The monarchy of the kingdoms of Castile, Navarre and Aragon became a genuine empire – in the terms of Roman and Carolingian imperial tradition – with the reign of King Carlos I of Spain (1516–56) – better known as Charles V after he had been elected Holy Roman Emperor.1 The political entity that would constitute the backbone of Carlos’ state, the kingdom of Castile, thereby committed itself to major expansion on the other side of the Atlantic, on the islands and mainland around the Caribbean Sea. The proclamation of Carlos as emperor coincided with and was inextricably linked with the formation of an enormous zone of expansion that would develop to an extraordinary extent in the Americas and Philippines during his reign and that of his son, Felipe II (1556–98), who did not succeed his father as Holy Roman Emperor. The discovery of America by Columbus in 1492 was soon followed by the successful campaigns of Cortes (1519–28) in Mexico and Pizarro (1532–33) in Peru. The Philippine Islands were acquired shortly afterwards (1564–71).
The conquest of new territories and the subjugation of their populations, in a world that had been totally unknown to Europeans, can be seen as the prolongation of the period of the Catholic Spanish rulers’ expansion in the interior of the Iberian peninsula. This historical process of the destruction of the Muslim state of Al-Andalus in southern and eastern Spain is traditionally known as the Reconquista, a term that reflects an uncritical acceptance of the ideological assumptions and cultural justifications used by Castilian, Portuguese and Catalan-Aragonese rulers alike. The process in fact represented not so much a ‘reconquest’ as a conquest of territories and peoples by the social groups revolving around the Iberian monarchies, who had for centuries been pushing back the frontiers of their own territory at the expense of the Islamic caliphate of Cordoba.2
This conquest extended from the thirteenth century to the capture of the city of Granada in 1492 – the same year that Christopher Columbus set sail for the Americas. After centuries of neighbourliness between Catholics and Muslims in Iberia – albeit a cohabitation not exempt from marauding initiated by both sides – the Christian kingdoms of the north set about systematically conquering new territories, thereby moving the frontier of their realm further and further south. At the heart of these military operations lay a desire to capture new land where they could set up their supporters as vassals, while they dominated and subordinated the local Muslim populations.3 In most cases, the conquered population of Andalusia was inexorably eliminated, while the Muslim peasants of the glittering prizes of the Catalan-Aragonese monarchs – Majorca and the other Balearic Islands – also virtually disappeared within a generation of the Spanish conquest. Those who did survive were reduced in numbers, dispossessed of the lands that they had farmed for centuries, and forced to scrape by on the fringes of society. The area they had previously occupied was transferred to armed bands as part of a complex process of constructing large feudal estates, replacing old sorts of farming and land-holding and, at the same time, forming a new type of peasant society. The remaining population of Muslim Andalusia that survived in marginal enclaves tolerated by the Christian sovereigns was then brought to the verge of extinction by campaigns of extermination such as that in Granada’s Alpujarra Mountains (1568–71), before the Muslims were finally expelled by Felipe III in 1609. The modern concept of ‘ethnic cleansing’ was thus created on the late-medieval stage in southern Spain – an indisputable fact that is very difficult to incorporate into the traditional narrative of Spanish history.
The Christian kingdoms’ policy of advancing their frontiers in Iberia provides the immediate precedent for the conquest of the Americas. In this context, Patricia Seed has shown how the formula of requerimiento that sealed the submission of the conquered American peoples traced its origins to an earlier Arab-Muslim tradition.4 As in so many other aspects of overseas expansion – the rush for the precious metals of silver and gold, the policy of massive enslavement of African peoples, the intensive deployment of military and maritime technology around the world – the Portuguese were the pioneers, and the Castilians and Aragonese followed in their footsteps. The military and social capacities of the group of Christian kingdoms centred on Castile, however, were greater than those of the Portuguese. It was indeed both the limits reached by the Portuguese in Africa, and the swift conquest and domination of the Canary Islands – along with the messianic impulse of the Genoese captain Christopher Columbus during Spain’s ‘Golden Age’ – that led the Spanish to open up a new colonial frontier in the Atlantic, considered by some a short cut to Japan and China, and by others the road to possessions in hitherto unknown territories.5 The first colonization of Hispaniola (the island now shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti) opened the door to a new colonial frontier in an extraordinary intensification of a centuries-old impulse to Spanish expansion. This expansionism would be recast in the light of the ideas and innovations of the Renaissance, but its origins lay centuries in the past, in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean.
