers] and others of such extract under the torrid Zone.'64 The descendants of English settlers of America thought of themselves as quintessentially English, just as, in their own eyes, settlers of Spanish descent in the Indies were espanoles, as distinct from indios, mestizos and negros. The term creole, moreover, rapidly acquired a set of negative connotations. Even those who could boast pure Spanish descent, without any admixture of Indian blood, were widely believed among peninsular Spaniards to have gone to seed in the Indies. The seventeenth-century jurist Solorzano y Pereira, coming to their defence, blamed those who, through ignorance or a malicious desire to exclude creoles from offices and honours, liked to claim that they `degenerate so much as a result of the constellations and temper of those provinces, that they lose all the good effects that derive from the influence of Spanish blood', with the result that they were `scarcely worthy of being described as rational beings ...'6s