Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (51 page)

In due course, after the Lord had wonderfully prospered him in his undertaking, Mather wrote and printed a tract, La religion Pura, designed to bring the light of the gospel to the peoples of that benighted Spanish world.176 In 1702, after he had been `much engaged both in public and private Supplications, that the Lord would open a way for the Access of His glorious Gospel into the vast regions of the Spanish America', he received with excitement the news of the Grand Alliance against Bourbon France and Spain, with the commitment of the English and the Dutch to make themselves the masters, if they could, `of the Countreys and Cities under the Dominion of Spain in the Indies'.177 The day of redemption was surely close at hand.

Mather's hopes were not, after all, to be realized. There was more resilience in Spain's American possessions than he, or the Protestant world in general, could appreciate. Nor were all the comparisons necessarily to the advantage of the British colonies. Uniformity of faith had given Spanish America, for all its social and ethnic diversity, an inner cohesion that still eluded the British colonies. But could a society based on uniformity of faith adjust to new ideas? On the other hand, could a society with a diversity of creeds achieve stability? As the eighteenth century opened, the test was yet to come.

On 20 October 1697, Samuel Sewall, who shared the hopes of his friend and fellow Bostonian, Cotton Mather, for the speedy conversion of Spain's dominions in America, went to Dorchester to wait on the Lieutenant Governor: `breakfast together on Venison and Chockalatte: I said Massachuset and Mexico met at his Honour's Table." This gastronomic encounter of British and Spanish America at a Massachusetts breakfast table was a small, but symbolic, indicator of a larger process of transformation that was by now well under way: the creation of an integrated Atlantic world. It was a world in which the rivalries of European states increasingly impinged on the colonial societies of the Americas, and in which new relationships, both transatlantic and hemispheric, were being forged in response to the combined, and frequently conflicting, requirements of trade and war.

The accelerating process of contact and conflict within the framework of a developing Atlantic community sprang from developments on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century were marked by profound shifts in the international balance of power. In the Americas, which found themselves caught up in the consequences of those shifts, they saw the consolidation of colonial societies as distinctive polities with their own unique characteristics - characteristics that differentiated them in important ways from the metropolitan societies that had given birth to them, and gave rise to fundamental questions of identity which would become increasingly insistent during the opening decades of the eighteenth century.

The massive change in the relationships of the great powers of Europe in the middle years of the seventeenth century was succinctly summarized by the English publicist and political theorist, Slingsby Bethel, in his The Interest of Princes and States (1680):

Formerly the affairs of Christendom were supposed to be chiefly swayed by the two great powers of Austria (wherein Spain is understood) and France: from whom other Princes and States derived their Peace and War, according to the several parties they adhered unto. But now the puissance of the former being so much abated, that it deserves no rank above its Neighbours, France of the two remains the only formidable Potentate, of whose greatness, all Princes and States are as much concerned to be jealous, as formerly they were of Austria.2

The revolts of the 1640s in Catalonia, Portugal, Sicily and Naples had shaken the Spanish Monarchy to its core. While it eventually managed to weather the storm, although at the expense of the permanent loss of Portugal and its overseas empire, its `puissance', as Bethel observed, was `much abated'. The signing of the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, which ended almost 25 years of Franco-Spanish conflict, marked the emergence of the France of Louis XIV as the dominant military power in Europe. `Having now got the advantage of Spain,' wrote Bethel, France was aiming to `improve it to an universal monarchy, as Spain formerly designed.' Great Britain and the Dutch Republic were understandably anxious. They had not fought for so long against Spanish world domination simply to exchange one tyrannical Roman Catholic power for another as the arbiter of Europe.