The foundations of the Spanish empire were laid in the Americas and in the Atlantic world. This statement must nevertheless be qualified in two important respects. First, the Spanish monarchy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries boasted enormous possessions in Europe itself. Moreover, its commitment to the future of Roman Catholicism, in the face of the Protestant Reformation, as well as the crucial role of the Spanish Habsburgs in holding back the continuous expansion of the Turkish empire in the Mediterranean, imposed a heavy military, political and financial burden on the ‘Hispanic monarchy’, with a subsequent dramatic impact on Castilian society.6 The second caveat is equally important. Spain’s imperial aspirations in the sixteenth century were not restricted to the vast American territories it had recently discovered and colonized, but were driven by a desire for world domination – which explains why the Spanish monarchy never renounced its expansionist intentions in North Africa or its plans to subjugate and Christianize Asia, including hopes for the conquest of China from its base in the Philippines.7 The fact that such global pretensions were finally cut down to far more modest ambitions should not obscure the contemporary perspective concerning the scope of the Spanish empire’s self-appointed historic mission.
The empire’s huge dimensions by the late sixteenth century – possessions in Europe ranging from the Low Countries to southern Italy, colonies covering most of Central and South America, some of the largest islands in the Caribbean, the Philippine Islands and toeholds in Africa – explain the characteristics of its internal organization. This motley collection of constitutional arrangements has been defined by John Elliott as a ‘composite monarchy’, i.e. a system in which the various components maintained their own constitutions, at least until the arrival on the throne of the Bourbons in early eighteenth-century Spain.8 The decades of the 1640s and 1650s were particularly critical, as some of the minor possessions defied the authority of the monarchy in Madrid, creating a conflict that resulted in separation between Portugal and Spain, and serious altercations in the Castilian-ruled areas of Catalonia (in northeastern Iberia) and Naples (in southern Italy). Another surprising aspect of the Spanish empire was the position of the American dominions and the Philippines within the framework of this global system, or more precisely their lack of any constitutional system or representative government, and their utter administrative dependence on the institutions of the Crown of Castile. This unique position can be explained by three significant factors. First, there were complex disputes within both the royal court and the Spanish church as to the very legality of the conquest of the American colonies.9 This debate, far-reaching in doctrinal terms in accordance with the precepts firmly established by the late-medieval societies of Iberia, revolved around not only the legitimacy of the conquest and of the subjugation of the native American peoples but also the crucial question of whether the indigenous peoples could be enslaved. Moreover, a vital stage in the construction of the empire coincided with the internal conflict between the monarchy and the main Castilian cities. The Crown chose to govern the overseas territories of Castile from the metropole (a decision that led to the development of a wide-ranging body of legislation, the Leyes de Indias), and to set up a series of municipal and politico-judicial institutions (the audiencias) rooted in Castilian tradition. Finally, the critical circumstances surrounding the creation of the empire in the Americas made it advisable for the monarchy to opt for direct control over those vast and remote possessions, resulting in the design of a distinctive administrative structure without precedent in the Spanish Crown’s European territories.
The creation of Spanish America never followed a predetermined plan. The Caribbean was conquered first (1492–96), then followed the Aztec empire of Mexico and Central America (1519–29), and finally the Inca empire of Quito, Peru and Chile then fell into Spanish hands (1531–34). The conquest was basically the initiative of the so-called huestes, small armed gangs financed by capitalists on the Iberian peninsula, who were attracted by the far from illusory prospect of rapid enrichment or, failing that, of domination of the local population and hopes for future wealth. The Crown and the administrative personnel – royal, civil and ecclesiastical – arrived only at a later stage of colonization, after the conquest of foreign territories by these huestes. The religious or cultural justifications advanced for the conquest were hastily improvised in the wake of this hurried expansion of territory.
This decentralized model of expansion, in which Crown rule followed in the wake of private parties’ conquest, destruction and appropriation of Native American lands and peoples, was developed by means of limitless violence, as particularly exemplified by the Peruvian Civil War (1544–48).10 The underlying dynamic behind these types of armed conflict was simply a struggle between the Crown and the various social, civil and religious participants in the initial conquest – via the system of the encomienda (or the surrender of Indians on condition that they converted to Christianity) for the appropriation of the greatest possible number of natives. Over time, and in the face of the news that came back of the rampant ‘destruction of the Indies’, the monarchy tried to introduce certain restrictions on the use of the encomienda, particularly to the financial obligations imposed on the subjugated indigenous peoples, enforced labour and the hereditary transfer of concessions.11 In this crucial struggle, which ended with the defeat of the encomenderos in Peru and Mexico, the Crown’s intention was to introduce a long-term plan for exploitation, rather than to end colonization itself. The possibility of freeing the native population from the burden of supporting the colonial structure was not envisaged even by a radical clergyman who supported the bishop of Chiapas, Bartolomé de las Casas, or by groups of the Catholic Church most committed to a kind of ‘theocratic republic’ in which the Indians would be placed under the protection of priests, out of the reach of the avaricious colonialists.
