Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (68 page)

Their problems were exacerbated by the fact that the imperial territories they already possessed appeared to be in danger of slipping from their control. The consolidation of creole oligarchies, and the accelerating infiltration of their members into high judicial, administrative and ecclesiastical posts,36 had left Spanish ministers and viceroys with a growing sense of impotence in the face of creole opposition. For all the talk of reform, and serious efforts between 1713 and 1729 to return to traditional standards of appointment, 108 creoles secured positions in the Audiencias during the reign of the first two Bourbons, and it was only in 1750 that the crown felt able to end the practice of putting these posts up for sale. By then, creole judges were in the majority in the Audiencias of Mexico City, Lima and Santiago, and retained it for a further two decades.37 By no means all the creole judges were local sons, but, where they were, the strength of their local connections hardly guaranteed an impartial enforcement of royal justice and an effective implementation of royal decrees.

In the British colonies, royal governors found themselves hamstrung by their lack of financial independence, with colonial assemblies dictating appointments through their control of salary appropriations. `The ruling faction has obtained in effect the nomination to all offices,' complained Governor Clinton of New York in 1746.38 The Seven Years War only served to increase the opportunities for political leverage by the assemblies. By the end of the war all the lower houses in the British colonies had effectively secured an exclusive right to frame money bills, and were becoming accustomed to thinking of themselves as local equivalents of the House of Commons.39 Until now, the presence of the French had helped to restrain those inclinations to independence which ministers in London suspected the colonists of harbouring. With that presence removed, how could continuing loyalty be assured?

These were the kind of problems that had long preoccupied George Montagu Dunk, Earl of Halifax, President of the Board of Trade between 1748 and 1761, who had tried to push successive administrations into paying more attention to American affairs and had presented them with far-reaching proposals for administrative reform.40 They also bulked large in the minds of the reformist ministers whom Charles III had gathered round him in Madrid. The temper of the age in continental Europe was running strongly towards the strengthening of the state and the rationalization of administration in line with the scientific principles of the Enlightenment. Ministers and officials were anxious to take their decisions on the basis of the most up-to-date information available. This meant applying the methods of science to government and ensuring that reliable statistics were collected. Ministers therefore launched surveys and promoted scientific expeditions that would furnish them with the facts and figures on which to base their policies. Even English ministers were not immune to the new breezes blowing from the continent. Halifax exemplified this new rationality as he sought to devise a programme of colonial reforms that would enable London to create a cost-effective empire.41

It was one of the ironies of the 1760s that Spanish ministers should have taken Britain's commercial empire in America as a model for their own at a time when the British themselves were becoming increasingly attracted by the idea of a more centrally controlled empire on the model of the Spanish. Madrid wanted to see Spain's American possessions transformed into British-style `colonies', a rich source of staple products and a market for its goods, but it was under no illusions as to the scale of the reforms that would be needed. The loss of Cuba, however, and its recovery under the terms of the Peace of Paris, presented ministers with an opportunity that they were quick to seize. The urgent need for a radical overhaul of the island's defences made Cuba an ideal laboratory for trying out a programme of comprehensive reform that might later be extended to the mainland territories.42

Following the return of the island to Spain, the Count of Ricla was sent out as governor and captain-general to retake possession and reorganize the system of defence. He arrived in Havana in June 1763, accompanied by General Alejandro O'Reilly, who was deputed to oversee the plans for refortifying Havana harbour, expanding the garrison, and reconstituting the island militia as a disciplined force. The costs of implementing the plans, however, would be high, and government revenues in the island were low The alcabala, which in other American territories was a substantial source of income consisting of 4-6 per cent payable on sales, had only recently been imposed on domestic transactions, and was set at a meagre 2 per cent. Although the Mexican treasury would contribute to the cost of constructing new fortifications, there was still a heavy shortfall, and the challenge facing Ricla was to generate more income in the island itself.

