Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (81 page)

While Britain was struggling in the 1770s to retain hold of its American empire, Spanish imperial policy during the same decade displayed an assertiveness that owed much to the reforming drive of Jose de Galvez, in his capacity, first as visitor general of New Spain, and then, from 1775, as secretary of the Indies.132 Determined to protect the northern frontier of New Spain and the Pacific coast from British incursions, and from the growing threat posed by Russian expansion down the coast from Alaska, he embarked on an ambitious expansionist programme. This was intended not only to strengthen Spain's hold on the provinces of New Vizcaya, Sonora and the Baja California peninsula, but also to establish a firm Spanish presence up the Californian coastline. In 1770 Spain planted garrisons at San Diego and Monterey, and in 1776 San Francisco was founded as the third Californian presidio. Just as the British were losing their North American colonies, the Spanish were acquiring, in `New California', a brand new American colony of their own .113

The assertive imperialism of the Spain of Charles III was accompanied by an effort, comparable to that of Philip II but inspired by the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment, to survey and document the physical features and natural resources of the crown's overseas territories. During the last three decades of the century, the crown sponsored a series of exploratory and scientific expeditions to different regions of Spain's American territories and the Spanish Pacific, culminating in Alejandro Malaspina's great expedition of 1789-94, which sailed all the way up America's Pacific coast from Cape Horn to Alaska, before proceeding to the Philippines, China and Australia and returning to Cadiz by way of Cape Horn. 134

While these expeditions were evidence of the crown's determination to dispel the image of Spanish backwardness, they were also integral to the Bourbon programme for a more effective exploitation of American resources. It would only be possible to sustain the mounting costs of imperial defence and expansion if more wealth could be extracted from the American territories. In 1770 revenues from the Indies constituted around 23 per cent of the total revenues of the Spanish treasury.131 With the crown imposing new pressures and providing new incentives, silver production in the mines of New Spain and Peru grew in the years before 1780 at an annual rate of some 1.2 per cent136 - an increase that not only brought relief to the Spanish treasury but also helped to stimulate trading contacts around the Atlantic basin. In November 1776 the Congress of the newly independent United States effectively recognized the dominance of Spanish American silver by adopting the Spanish peso, under the name of `dollar' (from the German Thaler), as the unit of currency.137 Whatever the political transformations under way, the British and Spanish Atlantic economies were becoming increasingly interdependent.

Map 7. Spain's American Empire, End of the Eighteenth Century.

Based on Guillermo Cespedes del Castillo, America hispanica, 1492-1898 (1983), vol. 6, map xv; The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 3 (1987), p. 6.

The overseas revenues that allowed Spain to sustain, if somewhat precariously, its great power status, resulted not only from rising silver production, but also from the efforts of royal officials to rationalize the American fiscal system and raise more revenue by way of taxes and monopolies. These efforts, however, imposed massive strains on American populations and on the social fabric of American communities. At the beginning of the 1780s Galvez and his colleagues were brought face to face with the uncovenanted costs of their programme of reform. While the thirteen mainland colonies of North America were slipping from Britain's grasp, Spain found itself in danger of losing a vast area of South America, some 500,000 square kilometres in extent, in the southern Andes.138

The coincidence did not escape the notice of Alexander von Humboldt as he introduced his readers to Tupac Amaru's rebellion, which he believed was `little known in Europe': `The great revolt of 1781 was on the point of snatching from the King of Spain all the mountainous region of Peru at the same time as Great Britain was losing almost all its colonies in the continent of America. 13' The Andean rebellion of 1780 to 1783, easily the largest and most dangerous to have occurred in well over two hundred years of Spanish rule in America, originated at Tinta, in the Vilcanota valley to the south of Cuzco, and at one time or another extended over large parts of Peru and modern Bolivia to reach New Granada and Venezuela to the north, and Chile and the north-western regions of today's Argentina to the south.140 Faced simultaneously with an independent, but not entirely unconnected, insurrection in New Granada, which at one point saw 20,000 rebels moving on the capital of Santa Fe de Bogota'141 Madrid as much as London appeared to be on the point of losing its American empire. Of all its major territorial possessions on the American mainland, only the viceroyalty of New Spain remained relatively tranquil (fig. 34).

The precipitating cause of both these regional rebellions was Madrid's programme of administrative and fiscal reform, now made all the more pressing by the new expenses arising from Spain's entry into the war against England in 1779. In Peru, the sales tax of the alcabala was raised from 2 to 4 per cent in 1772, and to 6 per cent in 1776, and three years later was extended to coca, a product that the Indians consumed in large quantities. These tax increases were rigorously implemented by the authoritarian and inflexible visitor-general Antonio de Areche, who arrived in the viceroyalty in 1777 with instructions from Galvez to implement the reforms. Like the offices of the customs collectors in the British colonies, the customs houses he built through the southern Andes became the visible symbols of imperial oppression.142 Similar reform processes were also at work in the viceroyalty of New Granada, where another visitor-general, Juan Francisco Gutierrez de Piiieres, arrived in 1778, and immediately set about reorganizing the tax apparatus in an attempt to extend the fiscal net. 141

The colonial societies of Spanish South America, like those of British North America, were now confronted with the unenticing prospect of being brought within the confines of the new-style European fiscal-military state. For all the differences in their political cultures, large areas in both colonial worlds responded with protest, riot and rebellion. Their rebellions, however, took different forms, and followed different trajectories, reflecting the deep differences that divided British American from Spanish American colonial society, and British imperial power and practice from their Spanish counterparts.

