Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (52 page)

If improved communications did much to further the integration of an AngloAmerican Atlantic polity, so also did the advent of war. As England and its continental allies embarked on all-out war with France, the European struggle spread to the far side of the Atlantic, and the colonies found themselves embroiled in what was fast becoming a global conflict. King Philip's war of 1675-6 proved to be the last Indian war without external intervention. As the British settlements and the authorities in French Canada jockeyed for support among the independent Indian tribes, Indian-settler conflicts were subsumed into the wider conflict of the two colonial powers. Along the borders of New England and New York, townships were pillaged and razed by the French and their Indian allies.20

All the colonies, however, were affected to a greater or lesser extent, as London sought to induce them to unite in self-defence, while colonial governors struggled to persuade their assemblies to vote money and quotas of men for the prosecution of the war. Arms and ammunition were needed from England, and the help of the royal navy was required for the protection of the North Atlantic trade. The experience of war between 1689 and 1713 made the colonists more aware of their dependence on the mother country, while also stimulating pride in their own efforts and in the new closeness of their partnership with their English cousins. `It is no little Blessing of God', wrote Cotton Mather in 1700, `that we are part of the English Nation.'2'

While the bonds of empire were being more tightly drawn in the British Atlantic polity, the relationship between Spain and its empire of the Indies seemed to be moving no less inexorably in the opposite direction. The difference reflected the divergent trajectories of English and Spanish power during the second half of the seventeenth century. As England rose to a position of commercial and maritime supremacy, the military and economic weakness of metropolitan Spain during the final years of Philip IV and the agonizingly prolonged reign of his sickly and feeble-minded son Carlos II (1665-1700) had the effect of loosening the control of Madrid over its American territories, and giving their creole societies new and expanded space for manoeuvre.

`As the weaknes of Spain is such at home,' wrote Roger Coke in 1670, `so it is the more in his Indies, from whence his Wealth and Riches flow ...122 The effects of metropolitan weakness were felt at many points, and most obviously in the seizure by the English, the Dutch and the French of a string of islands in the Caribbean and of toeholds on the American mainland - the English in Belize and the Mosquito coast of Nicaragua, and all three powers in the Guiana region. These European outposts served as ideal bases for piracy and trade. Between the 1650s and the 1680s buccaneers swarmed through the Caribbean, raiding the Spanish American mainland and preying on Spanish ships. Jamaica in particular was a hornets' nest of pirates. Acting in collusion with the island's governor, Thomas Modyford, and in wilful disregard of the Anglo-Spanish peace treaty of the preceding year, Henry Morgan launched a devastating raid on Panama in 1671.23

Trade and piracy were liable to be synonymous in this lawless Caribbean world of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and buccaneers, merchants and planters became fickle accomplices in the enterprise of stripping the Spanish empire of its assets. New England merchants seized control of the export trade in central American logwood (for dye-making) from the Gulf of Campeche, and fortunes were made in Rhode Island by Newport merchants who happily combined commerce with attacks on Spanish shipping.24 Spain's islands in the Antilles were poor and vulnerable imperial outposts, requiring heavy and continuous subsidies from the Mexican treasury for their fortification and defence. The larger the subsidies that had to be remitted from New Spain to the Antilles, the less would be the silver available for shipment to Seville. By contrast, Britain's Caribbean islands, with their developing plantation economies, were to be the jewels in the crown of its American empire.

Jamaica, ideally located at the heart of the Spanish Caribbean and blessed with a splendidly sheltered harbour at Port Royal, was better placed than the Dutch island of Curacao for managing the collective larceny of Spain's overseas assets. Britain's possession of the island gave English merchants, and their New York and Boston counterparts, the edge over their Dutch competitors for domination of the contraband trade with the Spanish Indies. From their Jamaican vantage-point Anglo-American merchants infiltrated and subverted the Spanish trading system, supplying the Spanish islands and mainland with smuggled goods which they could otherwise only obtain at inflated prices when the fleets put in from Spain, or else not obtain at all. Spanish officials would wink at this illicit trade once their palms had been greased, but there were occasions when sheer necessity forced them to issue official import licences. African slaves especially were in short supply. As a result, Jamaica in the 1680s became a major supplier of slaves for despatch to Spanish America by way of Havana, Portobelo and Cartagena.

This Jamaican trade in slaves and other commodities brought handsome returns. The silver siphoned off by merchants or seized by buccaneers percolated through the Anglo-American Atlantic economy, and helped reduce Britain's trading deficit with the Far East. Jamaica became the principal supplier of bullion to the North American colonies, mitigating their endemic monetary difficulties and enabling them to purchase not only essential British commodities, but also Spanish American luxuries, like the Mexican chocolate which Samuel Sewall sipped for breakfast in Dorchester, Massachusetts, on 20 October 1697.25

