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

by John H. Elliott

  Among those predators, although not initially in the forefront, were the English. Through a combination of choice and necessity, theirs was a smaller vessel, and easier to manoeuvre. Elizabethan and Stuart Englishmen also possessed the incalculable advantage of being able to take Spain first as a model, and then as a warning. If they sought initially to replicate Spanish methods and achievements, the very different nature of the American environment in which they found themselves, together with the transformations in English society and the English polity brought about by the Protestant Reformation and by changes in contemporary conceptions of national power and wealth, set them on their own distinctive course.

  That course, which was the result of a multitude of individual and local decisions rather than of a centrally directed imperial strategy, led to the creation of a number of colonial societies that differed markedly from each other, although they came to share certain fundamental features. Among the most important of these were representative assemblies, and the acceptance, often grudging, of a plurality of faiths and creeds. As the Dutch Republic had already shown, and as seventeenth-century England came to discover, the combination of political consent and religious tolerance proved to be a successful formula for unlocking the door to economic growth. Shielded by Britain's growing military and naval power, the mainland American colonies confirmed once again the effectiveness of the formula as they moved in the eighteenth century at an accelerating pace towards demographic and territorial expansion, and rising productivity.

  The visibly increasing prosperity of its colonies offered an obvious inducement to eighteenth-century Britain to capitalize more effectively on the expected benefits of empire. While the mother country had always looked on the American colonies as a potentially valuable source of products that could not be grown at home, it became increasingly apparent that Britain was spending more money on colonial administration and defence than it obtained in return. Adam Smith expressed the dilemma nicely when he wrote in 1776:

  The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire ... If the project cannot be completed, it ought to be given up. If any of the provinces of the British empire cannot be made to contribute towards the support of the whole empire, it is surely time that Great Britain should free herself from the expence of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace, and endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.6

  Modern attempts at cost-benefit analysis tend to bear out Smith's perception. Although the colonies provided a rapidly expanding market for eighteenthcentury Britain's industrial output, and the ratio of costs to benefits fluctuated over time, current estimates suggest that in the period just before the American Revolution, the thirteen mainland colonies, and possibly also the British West Indies, brought `no significant, if any, positive benefits to Britain'.7 The calculation, restricted purely to what can be measured and quantified, naturally leaves out of account such imponderables as the contribution of its American colonies to Great Britain's international power and prestige, and the range of alternative possibilities open to the British economy if there had been no American empire.

  To appearances, at least, the ratio of costs to benefits for Spain was substantially more favourable. The massive silver resources of New Spain and Peru enabled it over the course of three centuries not only to cover the expenses of American administration and defence, but also to ship regular remittances to Seville or Cadiz that amounted to some 15-20 per cent of the crown's annual revenues in the reign of Charles III, just as in the reign of Philip II two centuries before. Spanish America, therefore, unlike British America, was self-sustaining, and did not of itself constitute a drain on the Castilian tax-payer.'

  This, however, should not obscure the enormous costs and consequences to metropolitan Spain arising from its possession of a silver-rich American empire.' While bullion from the Indies sustained the international position of the Spanish Monarchy between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries as the dominant power in the western world, it also encouraged the Spanish crown and Castilian society to live consistently beyond their means. Imperial ambition consistently outran imperial resources, and it was this situation that the Bourbons hoped to correct when they embarked on their programme of reforms. These were at least partially successful in that the increased income from America allowed the Spanish treasury to keep pace over some three decades with the escalating costs of maintaining the country's great power status. At a time when France and Britain were faced with a rapidly mounting public debt, Spanish public finances avoided running serious deficits during the reign of Charles III (1759-88), thanks to the enormous contributions made by the treasuries of New Spain and Peru. Even these, however, proved insufficient in the end. Solvency dwindled and disappeared under the pressures of almost constant warfare in the years after 1790.0

  While regular injections of American silver served to keep Spanish royal finances afloat, over the long term the benefits of Spain's empire of the Indies accrued more to Europe in general than to the mother country. The initial stimulus given to the Castilian economy by the conquest and colonization of America tended to diminish as Castilian products lost their competitiveness in international markets as a consequence of inflationary pressures which can be at least partially attributed to the influx of American silver.i" Although America continued to generate some incentives to Spanish economic growth, it failed to propel the metropolitan economy forward, partly because so many of the profits of empire were devoted to sustaining foreign and dynastic policies that were inimical, or largely unfavourable, to development of the domestic economy. These policies in turn reinforced traditional social and political institutions and structures, thus reducing Spain's capacity for innovating change.

