Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

by John H. Elliott

  Even in the still relatively small cities of British America, urban growth brought in its train an expanding underclass, whose existence gave rise to mounting civic concern.47 In Boston, where the problem of poverty emerged for the first time on a serious scale during the war of 1690-1713 - a war which created many war widows and fatherless children, and left seamen and carpenters jobless when it ended - a quarter of the population were living below the poverty line in 1740.48 This was a problem with which Spanish American towns had long been familiar. The insurrection in Mexico City in 1692 was an unpleasant reminder of what could happen when a large and ethnically diverse population, living at or below the poverty line in crowded tenement houses and insalubrious conditions, was suddenly confronted with sharp rises in the price of maize and wheat.49

  In the Hispanic world there was a well-established tradition of charitable giving, and the founding of convents and hospitals from the early years of settlement offered the possibility of relief for some at least of the poor and homeless. By the late seventeenth century, too, a network of municipal granaries had come into existence across the continent to hold down food prices and respond to sudden shortages. But the 1692 Mexico City riots were an indication that more drastic measures would be needed to tackle the problems of poverty, vagabondage and urban lawlessness, all of which increased as the cities of Spanish America expanded and hovels and shanties multiplied. During the eighteenth century both the imperial administration and municipal governments began to turn away from reliance on indiscriminate charity and move in the direction of more interventionist policies, confining the distribution of alms to the `deserving poor', and setting up institutions to confine the indigent.50

  The Protestant world of the North American colonies lacked the institutional safety net of religious foundations and charitable fraternities which offered a measure of relief in Spanish America to the needy and abandoned. Heirs to the ethos of Elizabethan England, the colonists regarded idleness as a major cause of poverty, and carried with them to America the harsh corrective traditions of the Elizabethan poor laws. Indeed, poor law legislation in Massachusetts was even harsher than its English original. Stern measures were taken to set the poor to work, and `warn out' unwanted paupers and exclude undesirable immigrants, especially the Scots-Irish, when shiploads of them began arriving in Boston in the second and third decades of the eighteenth century.5' Yet the colonists also brought with them from their homeland an appreciation that the care of the `impotent poor' was a communal responsibility. They devoted money, in increasing quantities, to poor relief. In Anglican Virginia, in particular, the costs of welfare rose dramatically in the early eighteenth century, and charitable grants and other relief measures placed a growing burden on the parishes.52

  While vestrymen and churchwardens struggled to keep pace with the increasing numbers of paupers, especially in the seaport towns, philanthropic associations sprang up to provide additional sources of relief.53 The responses to the problem of poverty in the Spanish and British colonial worlds did not therefore differ as much as their differing religious traditions might suggest. During the eighteenth century there appears to have been a growing convergence of attitudes to a common problem, as Spanish America, better endowed with religious and charitable foundations, moved in the direction of more interventionist and authoritarian measures, while British America, even if initially inclined to impute poverty to individual failings, displayed a growing awareness of the need to supplement restrictive legislation with communal and individual charity.

  It seems plausible to assume, however, that poverty was proportionately much more widespread and acute in the teeming urban world of Spain's American territories than in the far smaller coastal towns of the British mainland colonies. There was always the safety valve of an expanding agrarian frontier in the British colonies, offering space and opportunity to indigent immigrants prepared to try their luck. The poor of the overcrowded Spanish colonial cities had fewer possibilities for escaping and making new lives for themselves, in a world where so much land was concentrated in the hands of large lay and ecclesiastical landowners, or was reserved for the use of Indian communities.

  The chances of employment in the cities of the Spanish Indies depended on a demand for goods and services which was determined by the spending capacity and tendency to conspicuous consumption of relatively small urban elites. Although fine craftsmanship and the products of skilled labour were always in demand in the viceregal capitals and the great mining centres, the demand was liable to fluctuate with the fluctuations of a mining economy, and life remained precarious for an artisan class that displayed an amazing ethnic diversity. In contrast to British America, where guilds either failed to take root or were few and generally ineffectual in controlling the market,54 craft and trade associations developed early in Spanish America, and exercised considerable control over the regulation of wages and labour and the quality of the finished products. If these guilds, some of which admitted Indians as well as creoles, gave their members status in urban society, they also had the effect of restricting the range of possibilities open to skilled craftsmen who found themselves excluded. Guilds were not intended for mestizos and blacks.55

  Yet in this complex Hispanic American society, nothing was ever quite as it seemed, and the urban labour market was frequently less restricted than would appear at first sight. Guilds were less powerful in some towns than others, and even in the older cities, where guilds for the different trades and crafts had commonly sprung up during the sixteenth century, ambitious master artisans found ways of evading guild restrictions. It was open to those who could afford it, whether creole, Indian or free black, to purchase black slaves. Slave labour had the advantage of permitting a greater flexibility of working methods and was not subject to the usual guild restrictions on hours and conditions of employment. As a result, a number of trades, like building, came to depend heavily on their slave labour force.56

