Edge of Crisis: War and Trade in the Spanish Atlantic, 1789–1808

1. Continuity and Crisis, 1789–1797

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 1. Continuity and Crisis, 1789–1797 Rest assured that this matter [comercio colonial] is the most important to confront the Nation. Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, August 1788 Our trade with America is immensely useful to us, and we are therefore obliged to spare no eVort to prevent its loss and to make it more and more and more exclusive. Diego de Gardoqui, 16 May 1794 For three decades the administration of Charles III had benefited from the ongoing tension between French and English mercantile and manufacturing interests competing for hegemony in the Atlantic. Spain’s entry into the Seven Years’ War was delayed until 1761. The loss of two major overseas ports, Manila and Havana, to English forces was a profound shock, but those ports were returned to Spain quickly at war’s end. The balance of Charles III’s reign was relatively peaceful, except for financial assistance to French forces operating in North America, the Franco-Spanish siege of Gibraltar during the American War of Independence, and the ill-fated attack on Algiers in 1775 under Alejandro O’Reilly. On the whole, Spain enjoyed a period of halting, intermittently sustained initiatives to renovate structures by a small elite core of long-tenured government functionaries, conspicuously moderate “reformers” like Floridablanca, Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes , and Pedro Lerena, respectively prime minister, governor of the Consejo de Castilla, and secretary of the Hacienda (Treasury). One should not be overwhelmed by the volume of analyses, some published and others pigeonholed, dedicated to the need for structural changes in key economic areas, such as land tenure, tax policy, tariVs, commercial treaties, and protectionism. Nothing better illustrates the wealth of analysis and the poverty of execution than the handling of the sensitive issue of 4 • Autumn of Proyectismo agrarian reform, which surfaced in the 1760s, first entrusted to Campomanes and still unresolved twenty-five years later. Gaspar de Jovellanos, a strikingly facile writer, showed comparable skill as a politically sensitive procrastinator ; hence his Informe de la Sociedad Económica de esta Corte al Real y Supremo Consejo de Castilla en el expediente de la ley agraria did not come oV the press until 1795, and only after the startling agrarian revolution during the initial years of upheaval in France. Career bureaucrats approached change (reforma) cautiously; they had to be sensitive to the entrenched, entangled interests of their country’s “gothic” structures, and they remained accommodatingly slow in enforcing even mildly reformist policy directives. Another aspect of continuity in bureaucracy and immobility was striking in the first years of the reign of Charles III’s son, namely, a perception evolving over decades that the area of realizable economic potential was not the imperial metropole but rather Spain’s colonial world in the western Atlantic , especially the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean possessions—New Spain (Mexico), northern New Granada (Colombia), Caracas (Venezuela), and Cuba. While responses to government initiatives in the metropole proved disheartening, they had a more promising reception overseas in the mining colony of New Spain, the late-developing plantations of Cuba and Venezuela, and the cattle-ranching hinterland around Montevideo and Buenos Aires. As a result, Spain’s colonial policy developed complementary objectives: to increase contact with newly developing colonial areas while providing stimulus to the long-established ones; to expand the participation of ports in Spain in colonial exchanges at the risk of antagonizing vested commercial interests in the traditional commercial centers, Cadiz, Lima, and Mexico City; and to make available to those seeking to expand exchanges with the American colonies reliable commercial intelligence on shipping, exports and imports, prices current, inventories, and, perhaps essential, an annual merchandise balance of trade. The government proceeded to disseminate these commercial data via an innovative publication aptly titled Correo Mercantil de España y sus Indias. Then it still seemed possible that with time and sustained prodding the Spanish metropole might at last become an eVective colonial power fulfilling eighteenth-century requirements of a colonial compact. So thought the regime’s bureaucratintellectuals . They were vectors of public and private interests in Spain’s peripheral provinces, their ports and immediate hinterland, who remained relatively eVaced. Policy seems to have emanated from Spain’s middle- and high-level state civil service, which had informal links to private sectors. Issues of public policy and its implementation were confined to ministerial Continuity and Crisis, 1789–1797 • 5 bodies like the Consejo de Estado and the...