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11. Euphoria and Pessimism
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Do you think any cultivated nation does not know of our current situation. . . . ? Julián Marías, La España posible en tiempos de Carlos III . . . the fables that denigrated our past and that by virtue of monotonous repetition created an inferiority complex among Spaniards. Felipe Ruiz Martín, Las Wnanzas de la monarquía española en tiempos de Felipe IV The closing years of Charles III’s long reign were a time of stocktaking, drawing up a balance sheet of what Spain’s political class and leading policymakers had managed to achieve. Charles’s life (1716–88) spanned most of the Wrst century of the Spanish Bourbon dynasty, which many hoped would bestir both the metropole and its American colonies from the stagnation of the later reigns of the Spanish Hapsburgs. For many in the state apparatus, among them Campillo and Ensenada under Philip V and Fernando VI, and Esquilache and Floridablanca under Charles III, it was imperative to Wnd a way to dispel the psychology of national inferiority with respect to Spain’s government, economy, Roman Catholic establishment, and society as a whole, expressed by seventeenth-century arbitristas and later proyectistas. Matching the patent progress of England, Holland, and France by revitalizing peninsular and colonial institutions was one way, and it was hoped that Spanish Bourbon achievements might ultimately earn the recognition, even the respect, of the “model” European states. After 1777, under Floridablanca, long-desired developments began to materialize: limitation of Cadiz’s monopolization of the Spanish transatlantic trading system; large-scale investment in major public works projects in the Peninsula, including canals in Aragon and Castilla’s Tierra de Campos ; the establishment of a national bank and the issuing of treasury notes 11. Euphoria and Pessimism • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • to shore up government Wnances and bring under control the troublesome reexport of American silver from Spain to the rest of Europe; and the revival of the Suprema Junta de Estado to coordinate decentralized, overlapping ministries and conciliar bodies, where “every minister considers himself absolute master over his department.”⁄ In international aVairs, Spain helped France support the successful struggle of the colonists of British North America to form an independent republic. At last, it seemed, Spain had begun to share characteristics of “enlightened” and “absolutist” Europe. On the other hand, some Spaniards remained troubled by the way the thought-control arm of the Catholic church, the Inquisition, was allowed to humble admired Wgures like the asistente de Sevilla, Peruvian-born Pablo de Olavide, and by the predictable reaction in France and elsewhere in Europe to the handling of this enlightened and cosmopolitan Wgure.¤ An even greater shock to oYcial complacency about progress under Charles III was the appearance in the widely read Encyclopédie méthodique published in Paris by Panckouck of a remarkably well-informed and surprisingly sympathetic article on the Spanish empire by the French critic Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers.‹ To be sure, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Raynal had been critical of Spain’s role in Europe’s evolution, but neither as explicitly nor as forcefully as Masson. His article was really about the burden of Spain’s Hapsburg legacy and the failure of Spaniards to make the most of the resources of the metropole and, worse, of the American colonies. Indeed , Masson, like his predecessors, hammered home that Spain’s European trading partners were garnering most of the beneWts of Spanish colonialism by supplying goods from their workshops and siphoning oV most of the silver remitted to Spain. As Masson phrased it: “Truly it is a blessing for Europe that Mexico, Peru, and Chile are possessions of a sluggish nation.” France, England, and Holland prospered by trade with Spain’s colonies via peninsular ports, while Spain itself stagnated. What after all, Masson questioned at one point, did Spain really represent in Europe? Masson recommended that Spain be shocked out of its “lethargie politique.” For Spain had “gradually suVered a decline from which it will arise with diYculty.”› Under Floridablanca, Madrid had to orchestrate a response to European critics by carefully selected optimists about Spain’s trajectory under the Bourbons. True, Floridablanca’s administration had issued the Reglamento del comercio libre covering the South American possessions in 1778, and the third and Wnal Reglamento incorporating New Spain into the imperial comercio libre trading system in 1789. In 1779, it had authorized publication of Bernardo Ward’s Proyecto económico, and in 1789, its partial incorporation into the Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América attributed...