These crucial debates between different colonial actors were prompted by the demographic catastrophe unleashed by the American conquest. The Caribbean was dramatically emptied of its original inhabitants, who preserved only a marginal presence on some of the smaller islands. The West Indies would later be repopulated by contingents of Europeans and Africans – the latter victims of a massive enforced emigration that continued for centuries. This extermination of the Native American population on the islands was then implacably reproduced on the mainland, in a process of what the ethno-historian Alfred Crosby has defined as ‘the Columbian exchange’, a genocide of unprecedented proportions that, though unplanned, was nevertheless not at all accidental.12 In little more than eighty years, the American populations plummeted. In Central America, the population declined in proportions of up to 20:1, while in the lands of the Inca empire it resisted somewhat better, with differentials of 10:1 and 6:1 after the conquest, due to the greater difficulties in transmitting germs in the cold areas of the high plateau.13 The collapse of the indigenous population, however, was not solely the result of contagion from epidemic diseases new to the indigenous peoples (such as influenza, measles, smallpox and whooping cough); social and psychological factors also played a role, along with sheer overwork under colonial coercion. The impact of this depopulation on the emergence and formation of colonial society was undoubtedly decisive to the future of the Americas.
The decimation of the Native American peoples marked the end of the pre-Columbian societies, as their economic, social and cultural structures were unable to withstand the catastrophe. A new colonial society was born from this massive destruction and the interlinking of the (now reconciled) objectives of the official imperial state and the early bands of private colonizers. It was also shaped by the capacity of indigenous society to resist and adapt to the demands of their new masters. Nothing would ever be the same again, as the societies that came into being were rooted in this dramatic fault-line of death, displacement and subordination. As Carlos Sempat Assadourian has explained, the most dynamic factor in the emerging colonial society was the booming mining economy of the two great Spanish viceroyalties of Peru and Mexico, in forms that accommodated the most rational alternative to the reduction in indigenous manpower.14 Technical advances in silver mining were decisive, particularly the process known as ‘amalgamation’, which involved separating the mineral ore from the gangue using mercury. A dynamic business sector quickly took shape on this new technological base, allowing the objectives of local economic development and the needs of the empire to dovetail.15 In a quarter of a century, a new society was thereby forged, in which the large mining districts (best exemplified by Potosí in Peru) and the administrative centres (where most of the population of European origin lived) established new forms of agriculture and domestic industry very different in organization and commercial outlook from those of the pre-Hispanic societies. Precious metals – and their export to the metropole – fuelled these networks: 181 tonnes of gold and 17,000 of silver, for example, arrived in Seville between 1500 and 1650.16 Gold and silver then went on to be the nexus of Spain’s relationship with the final destinations of these South American exports – several of the northern European countries and the great Asian societies, especially China.
In order to satisfy the growing demands for cheap labour in the mines, the imperial power subordinated the Native American population to the needs of the new sector in multiple ways. The best-known example is the Peruvian mita, a system of large-scale forced labour devised by Viceroy Toledo at the beginning of the 1570s. Herein lies the explanation of the paradox of a depleted native population serving the demands of a thriving imperial economy. Thanks to these financial and labour policies, most of Spain’s administrative, economic and social organization was firmly in place in the New World by the late sixteenth century.17 Many of these structures would remain in place two centuries later.
One of the most enduring distortions of the nature of the Spanish overseas empire is the confusion between its institutional manifestations and its social foundations. For centuries, the basis of this transatlantic world of Europeans, Africans and Native Americans was justified by strong Catholic messianism. Whatever doubts the Spanish theologians may have initially voiced about the legitimacy of the conquest of colonies, these were quickly put aside in favour of the accumulation of Spanish subjects and Christian souls. Furthermore, the papal imprimatur for conquest enshrined in the Treaty of Tordesilhas of 1494 – which divided the Atlantic arena between Castile and Portugal – provided an additional justification to the fait accompli of the Spanish conquest. The intense messianism invoked by the Crown, and also by the religious orders and the Spanish church, furnished certainty about a divine mission incarnated in the will of the Spanish monarchs, and further confirmed by the hostility of France and the Protestant powers to Spanish expansion.
