Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (71 page)

The passionate dedication of the colonists to liberty, as manifested in the riots in the seaboard cities and the successful staging of an inter-colonial congress, found practical expression in the development of an unprecedented weapon of political opposition for bringing pressure to bear on the British ministers and parliament - the boycotting of British goods. Under the Stamp Act, merchants would need to pay stamp duty to clear their goods through customs. A group of New York merchants took the initiative in pledging to cancel all orders for manufactured articles until the Stamp Act was repealed.99 Their action was publicized in colonial newspapers; merchants' orders were cancelled in Boston, Philadelphia and elsewhere; and consumers were exhorted to refrain from purchasing British luxuries.

In some respects the initiative taken by the New York merchants and imitated by their colleagues in the other port cities was self-serving. Times were depressed, import merchants had overstocked inventories on their hands, and the market for English goods was temporarily saturated. As it turned out, compliance with the boycott was patchy, but the colonists had hit on a form of leverage against the mother country with enormous potential. If the rapidly expanding consumer society of colonial America was heavily dependent on imports from Britain, the American market in turn had become of crucial importance for the industrializing British economy. Some two-thirds of the new industrial goods exported by Britain - linens, cottons, silks, metalware - were by now being exported to America.'00 At the beginning of the century, North America took 5.7 per cent of all British domestic exports; in 1772-3, the figure was 25.3 per cent.10'

Virginia and Maryland financed the purchase of these British goods primarily through their tobacco exports to Britain, while New England and the Middle Colonies did the same by supplying timber, grain, flour and meat to the West Indies plantations. Any disruption to this delicately poised British Atlantic system could obviously have the most serious repercussions both for the British imperial economy and for domestic industrial production in Britain, as the chairman of an organization of London merchants warned the Marquis of Rockingham. When the colonists refused to participate in any commerce requiring stamps, as he expected them to do on 1 November, `our sugar islands will be deprived of their usual supplies of provisions, lumber etc.' The West Indies planters would then be `disabled from sending home their produce or even subsisting their slaves', with obvious and disastrous consequences for the economy of the mother country. He warned, too, that a stoppage of American trade would prevent merchants collecting their debts, thus threatening them with ruin, while those who survived would stop buying manufactured goods for export to America. `It naturally and unavoidably follows that an exceedingly great number of manufacturers are soon to be without employ and of course without bread. 1102

Any British parliament was likely to be acutely sensitive to such a threat to national prosperity, and not surprisingly the House of Commons took notice when confronted by petitions from 25 trading towns urging repeal of the Stamp Act because of the distress they were suffering as a result of the fall in exports to America.103 It was the novel character of Britain's commercial empire of the eighteenth century - an `empire of goods' - that made non-importation such a potentially effective weapon. For Spain's American colonists such a weapon was unimaginable. Not only did Spain lack a representative body in which commercial and industrial interests could publicly voice their concerns, but the backwardness of Spanish industry meant that Spanish American consumers were largely dependent on non-Spanish manufacturers for the luxuries they craved. Their insatiable appetite for European goods, whether legally or clandestinely imported, was far more harmful to the mother country than any boycott could ever be. In the Spanish Atlantic system, contraband, not boycotting, was the most effective form of protest against unpopular policies emanating from Madrid, and the purchase of contraband goods had become second nature to these overseas subjects of the King of Spain.

Through consumer boycotts and street protests alike, the Stamp Act, formally introduced on 1 November 1765, was to all intents and purposes a dead letter from the start. Mass resistance on this scale took ministers in London by surprise, and presented them with a dilemma from which there was no obvious escape. But Grenville's removal from office that summer had provided the opportunity for at least a temporary retreat if this should be needed. The new Rockingham administration's expectation that the Stamp Act would be self-enforcing was dashed when it received in early December a report on the imminent danger of rebellion in New York. Already aware of the logistical problems in the way of reinforcing from England the army in America to levels which would enable it to contain the rising tide of disorder, the administration rightly came to the conclusion that the act was unenforceable.104 Imperial authority, however, must somehow be upheld. The government's solution was to repeal the Stamp Act in February 1766, but to follow the repeal with a Declaratory Act affirming the sovereignty of parliament over the colonies. It was in conformity with this act that Charles Townshend would introduce his project of colonial taxation in 1767, and thus unleash a new, and graver, crisis in the increasingly fraught relationship between London and the colonies.

The Stamp Act crisis exposed, as never before, the fragility of the imperial hold over North America in the face of violent and more or less co-ordinated resistance throughout the colonies to measures deemed unacceptable by their populations. But beyond this it also exposed fundamental ambiguities in the constitutional ordering of the empire itself. As a result of these ambiguities the metropolis and the colonies had come to view their relationship through very different lenses. The same was true of Spain and its American empire, but the ambiguities were not the same, and the problems they created, although severe, were not so immediately intractable.

The crisis that overtook the Anglo-American community in the 1760s can be seen in constitutional terms as the crisis of the British composite monarchy in the form it had come to assume by the middle of the eighteenth century.105 Where Bourbon Spain had turned its back on the idea of composite monarchy and was moving firmly in the direction of an authoritarian monarchy based on a vertical articulation of power,106 Hanoverian Britain was set on a course that had led to a partially composite parliamentary state. The events of 1688 had established the sovereignty of king in parliament, and the incorporating union of Scotland with England in 1707 had given the Scots parliamentary representation at Westminster in compensation for the loss of their own parliament in Edinburgh. Both Ireland and the colonies, however, remained outside this incorporating parliamentary union, and retained elected assemblies of their own.

