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

by John H. Elliott

  54. Anderson, Crucible of War, pp. 583-5.

  55. Barrow, Trade and Empire, pp. 183-4.

  56. Andrien, Crisis and Decline, pp. 154-5.

  57. Cited by Thomas, British Politics, p. 53.

  58. Lynch, Bourbon Spain, pp. 344-5; Guillermo Cespedes del Castillo, El tabaco en Nueva Espana (Madrid, 1992), ch. 3; Jose Jesus Hernandez Palomo, El aguardiente de cana en Mexico (Seville, 1974).

  59. Thomas, British Politics, p. 112.

  60. Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness, p. 130. The estimates would be vastly exceeded as a result of extraordinary expenses.

  61. Shy, Toward Lexington, pp. 188-9; Anderson, Crucible of War, pp. 720-2.

  62. Cited in Barrow, Trade and Empire, p. 225.

  63. Cespedes del Castillo, Ensayos, pp. 234-6.

  64. Above, p. 232.

  65. Vicent Llombart, Campomanes, economista y politico de Carlos III (Madrid, 1992). Campomanes served in the Council of Castile for three decades, from 1762 to 1791.

  66. N. M. Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 1759-1821 (London, 1968), p. 92.

  67. Cited by Laura Rodriguez, Reforma e Ilustracidn en la Espana del siglo XVIII: Pedro K. Campomanes (Madrid, 1975), p. 59.

  68. Horst Pietschmann, Las reformas borbonicas y el sistema de intendencias en Nueva Espana (Mexico City, 1996), p. 302.

  69. Cited by I. A. A. Thompson in Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker (eds), Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World. Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott (Cambridge, 1995), p. 158.

  70. See Farriss, Crown and Clergy. For provincial councils, pp. 33-8.

  71. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred, pp. 83-6.

  72. Mazin, Ent re dos majestades, pp. 138-40.

  73. The alleged involvement of the Jesuits in the overthrow of Esquilache is examined in Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, pp. 98-107. Andres-Gallego, El moon de Esquilache, pp. 655-63, leaves the problem unresolved, but provides (pp. 501-28) a useful summary of attitudes to the Jesuits and to their activities, including their activities in the Indies, in the period leading up to their expulsion.

  74. D. A. Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico. The Diocese of Michoacan, 1749-1810 (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 1; Antonio Mestre, `La actitud religiosa de los catolicos ilustrados', in Austin Guimera (ed.), El reformismo borbdnico. Una vision interdisciplinar (Madrid, 1996), pp. 147-63; Teofanes Egido (ed.), Los jesuitas en Espana y en el mundo hispanico (Madrid, 2004), pp. 256-73.

  75. Andres-Gallego, El moon de Esquilache, p. 596; and see more generally pp. 595-645 for his assessment of the consequences of the expulsion on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic.

  76. Martinez Lopez-Cano (ed.), Iglesia, estado y economia, p.

  77. Brading, Church and State, pp. 4-7.

  78. Cited by McFarlane, `The Rebellion of the Barrios: Urban Insurrection in Bourbon Quito', in Fisher, Kuethe and McFarlane (eds), Reform and Insurrection, p. 202.

  79. The account that follows is based on McFarlane, `The Rebellion of the Barrios', and Kenneth J. Andrien, `Economic Crisis, Taxes and the Quito Insurrection of 1765', Past and Present, 129 (1990), pp. 104-31.

  80. McFarlane, Colombia Before Independence, pp. 232-3; Fisher, Kuethe and McFarlane (eds), Reform and Insurrection, pp. 3-4.

  81. Andres-Gallego, El motin de Esquilache, p. 194.

  82. Ibid., p. 197.

  83. Cited in Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis. Prologue to Revolution (1953; repr. New York, 1962), p. 43.

  84. Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise. Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelaphia (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1986), pp. 175-6. For the relationship of the Stamp Act crisis to the impact of the post-war depression on the port towns, see especially Nash, Urban Crucible, ch. 11.

  85. Cited in David McCullough, John Adams (New York and London, 2001), p. 43.

  86. Greene, `Seven Years' War', p. 97.

  87. Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 121-32.

  88. Ibid., pp. 123-4.

  89. Above, p. 262.

  90. Nash, Urban Crucible, p. 247; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 48-9.

  91. For the Loyal Nine and their transformation into the inter-colonial `Sons of Liberty', see, in addition to Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution. Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (1971; repr. New York and London, 1992), ch. 4.

