The priority placed on the production of silver, however, and its overwhelming preponderance in the export trade, gave silver mining a disproportionate influence over other types of economic activity in the two viceroyalties. Its also tended to concentrate wealth in very few hands, with spectacular fortunes being made, and lost. Elites able to tap in to the various stages of silver extraction and export were avid consumers of luxury goods imported from Europe and from Asia by way of the Philippines trade. The extractive economies of New Spain and Peru were therefore in some respects comparable to the plantation economies of the British Caribbean and the southern mainland colonies, where the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small class of planters encouraged the consumption of foreign luxuries and militated against the expansion of a home market because the mass of the population lived in poverty.9
The analogy, however, is not perfect, since, unlike sugar or tobacco, silver - unless it all went directly for export - was the instrument for monetizing colonial economies, generating new activity in the process as it passed from hand to hand.10 Unfortunately it is impossible to determine the quantity of silver retained in Spanish America instead of being exported, but it may have been as much as half.'1 In addition to the portion held back after minting to meet the requirements of domestic commerce, there was a continuous unauthorized seepage of minted and unminted silver into the local economies. This silver energized the internal trade circuits of Spain's American empire; and although part of it went to the Spanish crown in payment of dues and taxes, or was siphoned off to Europe and Asia for the purchase of imports, enough remained to finance the church building and the urban improvements of the eighteenth century, which gave visitors their impression of opulence and growing prosperity."
Growth and development were visible, too, in the eastern regions of Spanish America, away from the extractive economies of New Spain and Peru, but increasingly locked into the Atlantic economy. Cacao from Venezuela and hides from the La Plata region were being exported to Europe in growing quantities. This in turn brought a new prosperity and population growth to Caracas and to Buenos Aires, which was already benefiting from its position on the silver conduit running from the mines of Peru.13 Yet for all the signs of economic progress and social change in Spanish America over the first half of the eighteenth century, a contemporary visitor returning to both Americas after a prolonged absence would probably have found them less startling than the transformation of British America during the same period.
This was hardly surprising. The British colonies had been settled much later than the Spanish, and several of them were still struggling to become viable communities when the eighteenth century began. New colonies had been settled in the closing decades of the preceding century. The colonization of Carolina began with the founding of Charles Town - uncomfortably close to the Franciscan missions of Spanish Florida - by planters from Barbados in 1670.14 Carolina's northern province, Albermarle County, which had been settled from Virginia, emerged as a distinct entity under the name of North Carolina in 1691. The Delaware counties broke off from the proprietary colony of Pennsylvania, founded in the 1680s, to form a colony of their own in 1702. Georgia, the last of the pre-revolutionary thirteen mainland colonies, would only begin to be settled in the 1730s.
Traditionally, the founding of new colonies in British America had been a response to political, religious or economic pressures in the mother country. But, as the foundation of North Carolina suggested, local American circumstances were now beginning to play an important part in a process hitherto largely governed by metropolitan preoccupations. The most powerful of these local circumstances was land hunger. From the later seventeenth century the population of British America was rising dramatically, and its rapid growth would generate powerful new pressures affecting every aspect of eighteenth-century colonial life. Population increase was partly the consequence of natural growth on a scale that was spectacular by contemporary European standards, and partly of the influx of white immigrants and African slave labour."
Between 1660 and 1780 the total population of the mainland colonies grew annually at a rate of 3 per cent.16 A combined white and black population for all the American colonies of some 145,000 in 1660 and 500,000 in 1710, increased to nearly 2 million by 1760. Of these 2 million, some 646,000 were black, almost half of them working on the Caribbean plantations.'7
Natural increase accounted for anything from two-thirds to three-quarters of this spectacular population growth. The eighteenth-century North American mainland was relatively free of the periodic harvest failures which brought famine to Europe. Fertility rates were high, and infant mortality rates far lower than in Europe. Much of the population, too, enjoyed the benefits of reasonable conditions of peace and security for a good part of the period." There were, however, wide regional variations in the rate and degree of population increase. The average annual rate of growth on the mainland was twice that on the islands. Of the mainland colonies, the Chesapeake settlements outpaced New England's 2.4 per cent, while the Lower South registered 4.3 per cent.19
The statistics of increase were pushed up by immigration, both voluntary and involuntary. It is estimated that some 250,000 men, women and children arrived in the English mainland colonies from overseas between 1690 and 1750. Of these perhaps 140,000 were black slaves, transported either from Africa or from the Caribbean plantations. The reproductive rate of the slave population settled on the mainland was significantly above that in the Caribbean islands, where mortality rates were higher, and the fertility rate lower, for reasons that still have to be fully explained.20