As Spanish imperial expansion progressed, the challenge of building institutions for such a vast domain came to the fore. The process that led to the Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias (1681) – the gargantuan task of collating thousands of edicts pertaining to colonial rule – provides an excellent indicator of the enormous legislative commitments arising from this ‘paper empire’. The empire’s political organization was derived from earlier foundations, even from pacts made with some of the indigenous peoples at the time of the conquest, but it had to respond to new requirements. Viceroyalties, military districts and governorships were established, but they had no relationship with each other and were solely answerable to the central bodies of the monarchy – primarily the Consejo de Indias, which formed the centre of this institutional mosaic. Within this political framework the audiencias were convened as the highest juridical-political authority. One of their functions was to act as a counterweight to the administrators appointed by the Crown, whether viceroys or the last corregidor (magistrate) of the Indians in a remote corner of Chile or Guatemala. The institutional structure overlapped in many respects with the ecclesiastical administration, from the bishoprics to the parishes and missions – the tentacles of a Church that depended on the monarch himself, by means of so-called royal patronage. The Castilian model of a political body assembling cities’ representatives that legislated alongside the king was ruled out in the colonial world. Also out of the question was the possibility of granting some form of representation to the American territories, along the lines followed in the first British empire. This option would come into play only with the crisis triggered by the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, which made it advisable to extend liberal political representation to the overseas territories and to authorize them to send parliamentary delegates to Spain.
A far from impartial assessment of the empire’s institutional elements and the absurd assimilationism of imperial politics has led Spanish historians, paradoxically, to deny the ‘colonial’ nature of New Spain and the Philippines – a position bespeaking ridiculous wordplay emanating from a confused overlapping of different fields of study. It is true that for a long time the Spanish did not employ the Portuguese, English or French concepts of feitorias, ‘plantations’ or ‘colonies’ – they only started to use the term ‘colonies’, coined by the English and French, late in the eighteenth century, and even then solely with reference to sugar-producing possessions in the Caribbean. These semantic discrepancies can be explained quite simply by the fact that the Spanish chose to wait longer than other Europeans before calling things by their true name. It is also the case, however, that the Spanish empire was based on a very tight economic organization aimed at enhancing the status of the metropole and its subjects, both at home and in overseas territories. This organization of the productive economy can nevertheless safely be termed ‘colonial’. Furthermore, this colonial situation was imposed without debate or restraint on the indigenous peoples, whose best land, water and assets unfailingly ended up in the hands of Spaniards.
There are very persuasive reasons for reasserting the ‘colonial’ nature of the Spanish overseas dominions. In the first place, the Indians were the only subjects obliged to pay the personal capitation tax, satisfy the demand for forced labour and buy the European goods sold by Spanish merchants in cahoots with local political leaders. These impositions were maintained until the end of the empire and even prolonged after its break-up. In short, it was the Spanish who demonstrated to the other Europeans the feasibility of annihilating, overpowering and subjugating enormous populations on a long-term basis. The fact that Adam Smith and his disciples did not consider the Spanish example appropriate for the British to emulate did not prevent their countrymen from zealously following the Spanish model of conquest, colonial governance and economic exploitation in Asia. Furthermore, the presence in Spanish America of slave populations from Africa – through experiments in large-scale exploitation in the sugar industry of Santo Domingo in the sixteenth century, on the Peruvian coast in the seventeenth century and along the entire Caribbean coastline in the eighteenth century – substantially contributed to making the Spanish world resemble that of the Portuguese in Brazil and of the north European nations in the West Indies.18 The crucial role of slavery in all the economic sectors and in the subsequent large-scale production of sugar can only be suitably explained as part of a true colonial process on an immense scale.19
Once we have accepted the truly subordinate nature of Spanish America and the conquered Philippines, there is no doubt that they did enjoy great autonomy in their evolution vis-à-vis the central institutions of Spain. Once the monarchy had established rules that guaranteed the complementary status of its territories in Europe and abroad, the colonial societies were left with an enormous scope for defining their own development. The huge distance between the European centre and the colonial periphery, along with the crisis that wracked Spain in the seventeenth century, served to enhance colonial autonomy in the Americas. Comprehending the racial and social frontiers within the empire is extremely important to understanding certain aspects of the development of these colonial societies.