  92. Cited in John L. Bullion, `British Ministers and American Resistance to the Stamp Act, October-December 1765', WMQ, 3rd set., 49 (1992), pp. 89-107, at p. 91.

  93. Burke, European Settlements, 2, p. 172.

  94. Ibid., p. 167.

  95. Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, p. 139. New Hampshire declined, but approved the proceedings after the congress was over.

  96. Cited in Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, p. 146.

  97. For the response in the West Indies, where there were riots in the Leeward Islands, see O'Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided, pp. 86-104.

  98. Cited in Anderson, Crucible of War, p. 684.

  99. See Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, pp. 222-34, for the early stages of the nonimportation movement.

  100. C. Knick Harley, `Trade, Discovery, Mercantilism and Technology', in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2004), 1, p. 184. See also his table 7.1 for official values of British trade, 1663-1774 (p. 177). Part 1 of Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, provides a vivid account of the huge variety of British imports on offer and the patterns of marketing and consumption in the colonies.

  101. Jacob M. Price, `Who Cared About the Colonies?', in Bailyn and Morgan (eds), Strangers Within the Realm, pp. 395-436, at p. 417.

  102. Barlow Trecothick to Rockingham, 7 November 1765, cited by Bullion, `British Ministers', p. 100.

  103. Price, `Who Cared About the Colonies?', p. 412.

  104. Bullion, `British Ministers'.

  105. See H. G. Koenigsberger, `Composite States, Representative Institutions and the American Revolution', Historical Research. The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 62 (1989), pp. 135-53. See also Miller, Defining the Common Good, chs 3 and 4.

  106. Above, p. 230.

  107. Greene, Peripheries and Center, pp. 61-2.

  108. Cited by Anderson, Crucible of War, p. 700.

  109. Miller, Defining the Common Good, pp. 192-4. The Greeks did in fact consider their colonies as dependent on the mother city The Roman notion of colonia, on the other hand, lacked this notion of dependency, which may have arisen in the minds of British politicians as a result of confusing Rome's `colonies', originally settlements of veteran soldiers, with its `provinces', which were indeed dependent on the metropolis. I am grateful to Professor Glen Bowersock for guidance on this point. `Colony' and 'plantation' were interchangeable terms in the early phases of English overseas colonization, but the notion of dependency had obviously established itself by 1705, when Lord Cornbury wrote that in his opinion `all these Colloneys, which are but twigs belonging to the Main Tree [England] ought to be Kept entirely dependent upon and subservient to England' (E. B. O'Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New York, 4 vols (Albany, NY11850-1), 1, p. 485). For an example of the distinction drawn by eighteenth-century British commentators between Greek and Roman colonies, see James Abercromby's De Jure et Gubernatione Coloniarum (1774), reprinted in Jack P. Greene, Charles F. Mullett and Edward C. Papenfuse (eds), Magna Charta for America (Philadelphia, 1986), p. 203.

  110. Cited by Anderson, Crucible of War, p. 642.

  111. Cited by Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven and London, 2002), pp. 154-5.

  112. Greene, Peripheries and Center, pp. 80-4. 'A mere cob-web', Daniel Dulany, in his `Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies', as cited in Samuel Eliot Morison (ed.), Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, 1764-1788 (2nd edn, London, Oxford,
New York, 1965), p. 26.

  113. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire. Origins of the War of American Independence (Baltimore and London, 1982), p. 157. See also Richard R. Johnson, "`Parliamentary Egotisms": the Clash of Legislatures in the Making of the American Revolution', The Journal of American History, 74 (1987), pp. 338-62.

  114. P. J. Marshall, `Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century: II, Britons and Americans', TRHS, 9 (1999), pp. 1-16, at p. 11.

  115. Cited by Stephen Conway `From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739-1783', WMQ, 3rd set., 59 (2002), pp. 65-100, at p. 84.

  116. Cited by Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire. British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 2000), p. 125.

  117. Eyzaguirre, Ideario y ruta, p. 44.

  118. Richard Morris, Josefina Zoraida Vazquez and Elias Trabulse, Las revoluciones de independencia en Mexico y los Estados Unidos. Un ensayo comparativo, 3 vols (Mexico City, 1976), 1, p. 165.