Forced removal to America was not restricted exclusively to blacks. Some 50,000 of the English immigrants to eighteenth-century America were convicts, following the passage of a new law in 1718 providing for their systematic transportation overseas. Most of these involuntary immigrants were shipped in chains to three colonies - Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia - under conditions little better than those aboard the African slave-ships.2' As far as voluntary emigration from England was concerned, this was substantially less in the eighteenth than the seventeenth century. With an expanding economy taking up some of the slack in the population at home, it was now the skilled, rather than the desperate, who were leaving for America. They did so in search of the higher wages and wider opportunities offered by a rapidly expanding market for skilled labour in the colonies. Some skills, however, were in more demand than others. William Moraley, a spendthrift from Newcastle who ran into difficulties at home and took sail for the colonies in 1729 as an indentured servant, was warned - correctly - that watchmaking, in which he had been trained, was `of little Service to the Americans', and that the `useful trades' in the colonies were `Bricklayers, Shoemakers, Barbers, Carpenters, Joiners, Weavers, Bakers, Tanners, and Husbandmen more useful than all the rest 1.22
If English and Welsh immigration was less intense than in the preceding century - under 100,000 in the period 1700-80, as compared with 350,000 in the seventeenth century 23 this was to some extent offset by the growing number of Scots and ScotsIrish immigrants. Somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 Scots-Irish arrived before 1760, and many more would follow in the succeeding decades, driven overseas by population pressure and the lack of employment opportunities at home .21 To these Celtic immigrants were added swelling numbers of immigrants from continental Europe, whose presence added new and variegated pieces to the mosaic of peoples which British American colonial society was in process of becoming. Besides Huguenot refugees fleeing the France of Louis XIV, a tide of Germanspeaking immigrants - more than 100,000 by 1783 - streamed into the country, driven from the Rhineland and other regions of Germany by hardship or political instability, or attracted by glowing reports of the success of the Pennsylvania Quakers in creating space for religious minorities to live their own lives .2-5
The majority of these German immigrants landed in Philadelphia. Some moved onwards, but many remained in Pennsylvania, where they found themselves in wha
t William Moraley described as `the best poor Man's Country in the World', borrowing a phrase that seems already to have been in common usage.26 The Middle and Southern colonies in particular were embarking in the eighteenth century on a dramatic phase of expansion, but everywhere through mainland America the buoyancy of the British Atlantic economy was creating opportunities for a new, and better, life.
There was nothing comparable in the Hispanic world to this massive movement of white immigrants into British North America during the first half of the eighteenth century, not least because of the crown's continuing formal prohibition on non-Spanish immigration, although a number of Irish and other foreign Catholics had been allowed to settle in the Indies during the seventeenth century, and officials showed a growing disposition in the eighteenth to relax the rules. A steady stream of Spaniards, however, continued to migrate, although apparently it flowed less strongly than in earlier times.27 As with British emigration in the eighteenth century, new tributaries were joining this stream. Just as, as in the eighteenth century, the British periphery was producing a growing share of the total number of white immigrants, so too the Spanish periphery was playing a larger part than before. During the seventeenth century increasing numbers of Basques, in particular, had joined the Castilians, Andalusians and Extremadurans who had preponderated in the first century of colonization. Eighteenth-century emigration saw the increased representation of immigrants from the northern regions of the peninsula - not only Basques but also Galicians, Asturians and Castilians from the mountain region of Cantabria - together with Catalans and Valencians, from the east coast of Spain.21
Some at least of this new wave of immigration from the periphery was encouraged and assisted by the Spanish crown. As the borders of Spain's American empire were pushed forward in the eighteenth century to counter the encroaching presence of the English and the French, great open spaces had somehow to be filled. There was little enthusiasm in Spain for migration to these remote outposts of empire, and successive governors of an underpopulated and ill-defended Florida begged Madrid to send them colonists. The crown responded by offering free transportation and other facilities to peasants from Galicia and the Canary Islands. The Galicians, clinging to their small parcels of land at home, were reluctant to be uprooted, but the crown enjoyed greater success with the Canary Islanders, whose tradition of emigration to America reached back to the earliest years of colonization. From the 1670s, as the population of the Canaries approached saturation point, islanders began to emigrate in significant numbers, in particular to Venezuela, with which the islands had maintained their connection since Cumana was conquered in the sixteenth century.29
The Canary Islanders tended to emigrate in family groups, and a number of families were resettled in the 1750s in St Augustine, the principal town of Florida. A small contingent of islanders had earlier been despatched to another distant outpost, San Antonio in Texas. The numbers of these government-sponsored immigrants, however, remained disappointingly few. As so often, Spanish bureaucracy proved the graveyard of good intentions."
Apart from the Spanish crown's policy of excluding the nationals of other European countries, there were good reasons why its transatlantic possessions should have proved less of a magnet to potential emigrants in the eighteenth century than those of the British crown. Although the population of Spain was growing again - from 7.5 million in 1717 to rather over 9 million in 176831 - it would take time to make up for the catastrophic losses of the seventeenth century, and especially those experienced in the realms comprising the Crown of Castile. Growth was stronger on the Spanish periphery than at the centre, and in so far as emigration was a response to population pressure at home, it was in the peripheral regions that the pressure was most likely to be felt.