One starting point is the Spanish notion of organizing its American world in the form of two separate ‘republics’, that of the Indians and that of the Spanish. This aspiration reflected a society obsessed with ‘purity of blood’ – the purity of the Spanish race, that is – and, at the same time, the desire of some sectors of the Church to keep the Indians out of the greedy clutches of Spanish colonizers. The impact of the demographic catastrophe that followed the conquest, and the disintegration of indigenous society as a result of the geographical relocation of the survivors and their mix into European and African populations – as well as the countless flights and subterfuges in which they engaged to avoid the excessive taxes – swelled the numbers of Native Americans separated from their own communities of origin. The maintenance of separate indigenous communities and setting up of religious mission stations were still considered the ideal solution to the dilemma of how to keep the native population under the control of the Spanish while avoiding the need for any large-scale contact between the two ethnic groups. The aftermath of colonial disruptions, however – the arrival of European and African emigrants, with an ensuing increase in interracial sexual relationships, and the emergence of large urban centres and new economic sectors, with their insatiable demand for labour, even in the domestic sphere – turned the ideal of a colonial society organized on the basis of two separate communities into a utopian dream.
Out of the failure of this idea of two racially separate ‘republics’ there slowly emerged what the Spanish called the society of ‘castes’ – a term borrowed from the Portuguese Jesuits to describe the divisions in India in the sixteenth century. In a society such as Castile – accustomed, after the virtual extermination of the Jews and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula, to considering racial stigmas as hereditary – the idea of castes distinguishable by physical differences found fertile ground in America. Over time, the distinctions between castes became increasingly subtle, giving rise to a complex demarcation of racial categories and sub-categories. Despite this sophisticated system of classification – similar to those developed in contemporary slave societies – its value in determining the limits to social advancement and the formation of a social and cultural hierarchy needs to be closely scrutinized. Access to most social and economic activities was not overly preconditioned by supposed membership of a caste, and the same was true of access to property and specialized professions. Having said that, however, we still do not know the exact extent of the discrimination implied by caste membership, simply because the questions asked by historians on this point have been badly formulated. Full knowledge of caste and racial cleavages requires painstaking research into people’s admission to and status in the trades and professions, the subtle rules of the marriage market, the behaviour of judges and magistrates, and the qualifications required for access to civil and ecclesiastical posts.
The fact that physical – racial – distinctions were not irrelevant seems to be borne out by the intensification of their use in the second half of the eighteenth century. The development of the modern state gave rise to new demands for law and order, some of which were very consciously accepted and manipulated by certain colonial social groups. Colonial and ecclesiastical administrators who ran the parishes and were responsible for the first labour censuses took an increasing interest in people’s blood stock,20 with significant racial correlations in the segregation of cities and marriage patterns.21 This was undoubtedly the key factor in social advancement, rather than any impediment for individuals with a capacity to accumulate assets. It is not surprising, therefore, that the government forbade mixed marriages, thereby reasserting the unequal basis of the colonial relationship. As Verena Stolcke has demonstrated, when the 1776 Pragmática Sanción banning mixed marriages in the metropole reached the Americas, its effects were multiplied ad infinitum, as it was applied within a framework of a complex racial structure.22 The effects were particularly intense and long-lasting in areas such as Cuba, where the existence of a substantial free black and mulatto social group turned the Sanción into an instrument for regulating the marriage market. The twilight years of the empire were therefore overshadowed by cultural issues focusing on hierarchical social structure and social exclusion. It is one of the ironies of history that the so-called ‘coloured castes’ – the descendants of slaves – were increasingly climbing the social ladder among the working classes, while in the urban professions, in the Army and in the Church, the empire’s racial culture resisted any dismantlement of social structures based on skin colour or slave blood. The transformation of slavery itself, with the emergence of huge plantations, was not unconnected with the intensification of a racialist viewpoint.