  119. Brading, Miners and Merchants, pp. 44-51.

  120. Richard Konetzke, `La condition legal de los criollos y las causal de la independencia', Estudios americanos, 2 (1950), pp. 31-54; Eyzaguirre, Ideario y ruta, p. 53; Brading, First America, p. 477.

  121. John H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares. The Statesman in an Age of Decline (New Haven and London, 1986), pp. 191-202.

  122. Ibid., p. 244.

  123. Konetzke, `La condition legal', pp. 45-6.

  124. Cited by Farriss, Crown and Clergy, p. 130.

  125. Table 2 in Brading, Miners and Merchants, p. 40.

  126. `Representation que hizo la ciudad de Mexico al rey D. Carlos III en 1771 . . .', in Juan E. Hernandez y Davalos (ed.), Coleccion de documentos Para la historia de la guerra de independencia de Mexico de 1808 a 1821, 6 vols (Mexico City, 1877-82), 1, pp. 427-55. There is an abridged English translation in John Lynch (ed.), Latin American Revolutions, 1808-1826 (Norman, OK, 1994), pp. 58-70, which I have used here. See also Brading, First America, pp. 479-83.

  127. Above, p. 319.

  128. Marshall, `Britain and the World', pp. 9-10.

  129. Konetzke, `La condition legal', p. 48; Brading, Miners and Merchants, p. 37.

  Chapter 11. Empires in Crisis

  1. Above, p. 321.

  2. Above, p. 149.

  3. The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 168-9. For the tracing of this and other ideas about colonial dependence, see J. M. Bumsted, "`Things in the Womb of Time": Ideas of American Independence, 1633 to 1763', WMQ, 3rd set., 31 (1974), pp. 533-64.

  4. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 112-13. For the influence in America of Trenchard and Gordon's Cato's Letters, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967; enlarged edn, Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 35-6.

  5. Cited in Barrow, Trade and Empire, p. 176.

  6. Above, p. 235.

  7. For these works and the debate they produced on both sides of the Atlantic, see Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, chs 3-6; Durand Echevarria, Mirage in the West. A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (1957; 2nd edn, Princeton, 1968), ch. 1; Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World. Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA, 2001).

  8. Francisco Javier Clavijero, Historia antigua de Mexico, ed. Mariano Cuevas, 4 vols (2nd edn, Mexico City, 1958-9). For Pauw's `monstrous portrait of America', vol. 4, pp. 7-10; and see Bra ding, The First America, ch. 20, for Clavijero and the `Jesuit patriots'.

  9. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1982), p. 64.

  10. See note 4, above.

  11. Federica Morelli, `La revolution en Quito: el camino hacia el gobierno mixto', Revista de Indias, 62 (2002), pp. 335-56, at p. 342; Antonio Annino, `Some Reflections on Spanish American Constitutional and Political History', Itinerario, 19 (1995), pp. 26-47, at p. 40.

  12. Manuel Gimenez Fernandez, Las doctrinas populistas en la independencia de HispanoAmerica (Seville, 1947), p. 57.

  13. Rene Millar Corbacho, `La inquisition de Lima y la circulation de libros prohibidos (1700-1800)', Revista de Indias, 44 (1984), pp. 415-44.

  14. Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1992), p. 42; Amory and Hall (eds), The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, pp. 367-73. For juries in pre-revolutionary North American politics, see John M. Murrin, `Magistrates, Sinners and a Precarious Liberty: Tried by Jury in Seventeenth-Century New England', in Hall, Murrin and Tate (eds) Saints and Revolutionaries, pp. 152-206; Reid, In a Defiant Stance, especially ch. 8; and Hoffer, Law and People, pp. 87-9.

  15. For the contrasts, see in particular the observations on colonial American newspapers in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York, 1983, repr. 1989), pp. 61-5.

  16. Francois-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias. Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispanicas (Madrid, 1992), p. 285; Haring, Spanish Empire, pp. 246-9.

  17. Amory and Hall (eds), The Colonial Book, 1, pp. 154 and 354.

  18. Ibid., p. 358.

  19. Louis B. Wright, The Cultural Life of the British Colonies, 1607-1763 (New York, 1957), pp. 241-2; Kammen, Colonial New York, pp. 338-41.

