The military reform programme in New Spain therefore got off to a rocky start. Although, on Villalba's figures, the viceroyalty had an army of 2,341 regulars and 9,244 provincials by the summer of 1766, only one of the six provincial regiments was properly armed and uniformed, and the quality of the recruits was low. Yet at least the structure of the army of New Spain was now in place, and the pattern established in the viceroyalty would be followed across the continent. By the end of the decade it was estimated that some 40,000 men, in different categories, were stationed across Spanish America .21
Spanish officers brought a new military professionalism to the Indies, with encouraging results. In 1770, for instance, the governor of Buenos Aires was able to expel the British from the Malvinas - the Falkland Islands - where they had established a fishing and naval station. For diplomatic reasons, however, his success was to be short-lived. In the following year a British ultimatum forced Charles III to abandon the islands, since the French, whose alliance with Spain was essential for successful defiance of England, were unwilling to come to his support.29
Over the next two or three decades, as Spanish America acquired a permanent military establishment, creole attitudes to military service changed. Madrid had always hoped that military titles and uniforms would prove a magnet to a creole elite hungry for office and honour. But its hopes were dashed when young men of good colonial families showed themselves unwilling to serve under Spanish officers. Service in the militia, however, began to look rather more attractive when - as in New Spain in 1766 - full privileges under the fuero militar were extended to officers in provincial units, and partial privileges to enlisted personnel.3o Traditionally, in the corporate society of metropolitan Spain, the military, like the clergy, constituted a distinctive corporation, possessing the right or fuero of jurisdiction over its own members. By extending immunity in criminal and civil cases to officers serving in the provincial militias, the fuero militar effectively set them apart from the mass of the population. Across the continent, from Mexico City to Santiago de Chile, the sons of the creole elite, resplendent in their uniforms, would constitute just over half the veteran officer corps of the army of America by the last decade of the eighteenth century.31 The first seeds of the militarization of the states of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America were sown by the Bourbon military reforms of the late eighteenth century.
The contemporaneous reforms in the system of British imperial defence were destined to have an opposite effect. The British government's decision to provide an army for America composed of regiments sent from the home country arose out of a perception of colonial realities that failed to factor colonial sensibilities into the equation. There were vast territories to be defended, and their experiences with provincial units during the Seven Years' War had left British commanders with a low opinion of American fighting capabilities. The authorities in London were therefore inclined - unwisely as it later transpired - to write off the militias as being of little value, and particularly those of New England which had been most heavily involved in the Canada campaign.32 Where the Spanish author ities - driven more by financial stringency than by any high regard for the fighting qualities of the creoles - chose to integrate reorganized and retrained local militias into the new system of imperial defence, their British counterparts, with large numbers of unemployed soldiers on their hands after the signing of the peace, saw the solution to their domestic and American problems in a standing army imported from England .31
The very notion of a standing army, however, smacked of continental tyranny to a colonial population that took for granted its entitlement to English liberty. During the war it had seen for itself how the argument of military necessity could ride roughshod over rights.34 For the time being, Pontiac's rebellion made them grateful for the continuing protection afforded by the redcoats. But grounds for apprehension already existed, and the subsequent actions of the ministers in London would do nothing to assuage them.
The drive for reform
The problem of security was to be the precipitant of change in both the British and the Spanish empires. Increased security meant increased costs, as ministers in Madrid and London were painfully aware. Britain emerged from the war saddled with an enormous burden of debt, and it now had to find an estimated £225,000 a year35 to maintain an army in America. It seemed reasonable to expect the colonists, whose current contribution to the costs of empire came from inefficiently collected customs dues, to take a fair share of paying for an army intended for their protection. Ministers in Madrid were moved by similar considerations. The defences of outlying and exposed regions, like the Caribbean islands or the central American coast, represented a continuous drain on the resources of hardpressed treasuries, and if the Indies were better administered they could surely do more to meet the costs of their own protection. Fiscal and administrative reform therefore appeared to follow naturally from the requirements of a modernized system of imperial defence.
Other, and related, considerations were also impelling British and Spanish ministers in the direction of a general reassessment of their colonial policies. There was, in particular, the question of territorial boundaries. For Britain the acquisition of New France and Florida meant the addition to its American empire of large new territories with their own distinctive legal and administrative systems, and with Roman Catholic populations. How could they be satisfactorily incorporated, and what rights could their populations be safely allowed at a time when English Catholics were excluded from participation in political life? The defeat of the French also meant the removal of the most effective barrier to trans- Appalachian expansion by a land-hungry population hemmed in along the Atlantic seaboard. Were the colonists now to be permitted to swarm into the Indian interior, thus provoking new Indian wars, with all the additional strain on financial and military resources that this would involve? The Spaniards, too, were faced with difficult boundary problems. The long northern frontier of New Spain was only thinly settled. Should it be extended still further northwards to form a barrier against the English, thus provoking further conflict with the Indians, and again adding to the costs of defence? The dilemma that confronted both Britain and Spain was that of an empire too far.