This left open the question of the relationship between these assemblies and the Westminster parliament, at least until 1720, when it passed a Declaratory Act asserting its authority over the Irish parliament. But the Westminster parliament refrained from exercising tax-raising powers over the Irish, and was careful to obtain the agreement of the Irish parliament before legislating on Irish matters.107 Until the 1760s it was similarly circumspect in questions relating to the internal affairs of the American colonies, although it showed no such scruples where the regulation of trade was concerned. But if the question of the ultimate location of sovereignty were to be directly put, there was no doubt at Westminster what the answer should be. Sovereignty was indivisible, and it lay with the English parliament. While rejoicing in American resistance in his famous speech on the Stamp Act of 14 January 1766, William Pitt described the constitutional position with brutal clarity: `When two countries are connected together, like England and her colonies, without being incorporated, the one must necessarily govern; the greater must rule the less .. '108

For a parliament, rather than the monarch, to assert sovereignty over the component parts of a composite monarchy, all of which had their own representative assemblies, constituted a novelty in the history of composite monarchies. Pitt and his fellow parliamentarians therefore found themselves navigating in uncharted waters. But the very notion of the indivisibility of sovereignty left them with little room for manoeuvre. The dominant interpretation of the status of colonies in terms of the historical example of the Romans, who (it was incorrectly believed) considered their colonies to be imperial dependencies, in contrast to the Greeks, merely strengthened their conviction of the correctness of their course.109 As Charles Townshend observed in replying to Grenville, if parliament were ever to give up the right of taxing America, then `he must give up the word "colony" - for that implies subordination."10 `Subordination' was automatically taken to mean subordination to the English legislature.

An incorporating union between Britain and the colonies on the Scottish model would have brought American representatives to the Westminster parliament. This was an idea that Benjamin Franklin, as Pennsylvania's agent in London, toyed with at the height of the Stamp Act crisis, but soon abandoned on hearing the latest news from America. `The Time has been', he wrote, `when the Colonies, would have esteem'd it a great Advantage as well as Honour to them to be permitted to send Members to Parliament; and would have ask'd for that Privilege if they could have had the least hopes of obtaining it. The Time is now come when they are indifferent about it, and will probably not ask it ...'i'i They would have no truck, either, with the argument devised by Thomas Whately during the course of the crisis, that the colonists, like those residents of Britain who did not possess the vote, nevertheless enjoyed `virtual representation' in parliament, a notion described by a Maryland lawyer as `a mere cob-web, spread to catch the unwary, and intangle the weak'."2 They had been endowed with their own representative assemblies, modelled on the English House of Commons, and the copies should surely replicate the original, not only in its workings but also in its pow- ers.113 Their assemblies provided not only a guarantee of the right they enjoyed by virtue of their English descent to reject all taxation to which they had not given their prior consent, but also the only proper forum for consent to new taxes when new taxes were required.

Loyalty to the person of the British monarch remained unshaken, and the colonists continued to take pride in their participation in a British Empire that was an empire of the free. But the incompatibility between their perception of their British rights and the British parliament's perception of its own uncontested sovereignty as the necessary condition for the effective running of that empire created a constitutional impasse. This impasse was, if anything, made all the more difficult to negotiate by the sense of shared identity and shared ideals. Occasional references might be made in England to Americans as foreigners '114 but many would have agreed with William Strahan, a London printer, when he wrote: `I consider British Subjects in America as only living in a different Country, having the selfsame Interests, and entituled to the self-same Liberties."" `Every drop of blood in my heart is British', wrote the Pennsylvania attorney, John Dickinson, in 1766, as if in confirmation. 116 It was precisely because they saw themselves as British that the Americans would stand up for their rights. This left little room for compromise in a constitutional framework which entrenched in representative institutions rights regarded as fundamental on both sides of the Atlantic.

The effective absence of such institutions in Spain's Monarchy and empire inevitably created a different dynamic from that which determined relationships in the British Atlantic community. But in the Spanish Atlantic community also there was a growing divergence in assumptions and perceptions on the two sides of the Atlantic that similarly presaged major troubles ahead. Spain's American territories, like the British colonies, continued to see themselves as members of a composite monarchy at a time when Madrid's terms of reference had changed. But where the British colonies now found themselves confronting a parliamentary regime that - even as it proclaimed its own absolute authority - still half spoke the language of composite monarchy, of liberty and rights, Spain's American dominions were faced with a monarch and ministers for whom the very notion of composite monarchy had become anathema. As a result, the two sides of the Spanish Atlantic were speaking different languages, whereas the languages spoken by Britain and British America were confusingly, and dangerously, the same.

The language spoken in official circles in Spain was now that of the unitary nation-state with an absolutist monarch at its head - a monarch who received his power directly from God without any mediation by the community."? This was the language used by the viceroy of New Spain, the Marquis of Croix, in his 1767 viceregal proclamation ordering absolute submission by all classes and conditions of Mexican society to the royal decree for the expulsion of the Jesuits: `... the subjects of the great monarch who occupies the throne of Spain should know once and for all that they were born to keep silent and obey, and not to discuss or express opinions on high matters of government."

In the authoritarian centralized monarchy of Charles III's ministers and viceroys there was no room for the semi-autonomous kingdoms and provinces of which a composite monarchy was traditionally composed, nor for the compacts that guaranteed the preservation of their distinctive identities. Instead, they must be integrated into the unitary state. But the creole elites of the kingdoms of Peru and New Spain, of Quito and New Granada naturally clung to the historic privileges and traditions of the lands that had become their patrias. These privileges and traditions, as they saw it, were now under growing threat from the interference of meddling reformers, and they expected their protests to be heard, and their grievances to be addressed, in the ways they always had been - through petitioning and bargaining, until an acceptable compromise was reached.