  Where British America provided numerous opportunities for immigrants with skills in what were described to William Moraley as the `useful trades', immigrants from the Iberian peninsula to the Spanish American viceroyalties were therefore liable to find that their dreams of a better life on the far side of the Atlantic were doomed to disappointment. There was already an ample supply of labour, both free and unfree, in the cities, and immigrants would find themselves competing for employment with creole, African and Indian artisans. Outside the cities, the natural growth of the population was reducing opportunities for securing employment and acquiring land. The Indian communities soon began to experience the impact of this population increase, as growing numbers of outsiders encroached on their communal lands in defiance of the law

  The Indians did their best to resist these encroachments and fought back with all the legal weapons at their disposal where they could.57 The legal rights they enjoyed, even if increasingly infringed, continued throughout the eighteenth century to maintain what amounted to internal frontiers in Spanish America. British America, too, had its frontiers, but these were primarily external, and under the pressure of a rapidly expanding settler population they were being relentlessly eroded.

  Moving frontiers

  As each new generation of settlers outnumbered the generation that preceded it and immigrants swarmed into the mainland colonies of British North America, the frontiers of settlement were constantly being pushed forward in the search for new land. But what constituted a frontier?58 Even in the Europe of the later seventeenth century, the concept of territorial demarcation through precisely defined linear boundaries was not yet fully established.59 Boundary lines in the Americas were correspondingly more obscure. Frontiers, whether between Europeans and Indians or between the colonial settlements of rival European states, were little more than ill-defined zones of interaction and conflict on contested ground.60 The assertions made on paper by mapmakers caught up in the work of imaginary colonization at the behest of European ministers were unlikely to bear much relation to America
n realities.61 These were determined by the colonists themselves, as they surged outwards from the old areas of settlement until checked by some geographical barrier, or by the presence of unsubmissive Indians or rival Europeans.

  The most formidable physical barrier to the westward expansion of the British colonies was the Allegheny Mountains, and it was only in the middle years of the eighteenth century, with the founding in 1747 of the Ohio Company of Virginia, that a serious attempt would be made to embark on projects for the settlement of the vast and unknown regions beyond the Alleghenies.62 This was `Indian Country', and no European colonial society on the North American continent could hope to exercise any form of control over the interior unless it drew on the support and co-operation of powerful groups among the competing Indian peoples who inhabited it.63

  The prize had for long been the fur trade of the Great Lakes region. Conflict over the control of this trade had pitted the Iroquois against Algonquian-speaking peoples and the French against the English, with corresponding combinations and permutations of political alliances. During the first half of the eighteenth century the French sought to hem in the English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, while forming a chain of trading settlements that would link Canada to their newly established colony of Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi. In the central decades of the eighteenth century, as the demand for agricultural land among the English colonists became greater than the demand for fur and hides,64 the frontiersmen had to contend not only with the physical barrier of the Alleghenies, but also with the alliance system put in place by the French. Westward expansion from the Middle Colonies could only be achieved by military victory over France and its Indian allies.

  Further north, the New Englanders, by crushing the Algonquian Indians in King Philip's War of 1675-6, had won for themselves more room for settlement, although the ending of the war also saw the drawing of firmer boundaries between English and Indian land.65 Conflict continued along the frontier areas until the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, when a temporary equilibrium was established between British America, French America and the Five Nations of an Iroquois Confederacy that had learnt from experience the advantages of neutrality.66 Calmer conditions during the three decades that followed the Treaty of Utrecht allowed New England settlers to flow westward in growing numbers towards the boundary lines. In this, they enjoyed more room for manoeuvre than their fellow colonists in New York. These found their hopes for expansion into the area of the Great Lakes blocked not only by the buffer territory of the Iroquois,67 but also by the unwillingness of the great New York proprietors to sell, rather than lease, portions of their land. The effect of this was to make land settlement and cultivation within the confines of the colony a relatively unattractive proposition for potential yeoman farmers.61

  The mass of new migrants - the Germans and the Scots-Irish - therefore tended to concentrate in the Middle and Southern Colonies, pressing westwards in Pennsylvania into Lancaster County and the Susquehanna River Valley, casting covetous eyes on the vast but still inaccessible expanses of the Ohio Country, which were claimed both by Pennsylvania and Virginia,6H and moving south-east from the Shenandoah towards the backcountry of North Carolina. Their arrival meant further displacements of indigenous tribal groupings, whose way of life had already been profoundly disturbed by the spread of English colonial settlements in the Carolinas in the 1670s and 1680s. As the colonists set Indian against Indian, and occupied new swathes of land, so the tensions multiplied. In 1711 the Tuscarora Indians struck back against the colonists of North Carolina; in 1715 it was the turn of the Yamasees of South Carolina. These had been military allies and trading partners of the English, whom they helped supply with the 50,000 or so deerskins that were now being exported to England each year.70 Their grievance was less over the occupation of their land than over the behaviour of the Carolina traders on their expeditions into the interior, where they carried off Indian poultry and pigs, exploited Indian carriers, and traded illegally in Indian slaves. In their exasperation the Yamasees launched a series of attacks on their former allies, and in the war that followed it looked for a moment as if the colony faced extinction. The eventual defeat and expulsion of the Yamasees opened up more land for settler occupation.