Their problems were exacerbated by the fact that the imperial territories they already possessed appeared to be in danger of slipping from their control. The consolidation of creole oligarchies, and the accelerating infiltration of their members into high judicial, administrative and ecclesiastical posts,36 had left Spanish ministers and viceroys with a growing sense of impotence in the face of creole opposition. For all the talk of reform, and serious efforts between 1713 and 1729 to return to traditional standards of appointment, 108 creoles secured positions in the Audiencias during the reign of the first two Bourbons, and it was only in 1750 that the crown felt able to end the practice of putting these posts up for sale. By then, creole judges were in the majority in the Audiencias of Mexico City, Lima and Santiago, and retained it for a further two decades.37 By no means all the creole judges were local sons, but, where they were, the strength of their local connections hardly guaranteed an impartial enforcement of royal justice and an effective implementation of royal decrees.
In the British colonies, royal governors found themselves hamstrung by their lack of financial independence, with colonial assemblies dictating appointments through their control of salary appropriations. `The ruling faction has obtained in effect the nomination to all offices,' complained Governor Clinton of New York in 1746.38 The Seven Years War only served to increase the opportunities for political leverage by the assemblies. By the end of the war all the lower houses in the British colonies had effectively secured an exclusive right to frame money bills, and were becoming accustomed to thinking of themselves as local equivalents of the House of Commons.39 Until now, the presence of the French had helped to restrain those inclinations to independence which ministers in London suspected the colonists of harbouring. With that presence removed
, how could continuing loyalty be assured?
These were the kind of problems that had long preoccupied George Montagu Dunk, Earl of Halifax, President of the Board of Trade between 1748 and 1761, who had tried to push successive administrations into paying more attention to American affairs and had presented them with far-reaching proposals for administrative reform.40 They also bulked large in the minds of the reformist ministers whom Charles III had gathered round him in Madrid. The temper of the age in continental Europe was running strongly towards the strengthening of the state and the rationalization of administration in line with the scientific principles of the Enlightenment. Ministers and officials were anxious to take their decisions on the basis of the most up-to-date information available. This meant applying the methods of science to government and ensuring that reliable statistics were collected. Ministers therefore launched surveys and promoted scientific expeditions that would furnish them with the facts and figures on which to base their policies. Even English ministers were not immune to the new breezes blowing from the continent. Halifax exemplified this new rationality as he sought to devise a programme of colonial reforms that would enable London to create a cost-effective empire.41
It was one of the ironies of the 1760s that Spanish ministers should have taken Britain's commercial empire in America as a model for their own at a time when the British themselves were becoming increasingly attracted by the idea of a more centrally controlled empire on the model of the Spanish. Madrid wanted to see Spain's American possessions transformed into British-style `colonies', a rich source of staple products and a market for its goods, but it was under no illusions as to the scale of the reforms that would be needed. The loss of Cuba, however, and its recovery under the terms of the Peace of Paris, presented ministers with an opportunity that they were quick to seize. The urgent need for a radical overhaul of the island's defences made Cuba an ideal laboratory for trying out a programme of comprehensive reform that might later be extended to the mainland territories.42
Following the return of the island to Spain, the Count of Ricla was sent out as governor and captain-general to retake possession and reorganize the system of defence. He arrived in Havana in June 1763, accompanied by General Alejandro O'Reilly, who was deputed to oversee the plans for refortifying Havana harbour, expanding the garrison, and reconstituting the island militia as a disciplined force. The costs of implementing the plans, however, would be high, and government revenues in the island were low The alcabala, which in other American territories was a substantial source of income consisting of 4-6 per cent payable on sales, had only recently been imposed on domestic transactions, and was set at a meagre 2 per cent. Although the Mexican treasury would contribute to the cost of constructing new fortifications, there was still a heavy shortfall, and the challenge facing Ricla was to generate more income in the island itself.
Ricla embarked on a round of astute negotiations with the tobacco and sugar planters, the ranchers and the merchants who constituted the island's elite. Access to British markets during the months of British occupation had brought home to them the benefits to be gained from a more liberal trading system than the highly regulated system that still prevailed in the Spanish colonial trade, in spite of recent attempts at relaxation. Ricla's best hope of success therefore lay in hinting at the possibilities of a change in the commercial regime as compensation for acceptance by the islanders of an increase in taxes. Such a change, however, would mean the government's defying the formidable Consulado of Cadiz merchants, who were determined to preserve their monopoly of the American trade.