Ricla embarked on a round of astute negotiations with the tobacco and sugar planters, the ranchers and the merchants who constituted the island's elite. Access to British markets during the months of British occupation had brought home to them the benefits to be gained from a more liberal trading system than the highly regulated system that still prevailed in the Spanish colonial trade, in spite of recent attempts at relaxation. Ricla's best hope of success therefore lay in hinting at the possibilities of a change in the commercial regime as compensation for acceptance by the islanders of an increase in taxes. Such a change, however, would mean the government's defying the formidable Consulado of Cadiz merchants, who were determined to preserve their monopoly of the American trade.

In April 1764, following a recommendation by Esquilache's reforming junta, the crown raised the Cuban alcabala from 2 to 4 per cent and placed levies on brandy (aguardiente) and rum. An anxious period of waiting followed on the island, as the Spanish crown considered a Cuban petition for liberalization of the trading laws. During this period Esquilache was engaged in facing down conservative-minded ministers and officials and the lobbying of the Cadiz Consulado. By October 1765 he was ready to act. In a decisive break with the practice of channelling the principal Indies trade through Cadiz, permission was granted to nine Spanish ports to trade directly with Cuba and the other Spanish Caribbean islands, and the ban was lifted on inter-island trade. A second royal decree modified and consolidated the island's tax system, raising the alcabala in the process to 6 per cent.

Esquilache himself was toppled from power five months later by a popular insurrection in Madrid directed against the Italian reformist ministers of Charles III and covertly encouraged by highly placed government officials.43 But the Cuban fiscal and commercial reforms that Esquilache had devised in partnership with Ricla not only survived but were sufficiently successful to lay the groundwork for Cuba's future prosperity as a sugar-producing colony. At the same time, the appointment in 1764 of an intendant to handle the island's fiscal and military affairs - the first time that one of these new-style officials, introduced into Spain by the Bourbons, had been appointed outside the peninsula - represented a first, tentative, experiment towards endowing the Indies with a modern, professional bureaucracy.44 The institution of these various measures, even if on the small scale of an island setting, suggested how reformist ministers, playing their cards skilfully within the traditional Spanish political culture of bargaining and mutual concessions, could defuse opposition and find a compromise solution acceptable both to themselves and to a colonial elite with a list of grievances to be redressed. It was an example that the ministers of George III would prove unable to replicate.

Even before they could be certain of the outcome of the Cuban reforms, Charles III's minsterial team decided to apply their reformist brushstrokes to a wider canvas. In 1765 Jose de Galvez, a lawyer in Esquilache's circle with a dry personality and a fanatical zeal for reform, was sent out to conduct a general visitation of the viceroyalty of New Spain. His six-year visitation was to be decisive both for his own career in the service of the crown, and for the future of the reform programme in Spain's American possessions as a whole. The success of his mission was to lead to similar visitations of the viceroyalties of Peru in 1777 and New Granada in 1778. Galvez himself, created Marquis of La Sonora by a grateful monarch, was appointed secretary of the Indies in 1775, and exercised a dominant control over American affairs up to the time of his death in 1787.45

The reform projects associated with the name of Galvez, involving fiscal, administrative and commercial innovation on an unprecedented scale, testify to the extent of the transformation of attitudes and assumptions about Spain's empire of the Indies that had been gathering strength in Madrid over the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The reforms were bold, but Charles III and his closest advisers had reached the conclusion that the case for reform was overwhelming. There was no doubt in their minds that, in the predatory international world of the eighteenth century, the survival of Spain's American empire could no longer be taken for granted. The loss of America, with its great reserves of silver and its large population - probably now approaching, and soon to overtake, the population of peninsular Spain with its 9 million inhabitants46 - would mean the end of Spain's pretensions to be counted among the great powers of Europe.