While European penetration of the Caribbean was eroding Spain's monopoly of the American trade at its receiving point, a vast breach had also been opened at its point of origin in mainland Spain itself. For a century and a half this had been located in Seville. From the 1670s, however, Cadiz was beginning to replace Seville as the entrepot of the American trade, as the Guadalquivir silted up, and ships found it increasingly hazardous to navigate the river. In 1717 the Spanish crown, bowing to geographical realities, would make the transfer official, and both the House of Trade and the Consulado removed to Cadiz.26 Taking advantage of the privileges negotiated under special treaty arrangements with a weakened Spanish crown, the foreign merchants operating from the two port cities freighted the outbound fleets with large quantities of the manufactures that Spanish industry was unable to supply. These goods, fetching high prices in the American market, were exchanged for the American silver on which Britain, France and the Netherlands relied to keep the wheels of their economies turning.27

French, Flemish, Dutch and English merchants were not the only beneficiaries of the inability of Seville's Consulado to sustain its monopoly of the American trade - a monopoly undermined by massive fraud at every stage of its operations. As early as the late sixteenth century creole merchants in the Americas, and most notably those of Mexico City and Peru, had glimpsed lucrative possibilities for themselves in the structure and functioning of the Indies trade. As they appreciated, not even the elaborate mechanisms set in place by Seville could dictate every detail of a trading system spanning the Atlantic. The growing quantities of silver produced by the American mines gave them a strong hand, further strengthened by the opening of the trans-Pacific trading route from Acapulco to Manila in the late sixteenth century. This offered new opportunities for making large profits by supplying creole elites with the oriental luxuries like silks, porcelain, lacquer ware and Japanese screens, for which they developed an insatiable appetite. The purchase of these luxuries was paid for by the diversion to their Asian suppliers of silver which might otherwise have been remitted to Seville.28

By making use of their ties of contract and kinship with Sevillian trading houses, and by participating in the fairs held at Vera Cruz, Portobelo and elsewhere on the arrival of the fleets from Seville, the merchants of New Spain and Peru became important players in both the official and the unofficial economy of the Spanish Atlantic. In the opening and middle decades of the seventeenth century they proved strong enough to challenge Seville's dominance of the colonial markets, manipulating prices to suit their own purposes, and exploiting the numerous opportunities for engaging in contraband trade .21

The new-found strength and confidence of the merchant communities of the American viceroyalties was a reflection of the wider shifts that were occurring in the economic relationship between the metropolis and its American possessions. The exploitation of the continent's mineral resources, the development of agriculture and manufactures - especially textiles - to meet the needs of a growing creole and mestizo population, and the growth of home-based shipbuilding, all helped to lessen the economic dependence of the viceroyalties on the imperial metropolis.

There was also a steady growth of inter-regional trade, hinting at the emergence of a partially autonomous Hispanic American economy. Mexico City had become the centre of an informal but widespread trading system. Horizontally this ran along an axis from Manila in the Philippines to Havana in the Caribbean. There was also a north-south axis which, in spite of the 1631 ban on trade between Mexico and Peru,30 linked the Pacific coast port of Acapulco to the ports of northern Peru, and then ran on to Lima, with a spur to Potosi. The Peruvian complex had trading links with Panama, to the north, and with Chile in the south, which was vastly increasing its production of wheat in response to Peruvian demand. Another route, reluctantly authorized by the crown in the early seventeenth century, ran overland from the Peruvian mines, by way of Tucuman and Cordoba, to the growing port city of Buenos Aires, 63 days on horseback from Potosi (see map 7, p. 354).31 At this point, internal trading systems tapped into the increasingly internationalized Atlantic economy, as foreign traders descended on the La Plata region with supplies of slaves and European manufactures to exchange for illegally exported Peruvian silver.32

Although dependent on Portuguese and other foreign merchants for a steady supply of African slaves, and still relying on Europe for luxury products and essential commodities like paper and hardware, the economies of New Spain and Peru were therefore becoming more self-sufficient, and, as a result, less vulnerable to the vagaries of Spanish and European economic movements.33 This does not, however, mean that they were untouched by recession. Devastating floods struck Mexico City in 1629, and New Spain experienced serious economic difficulties over the following three decades. In the years between 1635 and 1665 there was a slump in the output of the Mexican silver mines, but production picked up strongly again in the 1670s, at a time when the indigenous population was at last beginning to recover from the demographic disaster of the century of conquest.34

The Peruvian economy seems to have escaped sustained recession in the middle years of the century, but only to run into serious trouble in the wake of the devastating earthquakes which hit central Peru in 1687. Silver production in Potosi, which reached a peak around 1610, moved in the second half of the century into a prolonged period of decline, which continued at least until the 1730s, although with moments of recovery.35 Downward trends in Peru, however, were offset by the mining revival in New Spain, where production began to outstrip that of Peru in the late seventeenth century.36 Although the registered imports of American silver into Seville slumped dramatically in the second half of the century, there are strong indications that the drop was more the result of a massive increase in fraud and contraband than of an over-all diminution of production. Enormous quantities of silver, sometimes arriving in larger consignments than during the peak period of the late sixteenth century, continued to be remitted to Europe, in spite of the retention of considerable quantities for defence and other purposes in the viceroyalties themselves, and of a constant drain of silver to the Far East by way of the Acapulco galleon and the Manila route.37