  The displacement and destruction of Indian tribal groupings generated an enormous volatility in the interior of the continent, precipitating mergers and alliances of enemies as well as friends, as the indigenous peoples struggled to hold on to their lands and hunting grounds in the face of growing European encroachment. Like the settler societies that had intruded upon them, the native American societies, too, were societies on the move. They responded to the dangers that faced them in different ways. The Iroquois resorted to diplomacy. They had negotiated the confederation of the Covenant Chain with the English colonists in 1677, and they played skilfully on Anglo-French rivalry to sustain their own territorial interests and extend their influence or hegemony over other Indian peoples in the West and the South (fig. 35).71 Other groups resettled well away from the intruders, or, like the remnants of the defeated Yamasees of South Carolina, changed sides. A generation earlier, the Yamasees had allied with the English to wipe out the Spanish mission province of Guale - `Wallie' to the English72 - on the Georgian coast. Now they moved south into Florida to seek the protection of their former Spanish enemies.73

  The upheavals created by European imperial rivalries and internal colonial pressures were not confined to the North American continent. Frontiers with the Indians grew up in South America wherever pacification or military conquest failed. The earliest and most obvious of these was the military frontier in southern Chile along the river Biobio, designed to keep the Araucanian Indians at bay. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries another Indian frontier emerged, this time in the Rio de la Plata region. Once horses crossed to the other side of the Andes in the late seventeenth century, mounted Pampas Indians, attracted by the livestock, became a serious threat to the growing number of stock-raising settlements, forcing the Spaniards to take defensive measures.74

  But in this region, and up much of the eastern side of the continent, the Spaniards also had European rivals to worry about. In an attempt to demarcate the respective spheres of interest of the crowns of Spain and Portugal, the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 had allotted to Spain all lands and islands in the Atlantic falling to the west of a line running 370 degrees west of the Cape Verde Islands, while those to the east of it went to Portugal. The land of `Brazil' found by Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500 thus fell automatically within Portugal's area of jurisdiction. Juridically speaking, the straight line drawn on a map made the frontier of Brazil the most clear-cut frontier in all the Americas, but nobody in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century had any accurate idea of where in practice Portuguese territory ended and the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru began.

  Although Portugal's overseas possessions legally kept their separate identities in the sixty years following the union of the crowns in 1580, the eastwards expansion of settlers from Peru and the westwards expansion of Portuguese and mixedrace colonists from the coastal settlements into the Brazilian interior brought convergence as well as conflict. By the mid-seventeenth century there would be many Castilian names among the inhabitants of Sao Paulo.75 But the frontier was also the setting for violent confrontation. As the Spanish Jesuits advanced their mission settlements eastwards from Asuncion, armed gangs of bandeirantes from Sao Paulo raided deep into mission territory to seize slaves for work on the landed estates of the Sao Paulo region and the sugar plantations of Pernambuco and Bahia. By the time Portugal recovered its independence in 1640 the Spanish crown had been forced to abandon its traditional Indian policy and consent to the arming of the Guarani Indians living in the Jesuit missions so that they would be in a position to defend themselves. By then, however, the Guaira missions, with their 10,000 remaining Indians, had been driven to relocate to a safer region east of the River Uruguay.76

  The ruthless depredation
s perpetrated by the Paulista bandeirantes checked the process of Spanish expansion from Asuncion, clearing the way for eventual occupation of the disputed territory by settlers from Brazil. The Spaniards, for their part, founded Montevideo, at the mouth of the River Plate, in 1714, as a base from which to extend their control over the hinterland and check the southward expansion of the Portuguese." In the following decades the Spanish-Portuguese frontier remained a still undefined and shifting zone of conflict and commercial interchange, with a shrinking indigenous population caught in the middle.

  Some peoples, like the Pampas Indians of the Rio de la Plata region, were more effective than others at keeping the Europeans at bay. When the Jesuits sought to complete their ring of missions round Portuguese territory by establishing themselves on the Upper Orinoco, they were compelled to withdraw after their missions were attacked and destroyed by Guayana Caribs in 1684. Along with other religious orders they moved back again into the Orinoco region in the 1730s. This time the forward movement of the missions was backed up by a support system of Spanish civil settlements and a line of fortifications. But even then their situation remained precarious in the face of an alliance between the Caribs and the Dutch, who had begun settling in Guayana in the later seventeenth century. The Caribs, like the Iroquois, had learnt to play the European game .71

  At the Treaty of Madrid of 1750 Spanish and Portuguese ministers and mapmakers made an effort to define Brazil's borders all the way from the Orinoco basin in the north to the ranching region of the Banda Oriental, the eastern edge of the Rio de la Plata estuary, in the extreme south-east. Except where concessions were mutually agreed, each party was to retain possession of territory already occupied. This effectively relegated the line drawn at Tordesillas to the realm of myth. Instead of a geometrical abstraction, natural boundaries were now sought wherever possible. These followed the contours of the Brazilian river system, as politicians turned to geography rather than astronomy to determine frontier lines.