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

12. By Way of Conclusion

Monographs by their nature emphasize detail to be convincing. Hence the detail should Wt into a wider context to avoid irrelevance. In a long retrospective view, eighteenth-century Spain could not recover from the eVects of the drawn-out, wasting conXict with the Netherlands that ended in the middle of the seventeenth century. To consolidate support among the new and old aristocracy, Hapsburg policy had enhanced the institutions of privilege, which then eVectively blocked eVorts to curb them. As a result, Bourbon Spain’s political class in the eighteenth century, from Patiño to Campillo, Esquilache, and Floridablanca, could at best initiate cosmetic change when more radical change was made imperative by the rapidly developing English and French economies of the time. Which is to say that Spain’s policy-makers were not “reformers” but merely anxious to preserve the colonies in America from direct exploitation by English and French merchants. Their project may best be described as a form of “defensive modernization.” Empires, we all know, decay, and the earliest of the overseas empires of occidental Europe were contracting or, as some would have it, declining around 1700 or even earlier. The process should not be exaggerated: Spain would hold on to its American continental possessions for another century, and would only retreat from Cuba and Puerto Rico (and the Philippines) two centuries later. Like Portugal, Spain managed to stretch out its decline. What slowed it down was the decision of Spain’s elites around 1700 to accept a Bourbon as monarch, the basis of an informal alliance with France against England that would become the formal Family Pact of 1761. For most of the eighteenth century, the output of silver mines in New Spain and Peru was considered basic to the metropolitan economy. Of course, indirectly, silver leaked out to western Europe via English and French 12. ByWay of Conclusion • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Caribbean ports, to the English colonies in North America, and to Asia via the Philippines. Growth of the empire’s nonmining exportables from Cuba (sugar, tobacco) and the Rio de la Plata (hides, dried beef) came mainly in the last quarter of the century. Madrid’s colonial policy over the century after 1700 had to focus on isolating New Spain from the merchant community in Kingston, the major port of England’s major sugar economy in its “west” Indies, Jamaica. Madrid turned to Bourbon France because together they might hope to reduce the threat of English expansion in the Caribbean to the traYc and ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena. Barbados, Antigua, and Jamaica became imperial England’s overseas engines of growth, exporting sugar and tobacco, importing merchandise and African slave laborers, and reexporting goods to Spain’s possessions in the Caribbean in exchange for silver pesos. Kingston functioned as a Caribbean emporium: handling traYc with Britain, with the British colonies in North America, with Africa, and with Spain’s colonies around the Caribbean. London’s Freeport Act, a reaction to Madrid’s decision in 1765 to permit Havana and other island ports to trade with many peninsular ports other than Cadiz, conWrmed the importance of smuggling between Kingston and nearby Spanish colonial ports. England’s Caribbean complex, a portion of its American empire stretching from Newfoundland to Barbados, needed naval protection to sustain its transatlantic Xow of goods, people, and silver, as well as the unity and inXuence of the “master class” of its plantations. It required seamen and oYcers, ships, shipbuilding and maintenance facilities at home, and, overseas in the Caribbean, naval stations suitable for wintering warships. In wartime, those naval units could be shifted from defense to oVense, to capturing enemy shipping and blockading enemy ports. The Royal Navy was the core of military policy in the “long” century of English economic growth after 1660. For its time and place, the scope of public intervention by the English state was unique and extraordinarily successful: consider the size of inputs for ship construction in the form of wood, ironware, rope, and canvas, in repair facilities at home and abroad, in oYcer training, and in at one point provisioning as many as 40,000 men at sea. Ranked against such massive state intervention, the operations of England’s private sector were minor. The buildup of naval power was the handmaiden of English economic development . By the time of the Seven Years’ War, the great war of the eighteenth century, between 1756 and 1763, England’s naval establishment could mount simultaneous operations in the western PaciWc at Manila...