  Unable to make effective use of the rewards of empire in ways that would enhance national productivity, Spain also saw those rewards slip from its grasp. `There is nothing more common', wrote a British historian of Spain's American empire in 1741, `than to hear Spain compared to a sieve, which, whatever it receives, is never the fuller.'12 The silver of the Indies poured through the sieve as Spanish consumers used it to finance their purchase of foreign luxuries, and the crown deployed it to fund its foreign wars. With Spain's domestic economy incapable of supplying the goods required by an expanding colonial market, the shortfall was made up by foreign manufactures that were either shipped in the fleets departing annually from Seville or Cadiz, or were smuggled directly into Spain's American territories in a massive international contraband operation that no amount of mercantilist legislation could prevent or control. The silver that, in consequence, fell through the meshes of the Spanish sieve flowed into the economies of Europe and Asia, generating in the process an international monetary system whose development did much to facilitate the global expansion of trade.13

  Spain's American empire, however, was much more than simply a mechanism for extracting and exporting the precious metals that would replenish royal coffers and sustain global commerce. It also represented a conscious, coherent and - at least in theory - centrally controlled attempt to incorporate and integrate the newly discovered lands into the King of Spain's dominions. This involved Christianizing and reducing to European norms their indigenous peoples, harnessing their labour and skills to meet imperial requirements, and establishing on the farther side of the Atlantic new societies made up of conquerors and conquered that would be authentic extensions of the mother country and replicate its values and ideals.

  Inevitably, this grand imperial design could only be realized in part. There were too many differences between the American environment and the more familiar environment of Europe; too many conflicting interests were invo
lved in the enterprise to ensure the coherent application of a unified policy; and the presence of so many indigenous survivors of the pre-conquest societies inevitably shaped the character of the successor societies in ways that proved disconcerting to peninsular Spaniards, who were alarmed by the rise of racially and culturally mixed populations through the mingling of the blood of the conquerors with that of the conquered. Added to this was the importation of large numbers of Africans. The outcome of all this mingling was the creation of societies composed, as Crevecoeur disparagingly noted, `of such a variety of castes and shades, as never before were exhibited on any part of the earth'.

  Given the scale and complexity of the challenges that faced them, it is surprising that the Spaniards realized as much of their imperial dream as they did. By violence and example they managed to Christianize and hispanicize large sections of the indigenous population to a degree that may not have satisfied their own expectations, but left a decisive and lasting imprint on indigenous beliefs and practices. They established the institutions of an American empire that lasted for 300 years, and - at enormous cost to their indigenous subjects and an imported African labour force - they reshaped the economies of the subjugated lands into patterns tailored to meet European requirements. This won for them a regular surplus for export to Europe while simultaneously creating the conditions that permitted the development of a distinctive and culturally creative urban-based civilization in their American possessions.

  This civilization, of increasing ethnic complexity with each passing generation, was given coherence by the common institutions of church and state, a common religion and language, the presence of an elite of Spanish descent, and a set of underlying assumptions about the working of the political and social order that had been reformulated and articulated in the sixteenth century by Spanish neo- scholastics.14 Their organic conception of a divinely ordained society dedicated to the achievement of the common good was inclusive rather than exclusive in approach. As a result, the indigenous peoples of Spanish America were given at least a limited space of their own in the new political and social order. By seizing such religious, legal and institutional opportunities as were afforded them, individuals and communities succeeded in establishing rights, affirming identities, and fashioning for themselves a new cultural universe on the ruins of the universe that had been shattered beyond recall in the trauma of European conquest and occupation.

  After an uneasy period of cohabitation, the English settlers, faced with sparser indigenous populations which did not lend themselves so readily to mobilization as a labour force, chose instead to adopt an exclusionary rather than an inclusive approach, along the lines already established in Ireland. Their Indians, unlike those of the Spaniards, were shunted to the margins of the new colonial societies, or were expelled beyond their borders. When the colonists followed the Iberian example and turned to imported Africans to meet their labour needs, the space accorded their slaves by law and religion was even more limited than it was in Spanish America.

  Although their refusal to include Indians and Africans within the boundaries of their imagined communities would store up a terrible legacy for future generations, it also gave the English colonists more freedom of manoeuvre to make reality conform to the constructs of their imagination. Without the impulsion to integrate the indigenous population into the new colonial societies, there was less need for the compromises that their Spanish American counterparts found themselves compelled to accept. Similarly, there was less need for the external mechanisms of control through imperial government adopted by the Spaniards in order to bring stability and social cohesion to racially mixed societies.

  The latitude allowed by the British crown to the transatlantic communities to live their lives largely free of external restraints reflected the absence on the northern American mainland of the imperatives provided by the existence of mineral wealth and large indigenous populations that prompted the Spanish crown to adopt its interventionist policies. It also reflected the changing balance of political and social forces in Stuart England. The comparative weakness of the Stuarts gave free rein to groups of English men and women to establish themselves more or less as they wished on the farther shores of the Atlantic, with only sporadic and relatively ineffectual interference by the imperial government. As a result, eighteenth-century Britain woke up belatedly to discover that, in Adam Smith's words, its American empire had `existed in imagination only'.