In reality, there was no more a single colonial society in Spanish America than there was in British America. Each colonial world contained a multiplicity of societies, leading in turn to a multiplicity of reactions. The British West Indies and the mainland colonies reacted to the policies of the mother country in very different ways. Similarly, although there were innumerable local riots in eighteenth-century New Spain, the viceroyalty, for reasons still to be fully explored, did not experience the great upheavals that shook Spanish power to its foundations in New Granada and Peru.144 In the areas of revolt there were significant divergences, too, between the Andean insurrection of Tupac Amaru II and the rebellion of the Comuneros of New Granada. The story of both, however, highlights aspects of Spain's empire of the Indies which bring into sharper relief the character of Britain's American empire and of the revolt of the thirteen colonies.

The Andean revolt led by Juan Gabriel Condorcanqui, the self-proclaimed Inca Tupac Amaru II, was primarily, but by no means exclusively, the revolt of a large and exploited indigenous population which had been given a glimpse of a better future in the context of an idealized past. In 1763, when British troops and colonists were challenged by the massive uprising known as Pontiac's `rebellion', they had faced a movement of Indian peoples living on the frontier of empire, whose lands had been encroached on by British settlers, and whose political bargaining power had been destroyed by the elimination of France's American empire.145 Tupac Amaru's revolt, on the other hand, was that of a subject population which had been living under oppressive Spanish rule for over two centuries. Changing circumstances over the last few decades had alleviated some of its burdens, like the mita service in the mines '14' but had added, or aggravated, others. There was particular resentment at the expansion of the reparto, or the system of forced sale of goods at inflated prices to the indigenous population by local officials, the corregidores, who would act in collusion with estate-owners and influential merchants. As a result, the debts of the Andean peasantry piled up and could only be paid off by service in the mines and the textile workshops, or by work on the haciendas.

Following the legalization of the reparto in 1756, local revolts against the corregidores and the native chiefs or curacas operating on behalf of the state became endemic, but usually ended, as they began, as minor and strictly local movements of protest.147 The indigenous population of the Cuzco region was far from homogeneous, and Spanish rule had led to a progressive fragmentation of Andean rural society into numerous small peasant communities living their own lives and nursing their own communal grievances. 14' But the reparto system touched them all, as also did the fiscal changes introduced by Areche. The tax demands were all the harder to bear because they came at a time when the new and sustained growth of the Andean population had left Indian communities with a scarcity of resources and had generated bitter disputes over property rights with hacienda owners and members of the native nobility who had taken advantage of the long period of population decline to encroach on communal lands. The Andes had always been a cruel world, and from the 1740s onwards they were the scene of constant rural disturbances. 149

In 1776 a major administrative change provoked further disruption. Following the decision to create the viceroyalty of La Plata, Upper Peru (modern Bolivia) was detached from the Peruvian viceroyalty, and incorporated into the new viceroyalty, which was governed from Buenos Aires. Since the Potosi mines formed part of the transfer, this sharply reduced the viceregal revenues in Lima. It also had the effect of weakening the economy of the Cuzco region, now artificially divided from its traditional regional market of Upper Peru, which gravitated into the orbit of Buenos Aires. When the viceroyalty of La Plata was permitted to trade directly with Spain in 1778 as part of the crown's new `free trade' policy, Potosi's silver remittances to Cadiz were re-routed through Buenos Aires. Cuzco was thus deprived of its traditional source of silver supply, and its producers were left exposed to competition from cheap European goods introduced into the region by Buenos Aires merchants.''°

It was against this background of fiscal oppression and economic dislocation that Candorcanqui launched his challenge to the established order. The Jesuiteducated son of a cacique of Inca royal lineage, he had been fighting a long and frustrating battle in the Lima courts in the 1770s to establish his claims to recognition as the legitimate descendant of the last Inca, Tupac Amaru, executed after the capture of the Inca redoubt of Vilcabamba by Spanish troops in 1572. As a member of an Indian elite sufficiently well established and wealthy to interact on equal terms with people of Spanish origin, he made useful connections in Lima with creoles and mestizos who were critical of Areche and Spain's imperial policy. The Lima Gazette would have allowed him to follow the course of events in British North America, and he had a mestizo friend in Lima who had travelled in France, Spain and England. But his essential point of reference was the world of the Andes, and he seems to have been deeply influenced by his reading of the Inca Garcilaso's Royal Commentaries. The prologue to the second edition, published in 1723, included an Indian prophecy related by Sir Walter Raleigh that Inca rule would one day be re-established with help from the English."'

Smarting from his own personal experiences of Spanish injustice in Lima and his native Tinta, and fired by his reading of Garcilaso's evocation of the lost golden world of the Incas, Candorcanqui became a man with a mission. In November 1780, under the name of Tupac Amaru II, he called out the Andean peasantry in rebellion, and found a suitable symbolic victim in the oppressive corregidor of Tinta, Antonio de Arriaga, whom he seized and executed.

In proclaiming revolt, Tupac Amaru tapped into a rich vein of cultural pride and collective Andean consciousness, which looked for the creation, or re-creation, of a utopian social order under Inca rule. Prophecies clustered around the mystical numerals of the year 1777, creating expectations of the return of the Inca to restore order and harmony to a world purged of Spaniards.''' The outbreak of Pontiac's rebellion in North America had occurred in a similar climate of prediction and expectation, as the Delaware prophet Neolin urged his fellow Indians to turn their backs on the world of the whites. At the same time, Neolin's antiEuropean message, like the message now spreading through the Andes, bore the strong imprint of European religion. Its resort to Christian notions of sin, heaven and hell betrayed the growing religious syncretism of the Delaware Indians, a people whose exposure to Christianity did not begin to equal in length and intensity that of the population of the Andes, where the Catholic priest occupied a dominant position in village life, and extensive campaigns had been undertaken for the extirpation of idolatry..153