  20. Butler, Becoming America, pp. 170-4; Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, pp. 83-91; Beeman, Varieties of Political Experience, p. 259.

  21. Figures in Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 64, n. 50. I am grateful to Peter Bakewell for advice on this point.

  22. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions (2nd edn., New York and London, 1973), p. 26.

  23. John Leddy Phelan, The People and the King. The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison, WI, 1978), p. 85.

  24. John Dunn, `The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century', in John W. Youlton (ed.), John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 45-80. See, however, Jerome Huyler, Locke in America. The Moral Philosophy of the Founding Era (Lawrence, KS, 1995), especially pp. 207-8. Against recent tendencies to play down the influence of Locke in pre-revolutionary America, Huyler makes a cogent case for the permeation of American culture by Lockean ideals.

  25. Wright, Cultural Life, pp. 119-20, 151-2; Isaac, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom, pp. 88 and 359.

  26. Wright, Cultural Life, p. 121; Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford, 1976), pp. 61-4; Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, pp. 131-2; Ferguson, American Enlightenment, p. 57.

  27. May, Enlightenment, pp. 33-4.

  28. See J. M. Lopez Pinero, La introduction de la ciencia moderna en Espana (Barcelona, 1969), for the arrival of the new science and medicine in later seventeenth-century Spain.

  29. See Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958).

  30. See Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, for innovation in the writing of history.

  31. John Tate Lanning, Academic Culture in the Spanish Colonies (Oxford, 1940; repr., Port Washington and London, 1971), p. 65; Arthur P. Whitaker (ed.), Latin America and the Enlightenment (2nd edn, Ithaca, NY11961), p. 35.

  32. Colley, Britons, p. 132; T. H. Breen, `Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising', Journal of American History, 84 (1997), pp. 13-39.

  33. Breen, `Ideology and Nationalism', pp. 30-1.

  34. There is a massive literature on the ideological shifts on both sides of the Atlantic in the years following the accession of George III. See in particular Robbins, Commonwealthmen, ch. 9; Bailyn, Ideological Origins; J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985), and the relevant essays in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980). I have drawn on all these for the brief account
that follows.

  35. In addition to the literature cited above, see Jonathan Scott, `What were Commonwealth Principles?', Historical Journal, 47 (2004), pp. 591-613.

  36. See Bailyn, Ideological Origins, pp. 86-93.

  37. Bushman, King and People, pp. 194-5.

  38. Beeman, Varieties of Political Experience, pp. 111 and 244.

  39. Townshend's project is examined in detail in Peter D. G. Thomas, The Townshend Duties Crisis. The Second Phase of the American Revolution, 1767-1773 (Oxford, 1987). See also Barrow, Trade and Empire, pp. 216-24.

  40. Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, pp. 114-38; Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, ch. 7.

  41. Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, p. 118.

  42. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, pp. 230-4.

  43. `Philo Americanus', cited in ibid., p. 265.

  44. Theodore Draper, A Struggle for Power. The American Revolution (London, 1996), pp. 356-60; McCullough, John Adams, pp. 65-8. For succinct accounts of the pre-revolutionary period in the aftermath of the Boston Massacre see Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789 (Chicago, 1956), ch. 4, and Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution. A History (London, 2003), pp. 33-44.

  45. Nash, Urban Crucible, pp. 355-6; Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, p. 129.

  46. See Nash, Urban Crucible, pp. 351-82.

  47. Beeman, Varieties of Political Experience, pp. 258-62. For evidence that Adams made up his mind in favour of independence as early as 1768, see John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams. America's Revolutionary Politician (Lanham, MD, 2002), p. 65.

  48. Nash, Urban Crucible, p. 371.

  49. See Gordon S. Wood, 'A Note on Mobs in the American Revolution', WMQ, 3rd set., 23 (1966), pp. 635-42.

  50. Alexander, Samuel Adams, pp. 82 and 91-2.

  51. Ibid., pp. 117 and 122.

  52. Draper, Struggle for Power, pp. 415-19.

  53. Cited in Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, pp. 224-5.

  54. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, pp. 199-200; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, pp. 187-9.

  55. Morgan, Birth of the Republic, p. 61; Draper, Struggle for Power, pp. 434-5. For the role of conspiracy theory in eighteenth-century thought, see the fine article by Gordon S. Wood, `Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century', WMQ, 3rd set., 39 (1982), pp. 401-41.