  Imperial weakness, if measured by the failure of the British state to appropriate more of the wealth generated by the colonial societies and to intervene more effectively in the management of their domestic affairs, proved to be a source of long-term strength for those societies themselves. They were left to make their own way in the world, and to develop their own mechanisms for survival. This gave them resilience in the face of adversity, and a growing confidence in their capacity to shape their own institutions and cultural patterns in the ways best suited to their own particular needs. Since the motives for the foundation of distinctive colonies varied, and since they were created at different times and in different environments over the span of more than a century, there were wide variations in the responses they adopted and in the character their societies assumed. This diversity enriched them all.

  Yet, for all their diversity, the colonies also had many features in common. These did not, however, derive, as in Spain's American empire, from the imposition by the imperial government of uniform administrative and judicial structures and a uniform religion, but from a shared political and legal culture which gave a high priority to the right of political representation and to a set of liberties protected by the Common Law The possession of this culture set them on the path that led to the development of societies based on the principles of consent and the sanctity of individual rights. In the crisis years of the 1760s and 1770s this shared libertarian political culture proved sufficiently strong to rally them in defence of a common cause. In uniting to defend their English liberties, the colonies ensured the continuation of the creative pluralism that had characterized their existence from the start.

  Yet the story could have been very different. If Henry VII had been willing to sponsor Columbus's first voyage, and if an expeditionary force of West Countrymen had conquered Mexico for Henry VIII, it is possible to imagine an alternative, and by no means implausible, script: a massive increase in the wealth of the English crown as growing quantities of American silver flowed into the royal coffers; the development of a coherent imperial strategy to exploit the resources of the New World; the creation of an imperial bureaucracy to govern the settler societies and their subjugated populations; the declining influence of parliament in national life, and the establishment of an absolutist English monarchy financed by the silver of America.15

  As it happened, matters turned out otherwise. The conqueror of Mexico showed himself to be a loyal servant of the King of Castile, not the King of England, and it was an English, not a Spanish, trading company that commissioned an ex-privateer to found his country's first colony on the North American mainland. Behind the cultural values and the economic and social imperatives that shaped the British and Spanish empires of the Atlantic world lay a host of personal choices and the unpredictable consequences of unforeseen events.

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Introduction. Worlds Overseas

  1. Cited by Carla Rahn Phillips, Life at Sea in the Sixteenth Century. The Landlubber's Lament of Eugenio de Salazar (The James Ford Bell Lectures, no. 24, University of Minnesota, 1987), p. 21.

  2. For numbers of emigrants, see Ida Altman and James Horn (eds.), `To Make America'. European Emigration in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1991), p. 3.

  3. Enrique Otte, Cartas privadas de emigrantes a Indias, 1540-1616 (Seville, 1988), letter 73. For life at sea on the Spanish Atlantic see Pablo E. Perez-Mallaina, Spain's Men of the Sea. Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century (Baltimore and London, 1998).


  4. Cited in David Cressy, Coming Over. Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), p. 157.

  5. See Daniel Vickers, `Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America', WMQ, 3rd set., 47 (1990), pp. 3-29.

  6. For the cognitive problems facing Early Modern Europeans in America, see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (revised edn, Cambridge, 1986), especially the Introduction and ch. 1.

  7. David Hume, Essays. Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford, 1963), p. 210.

  8. See Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World. The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh, 1973).

  9. Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies (New York, 1964), p. 3.

  10. Turner first advanced his hypothesis in his 1893 lecture to the American Historical Association on `The Significance of the Frontier in American History' (reprinted in Frontier and Section. Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1961)).

  11. For a summary of the criticisms, see Ray Allen Billington, `The American Frontier', in Paul Bohannen and Fred Plog (eds), Beyond the Frontier. Social Process and Cultural Change (Garden City, NY11967), pp. 3-24.

  12. See, for Latin America, Alistair Hennessy, The Frontier in Latin American History (Albuquerque, NM, 1978), and Francisco de Solano and Salvador Bernabeu (eds), Estudios (nuevos y viejos) sobre la frontera (Madrid, 1991).

  13. Herbert E. Bolton, `The Epic of Greater America', reprinted in his Wider Horizons of American History (New York, 1939; repr. Notre Dame, IL, 1967). See also Lewis Hanke (ed.), Do the Americas Have a Common History? (New York, 1964), and J. H. Elliott, Do the Americas Have a Common History? An Address (The John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, 1998).