New confirmation of Spain's loss of global supremacy was to be found in the terms of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of Madrid of 1670, in which, for the first time, Spain officially conceded full British `sovereignty, ownership and possession' of ,all the lands, regions, islands, colonies and dominions, situated in the West Indies or in any part of America' held at that time by `the King of Great Britain and his subjects'. This included Jamaica, seized by Cromwell fifteen years before.' The New World monopoly conferred on the Iberian monarchs by Alexander VI in 1493 thus lost its last shreds of international legitimacy While the Spanish crown might still retain the bulk of its possessions on the American mainland, and the treasure fleets continue to return year after year to the Iberian peninsula with impressively large cargoes of silver, there was a widespread impression that Spain itself was in terminal decline.

Foreigners, following in the path of the Spanish arbitristas, made their own diagnoses of what had gone wrong. `Spain', wrote Slingsby Bethel, `is a clear demonstration that Mis-government, in suffering all manner of Frauds, and neglecting the Interest of a Nation, will soon bring the mightiest Kingdoms low, and lay their honour in the dust.'4 In the eyes of Bethel and other contemporary British observers, misgovernment included a failure to grasp the nature of the relationship between population, prosperity and liberty. As Bethel pointed out with reference to the recent successes of the Dutch and the English, `industry and ingenuity are not the effects of the barrenness of a country, oppression of the People, or want of Land ... but the effects only of justice, good laws and Liberty's The Spaniards had flouted the essential principles of good government by disregarding this fundamental truth, and were paying the inevitable price.

If Spain in the sixteenth century had furnished the model to be followed, now in the later seventeenth it was the model to be shunned. The encouragement of commerce, so neglected by the Spaniards, was coming to be seen as central to Britain's true interest. With the encouragement of commerce went a growing appreciation of the potential value to the mother country of its transatlantic colonies, although not everyone was persuaded of this. The pamphlet entitled A Discourse of Trade published by Roger Coke in 1670 feared that England was set on the same ruinous path as Spain. `Ireland and our Plantations', he wrote, `Rob us of all the growing Youth and Industry of the Nation, whereby it becomes weak and feeble, and the Strength, as well as Trade, becomes decayed and diminished ...'6 Sir Josiah Child found himself having to launch a counter-attack against `gentlemen of no mean capacities', like Coke, who argued that `his Majestie's Plantations abroad have very much prejudiced this Kingdom by draining us of our People; for the confirmation of which they urge the example of Spain, which they say is almost ruined by the Depopulation which the West-Indies hath occasioned." Far from weakening a nation, overseas plantations augmented its strength, although Child found himself wrestling with the problem of New England, notoriously unable to supply the mother country with those raw materials and commodities that justified colonies in the eyes of good mercantilists.

In practice, however, the new wealth brought to the metropolis in the second half of the seventeenth century by the rapid growth of the colonial market, and the economic stimulus provided by a buoyant transatlantic trade, spoke louder than any number of economic tracts.' The genuine if erratically pursued concern of later Stuart governments to regulate the colonial trade and reorganize colonial administration9 was a measure of the degree to which the American settlements were beginning to assume their place in the national consciousness as imperial outposts integral to the development of England's power and prosperity.

Britain's empire was therefore to be a maritime and commercial empire. As such it came to think of itself as the antithesis of Spain's land-based empire of conquest, the alleged cause of its ruin. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, in securing the Protestant succession in England and confirming its character as a parliamentary monarchy, contributed new layers of religious and political ideology to this dawning imperial vision. Commercial enterprise, Protestantism and liberty were now to be enshrined as the mutually reinforcing constituents of a national ethos which, in the long and exhausting wars against the popish tyranny of Louis XIV, would win the ultimate sanction of military success. Piece by piece, the various components of an eighteenth-century ideology of empire were being fitted into place. 10

The Glorious Revolution and its aftermath - the forging by William III of his grand anti-French coalition, and the global conflict with France culminating in 1713 in a peace settlement at Utrecht which set the seal on British claims to supremacy on the high seas - had profound if ambiguous consequences for the transatlantic colonies." It was only right that subjects of the crown who had settled overseas should enjoy the many benefits of an empire of liberty. Consequently there would be no Stuart-style attempts to interfere with the system of representative government operating through colonial assemblies, although continuing uncertainty over the relative powers of governors and assemblies would leave ample scope for conflict in the years ahead.'2

