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10. The French Connection: Spanish Trade Policy and France
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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The canal from the Indies passing through Spain, the one bringing cash in silver to France, is the one we must cultivate. Masson de Plissay Freeing our commerce and Your Majesty’s authority over ports and customs duties from the pressures exerted by England’s power in previous treaties and times. Secret agreements and adjustments with France concerned these issues. José Moñino, conde de Floridablanca, to Charles III (1788) At the end of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), French merchants and shippers could expand only inside Spain’s transatlantic trading system, now centered on Cadiz, not Sevilla. They exploited trade concessions by the Spanish Hapsburg governments in the last half of the seventeenth century that eVectively lowered duties on imports of French linens and other selected items.⁄ As for the concessions themselves, “France considered these privileges the foundation of its trade in Spain, indispensable to its continuation.”¤ At mid-century, large-scale French commercial penetration of markets overseas in Peru and New Spain was facilitated by an inXux of wartime proWts earned by French Wrms at Cadiz, which they invested in overseas speculation when the Spanish transatlantic system assured high earnings during and immediately following the war. Until the Revolution, the French remained the largest foreign merchant enclave at Cadiz, conspicuous and ever sensitive to infringement of their treaty rights. Omitting a sudden peak of 154 Wrms in 1771, on average there were, over the decades 1724 to 1778, about 60 principal French commercial houses, described as “maisons très opulentes.”‹ Charles III came to Madrid when it was already evident that the English were winning the Seven Years’ War and might move aggressively against 10.The French Connection: SpanishTrade Policy and France • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Spanish possessions in and around the Caribbean. For France as well as Spain, which Charles judged isolated in western Europe, his accession provided the opportunity at last to renew a dynastic alliance of mutual convenience , the “Family Pact” between the two Bourbon monarchies, a “collaboration of maritime forces to resist common enemies.”› In light of the Franco-Spanish diplomatic and defense collaboration symbolized in the pact, Madrid’s planners expected French private and public sectors to tolerate Spain’s tardy eVorts at protectionism, which they hoped might render their country eVective in the joint containment of English commercial and naval expansionism in the Caribbean. Sifting French consular and commercial reporting at mid-century, one discerns the main factors behind French involvement in Spain’s empire in America. A prime consideration was the signiWcant percentage of French textile production shipped to Cadiz for reexport; consequently, sales of linens, woolens, and silks at Cadiz for colonial markets directly impinged upon employment levels and earnings in France’s textile centers. French industry also absorbed appreciable quantities of Spain’s primary exports— wool, soda ash, raw silk—along with Mexican and Guatemalan cochineal and indigo dyes. From the French viewpoint, Spain had every reason to import French manufactures for reexport to its American colonies, since it was understood that perhaps only 10 percent of cargoes destined for the colonies consisted of Spanish-made goods; the balance could (and, to some, should) be drawn from the production of Spain’s ally, France. There was, moreover, more than just the export factor of concern to French interests: sales to Spain’s colonies generated a counterXow of silver into the private banking system centered on Paris and Lyons. In probing Spain’s economic relations with France in the age of Charles III, certain problems become prominent. Could Spain’s centuries-old imperial system based upon precious metals remain dependent upon colonial silver while belatedly fostering a manufacturing sector in the metropole— this, in the last phase of highly competitive commercial capitalism? Could an arrangement under the Hispano-French alliance satisfactorily harmonize French and Spanish policy objectives, balance French economic interests with Spanish developmentalism, and integrate two economies in diVerent stages of commercial capitalism, one relatively advanced, the other underdeveloped ? Perhaps answers may emerge from a detailed examination of three interrelated issues vital to the French economy: illegal transfer of American silver overland to France, the stagnation of France’s traditional exports of woolens and linens to the Spanish colonies, and the French reaction to Spanish developmentalist eVorts. These factors played a part in the 306 • The Colonial Option [3.229.122.112] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:03 GMT) crisis France experienced in 1789, as well as in the crisis in Spain two decades later. Silver Flows from Spain...