Despite the supposed distance of the Spanish monarchy from the major currents of international affairs in the eighteenth century, the empire reached its apogee and greatest territorial extent during this period. Three factors explain this surprising and belated expansionist rush. First, the evident demographic recovery of indigenous populations must be taken into account, along with the relentless growth of mixed-race groups that were culturally open to the Europeans or people of African descent. Second, there was a continuous expansion of the frontiers both northwards and southwards in South America, as well as into the uncolonized ‘empty’ space around the Orinoco and Amazon rivers. Third, the peripheries of the empire were becoming increasingly integrated into its overall economic and social system – a metamorphosis true not only of the Americas but also of parts of Spain, such as Galicia and Catalonia. The most noteworthy example of a development that both pushed back frontiers and integrated the peripheries was the successful organization of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata in 1776.23
If any single reason explains the acceleration of the long-term trend towards expansion, it is the empire’s definitive integration into the Atlantic economy, part of a process of the economic and social change of reformed mercantilism. The most visible aspect of such a change was the intensification of transatlantic economic exchanges.24 Another aspect, less visible but ultimately more revealing, derives from the definitive integration of the two main sectors of the colonial economy – mining and the minting of coins, and commercial agriculture, increasingly aimed at the European markets for raw materials (cotton and dyes) and foodstuffs (sugar, tobacco, coffee). This growing integration of the two sectors – closely linked to the development of colonial economies geared towards foodstuffs for local consumption (including stimulants such as coca from the Andes), and to the production of textiles and utensils needed regionally – was subject to commercial and fiscal reform measures introduced in the 1760s and 1770s. Tariff reforms turned the system of a Spanish trade monopoly – first based in Seville from the late sixteenth century and in Cadiz from 1717 onwards – into an oligopoly involving various Spanish mainland ports, and were intended partially to deregulate trade and increase income from tariffs.25 New economic policies of this type, geared towards taking fuller advantage of the empire, had been debated at length since the 1720s, but they were only implemented when the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) made them inevitable.
The war had demonstrated the empire’s military weakness, and showed an urgent need for Spain to reform armed forces and to raise money to pay for these reforms. Questions were also asked in Spain about the power-sharing within the American institutions (audiencias and cabildos) between Creoles (Europeans born in the Americas) and Spaniards.26 The reforms considered vital by the Enlightenment monarchs and their ministers involved nothing less than a drastic reorganization of the empire’s finances and power systems to align them more closely with their new priorities. As was the case with the French and British empires, however, payment for the war and subsequent reforms destabilized the internal equilibrium that had been so jealously guarded between metropole and colonies.27 The sums collected in the Americas through indirect taxation, fiscal monopolies (especially on tobacco), ‘compulsory loans’ and higher tariffs, all aimed at counteracting the impulses of their economies, provided the state with the resources required to defend the empire as a whole, thus fulfilling the monarchy’s main political objective.
The costs of this increase in fiscal pressure on the Americas were undoubtedly substantial, both in economic terms – it moved some sectors away from the informal economy into the hands of the state, while acting as a disincentive to others – and in political terms – it stirred up deep-rooted popular discontent, which exploded in the Andes in 1780 and in the Viceroyalty of New Spain in 1810.28 The invasion of Spain by Napoleon in 1808, the erosion of the imperial system of governance and the ever-increasing contradictions of the American colonial world led the societies of the empire into a spiral of violence, in which the loyalties of the royalists or the supporters of the colonial insurgency were markedly different from one place to the other. In these circumstances, the only social group capable of formulating an alternative cultural and political discourse was the Creole bourgeoisie, the prime beneficiary of the economic expansion in the eighteenth century.
The empire forged in the Americas in the sixteenth century ceased to exist formally in the first half of the 1820s, as a result of Spain’s military defeats by the American colonial separatists. The rebellion that broke out in 1810 and was, after 1813, led by Simon Bolivar resulted in the liberation of nearly all the former colonies and the creation of six independent countries – Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia – though Bolivar himself had dreamed of a single united nation. This wholesale defeat occurred despite efforts by the Spanish rulers to co-opt the American settlers in new representative institutions after the Napoleonic Wars. This ambitious political project failed, most notably because of the implacable conflict between the nationalist and pro-independence forces in some parts of the Americas and the Spanish incapacity to accept the Americans’ ‘federalist’ positions.
Despite the resounding failure of its attempts to keep the empire intact in Central and South America, Spain did manage to retain three very important colonies: Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The first was one of the richest European possessions in the world, as Wellington never tired of reminding the Spanish ambassadors in London. The fact that all three stayed in Spanish hands can be explained by their status as highly valuable enclaves, in both strategic and military terms, and by the successful implementation there of the reforms made between 1763 and 1782, in line with those applied throughout the empire. In contrast to the large continental viceroyalties, the island enclaves received immense resources for their military defence; these came from the rest of the empire and in the financial terms of the day they were known as situados (securities).29
Cuba thereby became the host for a vigorous sugar-based economy that reaped dazzling benefits from the sudden price rise triggered by the destruction of the neighbouring French colony of Saint-Domingue. Cuba’s sugar boom was enhanced by the arrival of exiled sugar planters from this great colony and, above all, by the untrammelled importation of African slaves prior to the signing in 1820 of an Anglo-Spanish treaty to ban the slave trade. In Cuba, however, as in Brazil and the south of the United States, a great intensification of slavery occurred precisely when this trade had been prohibited internationally by abolitionist treaties that Britain signed with the majority of European states following the Napoleonic Wars – the Spanish authorities turned a blind eye to the smuggling of Africans. As a result of the sugar boom in Cuba, other crops were transferred to different parts of the island, making way for the development of the mechanized nineteenth-century plantations. This process of moving crops to the highly fertile central areas enabled Cuba to become the world’s foremost producer of cane sugar and, consequently, an extraordinarily valuable colony for both the Spanish state (which financed its presence in the Caribbean with Cuban tariffs and had plenty of profits left over for use in Spain) and for Spanish capitalists.30 In Puerto Rico, the parallel development of the sugar and coffee industries – which exported primarily to the North European markets, via the Danish West Indian entrepôt of St Thomas in the neighbouring Virgin Islands, and also to the United States – formed a base that was more than sufficient to justify the interest of the metropole. As in Cuba, the Puerto Rican sugar business ran on slavery, though coffee was mainly cultivated by peasants of European origin.
