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

There is a quote, probably apocryphal, in which Lenin remarked there are decades when nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. Nowhere could this be said more accurately than of Spain and Mexico in 1808–1810, the focus of the fourth and climactic volume of Stanley and Barbara Steins’ history of merchants and imperialism in the Spanish Empire.

The Steins’ first two volumes described the emergence of Spain as a “rentier state” that literally survived by virtue of the flow of silver from Peru and then New Spain (Mexico). In the third volume, as the established foundations of this “empire” eroded under the assault of interlopers, the “reforming” Spanish Bourbons sought to reestablish control through new merchant clients in Veracruz, Havana and Buenos Aires. However, these proved not quite up to the task set them after the Seven Years’ War, the retention and redirection of colonial silver to the Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, rising British and long-established French interests pursued different strategies to thwart the Bourbons’ aims. The British relied on naval power and the efforts of neutral agents, especially in the United States, for greater access. The French, on the other hand, struck directly at the heart of empire, by seizing control of the peninsula and establishing a puppet state under Joseph Bonaparte. With French connivance, coups at the Escorial (1807) and Aranjuez (1808) ejected Charles IV and his favorite, Godoy, from power. Thus opens the final volume, with the botched abdication of Charles and the Prince of Asturias at Bayonne (1808), the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, and the detonation of civil war in the peninsula. And so the struggle in Spain and in the colonies began, with the emergence of competing regional councils (juntas) jockeying for power and influence in the face of both collaboration and opposition from senior royal appointees whose careers, and sometimes lives, depended on the choices they made.

Although much would ultimately depend on the fortunes of war in Europe and the Atlantic, the true theater of conflict was the Americas. Here the Steins take up the related narratives of Spain, Cuba, and New Spain with an emphasis on the colonial civil servants’ career patterns and experiences, family and bureaucratic relations, and their service in the imperial system that conditioned their responses to events in Europe and the Americas. There were, in essence, two models. Cuba, the rising pearl of the Antilles, was perhaps, one of two colonial possessions the Spaniards could not afford to lose. While its sugar plantations and vast acquisition of slaves had only just begun to make their presence felt in world markets, the Captaincy General of Cuba was second only in prestige and potential value to the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Its chief official, the Marques of Someruelos had begun an assiduous courtship of the island’s merchants and planters, both of whom, ironically, advocated an open economy and a closed polity—such was the distorting effect of African slavery in a plantation economy. He was between a rock and a hard place: he needed to control the island while the Havana merchants hoped to turn it into a Caribbean entrepot linked to both Veracruz and, increasingly, New Orleans. Someruelos was also, quite possibly, slated to become the Viceroy of New Spain. He would not be the first captain general of the island to be so elevated.

Mexico had become the crown jewel of the empire. Not only was it the wealthiest colony, but it also financed the defense of the Caribbean basin and the astonishingly costly wars of the Spanish Bourbons. Yet its constitutional status within the empire was highly ambiguous. The argument about whether New Spain was a Kingdom or a colony was far from a semantic one. A colony was the possession of a state, and whatever happened to the Bourbons, the Spanish state maintained its existence, contested though...