Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (53 page)

The balance of evidence, therefore, indicates that the Spanish and Spanish American economies moved in opposing directions during the seventeenth century, with the latter by now sufficiently self-supporting to be insulated from the worst effects of the economic depression that afflicted much of central and southern Europe in the era of the Thirty Years War.38 Partly because of the capture by foreign merchants of such large swathes of the transatlantic trade, and partly because of the process of transition and expansion within the viceroyalties themselves, the economic ties between Spain and its American possessions were being loosened at the very time that economic growth on both sides of the British Atlantic was tightening the relationship between England and its Caribbean and mainland colonies.

If America, however, had less need of Spain, Spain never stood in greater need of America than now. By the mid-seventeenth century, the fiscal difficulties that perennially beset the Spanish crown had become acute. The prolonged struggle with the Dutch and the French, the revolts of the 1640s and Philip IV's increasingly desperate attempts to recover control over the newly independent kingdom of Portugal, placed enormous strains on a treasury perennially incapable of meeting the demands made upon it. The resulting fiscal crisis forced the crown to resort to every kind of financial expedient, both in metropolitan Spain itself and in its overseas possessions. The crisis exported itself to the royal treasuries in Mexico City and Lima, where the viceroys faced growing difficulties in raising the additional revenues demanded by Madrid.

As the economies of the two viceroyalties became more diversified, so the enforcement of new fiscal expedients became more problematic. The difficulties in raising more revenue in societies where the white and mestizo population were exempt from direct taxation were compounded by the dishonesty of the treasury officials. In Peru, traditionally a more lucrative source of revenue for the crown than New Spain, high-ranking treasury offices began to be offered for sale on a systematic basis from 1633. As the crown's difficulties multiplied, so too did the number of offices created and put up for sale. While the sale of offices proved to be a highly profitable source of revenue, it was acquired at a heavy political price. Offices that came onto the market were snapped up by creoles or by Lima merchants with strong local connections. Large sums were diverted into private pockets by corrupt officials, and viceroys watched in despair as the sale of office drastically reduced both the efficiency of the administration and their own powers of patronage, which they considered essential for the effective exercise of viceregal authority.39

The natural beneficiaries of this process were the creole elite, for whom the crown's troubles fell as manna from heaven. The purchase of offices and titles to land, the acquisition of new credit opportunities as royal revenues failed to cover costs, and informal alliances struck with corrupt royal officials for the clandestine distribution of state resources, enabled oligarchies throughout Spanish America to entrench themselves still further. By the middle years of the seventeenth century the crown was putting provincial governorships up for sale, and under Carlos II the last dam was breached when the crown began systematically selling the judicial posts in the eleven Audiencias of the Indies. Between 1687 and 1695, 24 such sales occurred, 18 of them in the jurisdiction of Peru. The control of justice as well as administration was beginning to slip from the hands of Madrid.40

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