The Philippines always constituted a very special case in the Spanish Empire. This most remote of the Spanish possessions was sustained by a complex combination of taxes paid by the local population, financial aid that arrived from New Spain in the form of situados and customs duties yielded by the important shipping link established in the late sixteenth century between Acapulco and Manila – that is, trade between the Spanish and Chinese empires, with the Philippines capital as staging post. For centuries, the export of South American silver to the Chinese market (where it was highly prized due to the demands of the Chinese monetary system, which did not use paper money) largely guaranteed the viability of such a remote and costly possession. For their return trip to Acapulco, the silver galleons loaded up with textiles, pottery and other coveted Chinese goods, as well as spices from the islands of southeast Asia. The Philippines also played a key role in the empire’s rearguard defence against attacks from the Dutch and British in eastern Asia.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the crisis in the Spanish empire threatened to cast the Philippines to its fate, both politically and financially, the government in Manila managed to find a way to keep the archipelago in Spanish hands.31 Within only a few years, they developed a formidable fiscal monopoly sector, along the lines previously established in the Americas. Tobacco would acquire a fundamental importance in this scheme; the state monopoly on tobacco quickly became the basis of the Philippines’ official finances (and remained so until 1882), thereby guaranteeing a Spanish presence in the China Sea. Creating a tobacco monopoly meant turning the state into an economic agent: this required the imposition and control of tobacco-growing in some provinces, a system for transporting the leaves, the processing of the finished product in factories in Manila and a reliable distribution network. From 1840 onwards, the Philippine monopoly was also obliged to supply cut-price tobacco leaves to factories in the metropole. As the managers of the state monopoly had to strictly control both the illegal tobacco planting that was common practice among Philippine peasants and the ever-changing retail sector – in which the mixed-race (Chinese-Philippine) lower-middle class played an important role – the fiscal monopolies became a major instrument of colonization. While the tobacco monopoly played a decisive role in economic integration, military operations and steamships pushed the colonial frontier both inland (on the island of Luzón, in the Visayas) and into the territory of the Muslim populations of Mindanao and Sulu, in the southern part of the archipelago. In the last two decades of Spanish domination, fiscal monopolies were deregulated, the tax system was reformed and the investment of Spanish capital was encouraged. These moves were designed to create a new basis for Spanish domination and compete with emerging local capitalism, as well as with the European and American companies established in Philippine ports.
On these productive and fiscal foundations the new colonial model of liberal Spanish colonialism was built in the nineteenth century, once the neo-absolutist monarchy had definitively collapsed in Spain. Strangely, however, those liberals who had once rallied their American and Philippine counterparts to form part of a single system of representative institutions went on to separate them from this very system after securing power in the 1830s. Instead of a representative assembly and shared political rights, they hastily constructed a highly authoritarian and militarized system of government – the only way of filling the political vacuum in the colonies as a result of the suspension of the liberal constitutions approved in the metropole in 1837, 1845 and 1876. (Only much later, after a first Cuban War for Independence ended in stalemate and slavery had finally been abolished in 1886, did Spanish governments commit themselves to extending the benefits of representation to Cuba and Puerto Rico, although the Philippines unequivocally retained its status as a colony.)32 Spanish assimilationist concepts arrived late on a scene of fratricidal conflict, mutual distrust and increasing interest in the Spanish Caribbean on the part of the United States. This is not to say that Spain acquiesced in the end of its four centuries in the Americas without a struggle. Its impressive show of strength – 250,000 Spanish soldiers were dispatched to Cuba in 1898 – proved insufficient to crush the Cuban insurgency, however, and President William McKinley’s espousal of American imperialism definitively undermined Spain’s capacity for resistance. Once its imperial grip on the Americas had been loosened, Spain finally ceased to be a nation straddling the Atlantic, with tentacles in Asia and North Africa.