In spite of new signs of economic vitality in many parts of Spanish America, the opportunities it offered for an immigrant population at this stage of its development are likely to have been less than those awaiting immigrants to the British colonies. As in British America, the import of African slaves - much of it in the hands of British merchants following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 - ensured a steady supply of labour for the haciendas and plantations. One reckoning of the number of Africans imported into Spain's American dominions between 1651 and 1760 puts the figure as high as 344,000.32 Growing numbers of slaves were needed to provide labour for territories on the fringes of empire, like New Granada, whose combined gold-mining and agricultural economy had become dependent on Africans to supplement a rapidly dwindling Indian population .31 in the cacao-growing province of Caracas in Venezuela black slavery was the predominant form of labour during the boom years which stretched from the 1670s to the 1740s.34 Another outpost of empire, Cuba, had a slave population of some 30,000 to 40,000 by the mid-eighteenth century. The mass importation of slaves into the island only began in the years after the brief British occupation of Havana in 1762, and was a response to the dramatic spread of the sugar plantations as sugar overtook hides and tobacco as Cuba's principal export.35
While the import of black slaves helped to meet local demands for unskilled labour in regions where indigenous labour was non-existent or in short supply, the older-established areas of Spanish settlement on the American mainland were less dependent on external sources of skilled labour than the majority of the British mainland colonies. As in British America, the eighteenth century was an age of population growth, and increasing numbers of Indians, mestizos and free blacks helped to swell an artisan class catering for an urban demand that was expanding, but was still limited by the poverty of all but a small elite.36
In the viceroyalty of New Spain, in particular, the total population showed a marked increase, from some 1.5 million in 1650 to 2.5-3 million a hundred years later - a figure larger than that of the total population of all the British American colonies combined.37 Across Spanish America, however, there were wide regional variations in the rate and extent of growth, just as there were also wide ethnic variations between the increase in the numbers of creoles and mestizos on the one hand, and Indians on the other. The Indian population of Peru, and still more of New Spain, was beginning to recover in the middle or later decades of the seventeenth century from the cataclysm that had overtaken it in the aftermath of conquest and colonization, but the recovery, while strengthening, continued to be fragile. In spite of improved resistance to European diseases, Indians remained vulnerable to waves of epidemics, like the one that ravaged the central Andes in 1719-20 or the typhoid fever that hit central Mexico in 1737. Indian mortality rates - and especially child mortality rates38 - remained significantly higher than those of the white and mestizo population. The recovery, too, would falter in the later eighteenth century in areas where the food supply was unable to keep pace with population increase.39
The creole population was also increasing. In Chile, where the Indian population continued its decline until it constituted under 10 per cent of the total population by the late eighteenth century, the creole community was growing at the rate of 1 per cent a year in the first half of the century, and the pace of growth would accelerate as the century proceeded.40 The figures for creole demographic increase were certainly assisted by the inclusion of those who, although not of pure Spanish descent, managed to pass themselves off as white. The most marked feature of eighteenth-century Spanish American life, however, was the rapid growth of the mixed population of castas.41 Its results were everywhere apparent, although less, for instance, in Chile than in New Granada, whose population by 1780 was 46 per cent mestizo, 20 per cent Indian, 8 per cent black, and 26 per cent `white' (creole and peninsular Spaniard). Creoles, for their part, constituted no more than 9 per cent of the total population of New Spain in the 1740s, although this rose to 18-20 per cent (no doubt including many mestizos) around 1800. In Peru in the 1790s 13 per cent of the population was creole, as against some 76 per cent in Chile.42 New Granada society was consequently more fluid than that of Andean Peru or the heavily settled regions of New Spain, where
Indians accounted for 60 per cent or more of the population, and where the two `republics' of Spaniards and Indians continued to enjoy more than a purely nominal existence, at least outside the cities.43 Yet in New Spain and Peru, even if to a lesser extent than in New Granada, the growth of an ethnically mixed population was also changing the character of society and unleashing new forces which would sooner or later undermine traditional distinctions and erode Indian communities that had hitherto preserved a fair measure of integrity and autonomy.
One important consequence of eighteenth-century population growth throughout the Americas was an increase in the size of urban populations in both the British and the Hispanic colonial societies. Estimates suggest that the population of the five leading cities of mainland North America rose in the period 1720 to 1740 from between 29 per cent for Boston to 57 per cent for New York and 94 per cent for Charles Town. While this increase was impressive, these remained very small urban populations when compared with those of some of the major cities of the Spanish American world.44
1742 (to nearest thousand) 16,000 Boston 13,000 Philadelphia 11,000 New York 7,000 Charles Town Newport 6,000 1740s to 1760s (to nearest thousand) 112,000 Mexico City Lima 52,000 Havana 36,000 30,000 Quito 26,000 Cuzco 25,000 Santiago de Chile 19,000 Santa Fe de Bogota 19,000 Caracas 12,000 Buenos Aires
The growth of cities did not in itself mean a progressive urbanization of society. Indeed, as the population grew and spread outwards to cultivate new areas of land, so the proportion of town-dwellers in British America tended to decline. Even on the eve of independence, only 7-8 per cent of the mainland population lived in towns of more than 2,500 inhabitants.45 In Spanish America, too, population growth also seems to have led to a fall in the urban share of the population. With an estimated 13 per cent living in cities of 20,000 inhabitants or more in 1750, however, it was far above the North American percentage, and in line with European levels, although the cities of Spanish America were far more thinly distributed over space than their European counterparts.46
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Page 44
