Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759–1789

Preface

In our historiography [i.e., that of Spain’s American possessions], there is a kind of inferiority complex, a mélange of vapidity and a certain historical vision . . . [the idea] that the Indies were a divine gift to spread the faith rather than a source of proWt. Antonio-Miguel Bernal, La Wnanciación de la carrera de Indias By the middle of the eighteenth century, three established European empires were on a collision course in the western Atlantic, with each determined either to preserve its territory or enlarge it at the expense of its competitors . Spain, France, and England each had to renovate old or apply new Wscal measures to deal with real, envisioned, or imagined threats. Unrelieved competition thwarted eVorts to achieve an equilibrium of power, an aspiration repeatedly aborted by interimperial conXict after the settlements of 1713–14 that concluded the War of the Spanish Succession, which had pitted France and Spain against England, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire. That competition would end, at least in the western Atlantic, at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, with England the clear hegemon in the Atlantic system. After its seventeenth-century crisis, England had succeeded in mustering the Wnancial resources to confront its competitors by mobilizing aristocracy and merchant bourgeoisie alike in support of its imperial aims. Eighteenthcentury France, however, was unable to overcome late medieval institutions, interests, and mind-sets suYciently to pay for an adequate army and navy. Spain managed to postpone the crisis by using the economic surpluses of its American colonies, especially the most populous of them, silver-mining Mexico, then called New Spain, to Wnance both its metropolitan and colonial needs. Preface • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • When Charles III came to Madrid in 1759, after a quarter-century as ruler of the Spanish Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples and Sicily), Spain and its colonial empire in America were nonetheless seriously at risk. Madrid hoped to maintain its neutrality in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) between England and France for hegemony in the Atlantic. Without a conWrmed ally, Spain had reasons to fear inevitable English operations— conducted by the world’s most powerful navy—against Havana, the hub of its communications with New Spain and South America. Its maritime lifeline across the Caribbean to Veracruz was indispensable: without Xows of colonial specie, there was little hope of rebuilding Spain’s Atlantic defenses. After two hundred years of Hapsburg rule in Spain, followed by a halfcentury of Bourbon “reform” projects that had gone nowhere, Charles and his Neapolitan staV, notably his Sicilian close collaborator Leopoldo di Gregorio , marqués de Esquilache (Squillace), who became secretary of Spain’s Exchequer, or Treasury Department, the Consejo de Hacienda, had to come to grips with persisting political, social, economic, and intellectual Hapsburg institutions in both the Iberian Peninsula and the colonies. Part One of this book traces the attempt under Esquilache’s direction to renovate those institutions, initially concentrating on the metropole. In essence, “traditionalists ” and “reformers” wrestled with a persistent preoccupation: what adjustments were feasible in metropole and colonies to confront Spain’s imperialist challengers without radically altering the Hapsburg inheritance? The Esquilache-directed essay at domestic housecleaning was uncommonly ambitious and comprehensive for Spain, with many targets attacked simultaneously. Seven years after Charles arrived, however, a combination of privileged interests and factions fostered under the Hapsburgs engineered a coup at Madrid that forced Charles to send Esquilache, the architect of so many government initiatives, back to Italy. In Spain, renewal was stalled. But there remained, however, the possibility of revamping the colonial administration and the essential economic links between the metropole and its colonies. Before the March 1766 rioting (motín) at Madrid that unseated him, Esquilache had launched what was tantamount to a colonial review. After recovering Havana, which had been taken in 1762 by an English amphibious assault, Esquilache dispatched military oYcers to survey the situation of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Subsequently, in 1765, he appointed José de Gálvez, a young career bureaucrat, as high commissioner (visitador general) and authorized him to conduct a broad investigation of New Spain, Spain’s most important trading partner. With renovation ostensibly stalled in the metropole , Madrid now emphasized change in colonial aVairs. viii • Preface In Part Two of the book, we trace how Madrid moved to modify the persistent Hapsburg transatlantic trading system linking the metropole to its American colonies. No doubt Gálvez’s...