Cuba gained its independence in 1898 after a long war and several years of American military occupation. Puerto Rico shook off Spanish rule at the same time only to be occupied by US troops until 1900, when it became part of the USA, though with limited autonomy. The Philippines also ejected the Spanish with American help – but remained under US control until 1935.
It is a paradox of the Spanish empire that, at the point when it came to an end it was readopting approaches highly reminiscent of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the demographic growth of the maritime regions of the Spanish mainland, coupled with a fall in long-distance shipping costs, encouraged tens of thousands of Spaniards to emigrate to the Americas, just as their forefathers had done centuries before. Up until around 1760–70, travel to the overseas territories was largely restricted to the southern regions of Spain closest to the main ports serving the Americas, and to groups such as the sailors, agents and merchants who maintained the commercial relationship between the two sides of the transoceanic empire. Emigration to the remaining colonies in the Caribbean, or to the former colonies on the American mainland, had been very selective and intermittent until the 1840s. From then on, however, it changed in character. A relentless flow of emigrants would ‘Hispanicize’, to a degree hitherto unknown, extensive parts of the old imperial realm, particularly in those areas still under Spanish control. Legislative changes of the 1850s, which put an end to the previous policies that restricted emigration, fomented the creation of significant Spanish communities on the other side of the Atlantic. This tendency continued in the early decades of the twentieth century – even in the newly proclaimed Republic of Cuba, where Spanish migrants continued to be warmly received. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Havana and Buenos Aires at the beginning of the twentieth century were cities with major Spanish-born communities, well represented by political, cultural and leisure associations with a high social status.
After the defeat of Spain by the United States in 1898, the Spanish overseas empire was compared by one American commentator to a whale – an animal whose every part could be put to good use. Its dismemberment was carried out in the diplomatic salons of Paris, after Madrid and Washington signed a treaty that conceded to Spain certain commercial and financial concessions. The United States had strengthened its hold over the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico and Spain’s Asian domain of the Philippines, as well as its capacity to intervene in Cuba, which had been the jewel in the Spanish crown throughout the nineteenth century. The agreement marked the end of four centuries of Spanish entrenchment in the Americas and the world outside Europe in general, and the very length of this imperial history should give us pause for thought.
The predictable end of a crisis-ridden empire should not deter us from re-evaluating its place in history and its significance in the shaping of the modern world, a story that has still not been fully written, despite its relevance to understanding the changes in world history that took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The story of the latter years of the Spanish empire is one of contraction in the face of the expansion of the emerging powers of the modern world, particularly Britain, but also France, Germany, the United States and Japan.33 This essay has attempted to show how understanding the mechanisms of the decline of some empires and the rise of others throughout the development of the modern world is not strictly a question of geopolitics: the elimination of the Iberian empires provided a precondition for satisfying northern Europe’s need to expand into the southern hemisphere. It should therefore be understood as something that had a fundamental effect on the transformation of the economic, social and cultural traits of modern imperialism.
It is not unreasonable to see the Spanish empire as the hinge between the European Old World and developments of the modern world that are still in progress. The experience accumulated in those four centuries of history was a key element in the formation of the world as we know it today. For a long time, however, the justifications used by the Spanish themselves – Catholic messianism, monarchical imperialism, paternalistic feelings towards overseas territories and populations – found an easy echo and a self-interested confirmation in the ideas with which the Enlightenment and evangelical Protestantism formulated their own historical experience of expansion. However, just as we have moved away from a description of the nineteenth century based on technical changes in industry and transportation, complemented by the parallel dissemination of ideas of a genuinely European origin, the place occupied by the Spanish empire in history is in need of re-evaluation. There is little doubt that the Spanish were the advance party, and the Spanish empire was the first experiment on a large scale, in the European expansion that would later stretch into the first half of the twentieth century. In effect, the great enterprise of colonizing an entire continent – with unexpected branches in Asia – undertaken by emigrants, clergymen and court officials was the first major attempt to dominate and contain non-European peoples on a long-term basis. Its aim was nothing less than to create a new society that for generations could reproduce itself through its own momentum, and on those terms it was a success. Within this framework, the monarchical state marked out its objectives, the metropole was able to satisfy its thirst for wealth and domination, and the Catholic Church found an ideal setting for the massive conversion of culturally and psychologically exhausted populations. The script for subsequent developments had already been written in the sixteenth century.