Although Britain might have won the war, British ministers in London were as anxious as their Madrid counterparts about the future of their overseas empire. The population of British America still lagged far behind that of Britain itself: in the 1750s the mainland colonies had some 1,200,000 inhabitants and the West Indies 330,000, while the population of the British Isles now stood at around 10 million.47 It was generally acknowledged, however, that the value of the commodities produced for Great Britain by the colonies, and their rapidly growing potential as a market for British goods, had made their retention central to British policy. But they had to be retained in such a way as to prevent them from becoming a permanent burden on the British tax-payer, and this could not be achieved without major reforms in colonial management. In the spring of 1763 Bute observed: `We ought to set about reforming our old colonies before we settled new ones.'48

The fall of Bute and the appointment in April 1763 of George Grenville as first Lord of the Treasury in his place, placed government in the hands of a man with an obsessive determination to balance the books. His financial expertise, coupled with the American expertise of Halifax, who three months later was made secretary of state for the South, promised a determined attempt to reduce colonial affairs to order.49 This involved large-scale territorial reorganization, undertaken in the autumn of 1763. The newly acquired Spanish Florida was reconstituted as two separate colonies, East and West Florida.50 These were to have royal governors and elected assemblies, and be made subject to the English legal system. French Quebec similarly became a British colony, while the territory south of the St Lawrence estuary was added to Nova Scotia, a British colony since 1713.51 It was also necessary to give the benefits of royal protection to the king's new Indian subjects, together with his new French subjects and the handful of Spaniards who chose to remain in Pensacola and Florida after their transfer to the English crown. Halifax attempted to resolve the border question and pacify the Indian peoples by creating a demarcation line that would exclude settlers from the American interior. A royal proclamation of October 1763 established the famous Proclamation Line, drawing a boundary along the line of the Appalachian mountains - a boundary that was supposed to be policed by the colonial army, but that settlers and land speculators would rapidly come to ignore.12

This redrawing of the American map by ministers and officials in Whitehall was accompanied by the raft of measures between 1763 and 1765 which were to make the name of Grenville famous, or infamous, in Anglo-American history: the attempt to enforce the collection of customs dues by strengthening the system of vice-admiralty courts, originally established in 1697;53 the 1764 Currency Act, curtailing the emission of independent currencies by the colonies;54 the American Duties (Sugar) Act;55 and the notorious Stamp Act of March 1765, imposing a duty on legal documents, books, newspapers and other paper products - a form of taxation which, under the name of papel sellado, had been levied in the Spanish Indies since the 1630s.56 `The great object', said Grenville in a speech in the House of Commons in 1764, `is to reconcile the regulation of commerce with an increase of revenue. 117

This was equally the object of the Spanish crown, which was simultaneously accelerating its own campaign to secure higher returns from its American possessions. At the heart of this campaign was the move by royal officials to assume direct administration of the collection of excise and other dues previously farmed out to the highest bidder, and the establishment or reorganization of state monopolies on major articles of consumption, notably brandy and tobacco.58 These fiscal measures were to be accompanied by a more rational and better regulated system for the transatlantic trade, which would both encourage its development through some liberalization of the existing laws, and reduce the opportunities and the pretext for contraband - a source of deep concern to Madrid as it was to London.

In comparison with the measures taken by Madrid, those taken by Grenville and his ministerial successors, although infused by a determination to establish firmer metropolitan control over wayward colonies, look more like a set of pragmatic responses to the military, financial and administrative problems created by the Seven Years War than the building blocks of a coherent programme of reform.59 It was true that the sheer scale and complexity of the demands on the British military establishment in North America presented Whitehall with a formidable array of difficulties. As its commander-in-chief, General Thomas Gage, was painfully aware, his army was expected simultaneously to garrison an internal continental frontier against Indian attack, prevent colonists from jeopardizing relations with the Indian nations of the interior by flooding across the Proclamation Line, and keep a watchful eye on seaboard colonies that seemed strangely ungrateful to the mother country for all that it had done to defend them during the recent war. The costs of this programme were massive. Army estimates for America came to £400,000 a year, while the colonies themselves were yielding less than £80,000 in revenue annually.60