In general, the government of William III looked more benignly on the Caribbean colonies than on the mainland settlements, if only because of the growing importance of the sugar interest, and the need to assist the plantations as they sought to defend themselves against French attack.13 But it proved unable to tackle effectively the continuing problem of the survival of the proprietary colonies. Even in Massachusetts, the imposition of a royal governor under the new charter of 1691 was accompanied by a compromise which left the legislature in a potentially stronger position relative to the governor than that enjoyed by the assemblies of other royal colonies.14

Yet, even as the colonies were confirmed in their possession of institutions and liberties conforming to the broad principles of the Revolutionary Settlement, the growing recognition of their economic value to the imperial metropolis encouraged an interventionism from London in the management of trade that pointed to the potential for future conflict between the requirements of an empire of commerce and an empire of liberty. In the years immediately following the Glorious Revolution, the crown was too preoccupied with its domestic and international concerns to pursue a consistent policy towards the American settlements. But the creation in 1696 of the Board of Trade and Plantations in succession to the Lords of Trade was evidence of its determination to tighten London's control over the transatlantic trade. This seemed all the more necessary at a time when the diversionary effects of the war with France had made it easier for Scottish and Irish shipowners to break into the English monopoly created by the Navigation Acts, and sail directly to the Chesapeake and Delaware."

The creation of the Board of Trade was accompanied by the establishment in the colonies of vice-admiralty courts to try offences against the Navigation Acts. In spite of the setbacks to governmental control represented by the colonial upheavals of 1688-9, the hand of bureaucracy was reaching out towards America. By 1710 there were 42 permanent customs officers in the British colonies seeking to ensure that the Acts were observed.16 The number might be small, but the appearance of these officials was a portent. Spain's American possessions had long been accustomed to the prying activities of royal inspectors and customs agents. Where empire was established, regulation was never far behind.

At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, therefore, the presence of empire was making itself increasingly felt in England's Atlantic possessions, although imperial policy lacked the coherence and effectiveness that senior officials in London like Sir William Blathwayt would have wished. Colonial affairs inevitably took second place to the prosecution of the war in Europe. Consistency in the government's colonial policies, however, was also hampered by the divisiveness of British politics under William III and Anne. Bitter political feuding between Tories and Whigs gave an opening to colonial societies and their spokesmen in London to exploit the party political divisions in England for their own purposes. Individual colonies had begun to follow the example of Massachusetts in appointing a permanent agent to keep an eye on their interests in court and parliament. The activities of these agents and of pressure groups that emerged to defend one colonial interest or another complicated the attempts of Board of Trade officials to develop and implement a grand strategy. Colonial lobbying in London was beginning to influence the formulation of imperial policy.''

By force of circumstance, England and its colonies were being inexorably drawn into a closer relationship. The process of imperial integration was strongly driven by the expansion of the transatlantic trade - by 1700 there were at least 1,000 London merchants trading with America, and the steadily expanding British demand for sugar and tobacco was rapidly increasing the volume of transatlantic shipping. If in the 1680s fewer than 500 ships a year made the crossing from England, their number had more than doubled by the 1730s.18 Not only was transatlantic communication growing in both frequency and regularity, but the development of intercolonial trade between the mainland settlements and the West Indies, and between the various mainland settlements themselves, meant that by the 1730s British and European news was arriving more promptly, and being disseminated more widely, than fifty years earlier. In 1702 a bold wartime initiative was launched for the organization of a monthly transatlantic packet service to the West Indies, making the round trip in 100 days. Although the new service failed to survive the coming of peace, eighteenth-century correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic could write their letters with a growing confidence that they would reach their destination with a reasonable degree of predictability."