Crisis in an Atlantic Empire: Spain and New Spain, 1808–1810 by Barbara H. Stein, Stanley J. Stein (review)

The dust jacket of the Steins’ book pictures Goya’s Shootings of the Third of May, the iconic image of a white-shirted Spaniard being executed by a phalanx of French soldiers. The painting has come to symbolize the heroism of Spain’s people, spontaneously rising up to defend their country from Napoleon’s armies after the Spanish king Charles IV abdicated and his son Ferdinand VII was imprisoned in France. The martyrdom depicted in Goya’s painting is thought to be a manifestation of broad popular defiance of unwanted government, the first strike in a guerrilla war fought alongside Wellington’s troops.

This event in Madrid on May 2–3, 1808, and the deposition of the viceroy in Mexico City on September 15–16, structure the Steins’ inquiry into the typology of a coup d’état. Much mythology has arisen to obscure the real actors behind the two challenges to power, the principal myth being that the people took matters into their own hands. However, the Steins show that others, principally merchants wanting the protections of the old regime or rejecting them in favor of free trade, were the true promoters—or, as the Steins call them, the “crisis managers”—in each case manipulating mobs which early on were derisively called “el populacho” and only later the more acceptable “el pueblo.” Colonial monopolistic practices (shipping restricted to a few ports, controls that forced commerce into a few fleets a year, rules forbidding trading with countries that Spain proscribed) were under threat in the last days of Spain’s reform-minded administration, causing powerful interests in Spain and Mexico City (the scope of the Steins’ book) to intervene, hiding their extralegal actions behind what they called “street violence.”

Historians describing the two-year period covered by this study have customarily explained events by saying that in Spain the invasion introduced Bonaparte rule, as a result of which regional assemblies formed, each claiming legitimacy; thus metropolitan uncertainties caused Americans to think about autonomy and then independence. Their coverage then moves to a recital of military campaigns in the Peninsula and the Americas, and discussion of the subversive influence of French political ideas.

Yet these narratives, as shown by the Steins, themselves political economists, are too easy. Their book, filled with staggering detail as a result of what must have been long years spent working in archives and digesting secondary literature, reveals the role of an increasingly politicized merchant class, with differing conservative and liberal demands. The authors’ double focus on Spain (Aranjuez, Sevilla, and Cadiz) and Mexico (Mexico City and Veracruz) corrects several beliefs—that the people were the force behind the Peninsular war, and that on the other side of the Atlantic such thinkers as Simón Bolívar and Francisco Miranda (often represented as Romantics) inspired ideas of American independence. However, a prime example of economic discontent is the long chapter on Havana, telling how merchants there who represented Cuba’s sugar planters wanted changes in Spain’s trading policies, including free shipping so they could export that perishable commodity quickly to US and Caribbean ports. They also wanted access to cheaper US flour to feed their large slave populations. Between 1802 and 1809, Havana bought 285 vessels of different types from the US for purposes of sustaining its population and continuing its role as a way-port.

Focus on the economic linkages between Spain, Mexico (Spain’s richest source of wealth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), and several Caribbean colonies (Cuba, Venezuela) directs attention away from South American travelers in England, whose conversations with philosophers there have made it seem that the American revolutions were an ideologically inspired import. The Steins argue that Cadiz and Veracruz merchants formulated their own ideas. Many recognized Spain’s decrepitude and indecisive management policies, and wanted to address new exigencies. Spain’s war with England between...