In April 1764, following a recommendation by Esquilache's reforming junta, the crown raised the Cuban alcabala from 2 to 4 per cent and placed levies on brandy (aguardiente) and rum. An anxious period of waiting followed on the island, as the Spanish crown considered a Cuban petition for liberalization of the trading laws. During this period Esquilache was engaged in facing down conservative-minded ministers and officials and the lobbying of the Cadiz Consulado. By October 1765 he was ready to act. In a decisive break with the practice of channelling the principal Indies trade through Cadiz, permission was granted to nine Spanish ports to trade directly with Cuba and the other Spanish Caribbean islands, and the ban was lifted on inter-island trade. A second royal decree modified and consolidated the island's tax system, raising the alcabala in the process to 6 per cent.
Esquilache himself was toppled from power five months later by a popular insurrection in Madrid directed against the Italian reformist ministers of Charles III and covertly encouraged by highly placed government officials.43 But the Cuban fiscal and commercial reforms that Esquilache had devised in partnership with Ricla not only survived but were sufficiently successful to lay the groundwork for Cuba's future prosperity as a sugar-producing colony. At the same time, the appointment in 1764 of an intendant to handle the island's fiscal and military affairs - the first time that one of these new-style officials, introduced into Spain by the Bourbons, had been appointed outside the peninsula - represented a first, tentative, experiment towards endowing the Indies with a modern, professional bureaucracy.44 The institution of these various measures, even if on the small scale of an island setting, suggested how reformist ministers, playing their cards skilfully within the traditional Spanish political culture of bargaining and mutual concessions, could defuse opposition and find a compromise solution acceptable both to themselves and to a colonial elite with a list of grievances to be redressed. It was an example that the ministers of George III would prove unable to replicate.
Even before they could be certain of the outcome of the Cuban reforms, Charles III's minsterial team decided to apply their reformist brushstrokes to a wider canvas. In 1765 Jose de Galvez, a lawyer in Esquilache's circle with a dry personality and a fanatical zeal for reform, was sent out to conduct a general visitation of the viceroyalty of New Spain. His six-year visitation was to be decisive both for his own career in the service of the crown, and for the future of the reform programme in Spain's American possessions as a whole. The success of his mission was to lead to similar visitations of the viceroyalties of Peru in 1777 and New Granada in 1778. Galvez himself, created Marquis of La Sonora by a grateful monarch, was appointed secretary of the Indies in 1775, and exercised a dominant control over American affairs up to the time of his death in 1787.45
The reform projects associated with the name of Galvez, involving fiscal, administrative and commercial innovation on an unprecedented scale, testify to the extent of the transformation of attitudes and assumptions about Spain's empire of the Indies that had been gathering strength in Madrid over the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The reforms were bold, but Charles III and his closest advisers had reached the conclusion that the case for reform was overwhelming. There was no doubt in their minds that, in the predatory international world of the eighteenth century, the survival of Spain's American empire could no longer be taken for granted. The loss of America, with its great reserves of silver and its large population - probably now approaching, and soon to overtake, the population of peninsular Spain with its 9 million inhabitants46 - would mean the end of Spain's pretensions to be counted among the great powers of Europe.
Although Britain might have won the war, British ministers in London were as anxious as their Madrid counterparts about the future of their overseas empire. The population of British America still lagged far behind that of Britain itself: in the 1750s the mainland colonies had some 1,200,000 inhabitants and the West Indies 330,000, while the population of the British Isles now stood at around 10 million.47 It was generally acknowledged, however, that the value of the commodities produced for Great Britain by the colonies, and their rapidly growing potential as a market for British goods, had made their retention central to British policy. But they had to be retained in such a way as to prevent them from becoming a permanent burden on the British tax-payer, and this could not be achieved without major reforms in colonial management. In the spring of 1763 Bute obse
rved: `We ought to set about reforming our old colonies before we settled new ones.'48
The fall of Bute and the appointment in April 1763 of George Grenville as first Lord of the Treasury in his place, placed government in the hands of a man with an obsessive determination to balance the books. His financial expertise, coupled with the American expertise of Halifax, who three months later was made secretary of state for the South, promised a determined attempt to reduce colonial affairs to order.49 This involved large-scale territorial reorganization, undertaken in the autumn of 1763. The newly acquired Spanish Florida was reconstituted as two separate colonies, East and West Florida.50 These were to have royal governors and elected assemblies, and be made subject to the English legal system. French Quebec similarly became a British colony, while the territory south of the St Lawrence estuary was added to Nova Scotia, a British colony since 1713.51 It was also necessary to give the benefits of royal protection to the king's new Indian subjects, together with his new French subjects and the handful of Spaniards who chose to remain in Pensacola and Florida after their transfer to the English crown. Halifax attempted to resolve the border question and pacify the Indian peoples by creating a demarcation line that would exclude settlers from the American interior. A royal proclamation of October 1763 established the famous Proclamation Line, drawing a boundary along the line of the Appalachian mountains - a boundary that was supposed to be policed by the colonial army, but that settlers and land speculators would rapidly come to ignore.12
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Page 51