After 1714 Spain experienced a gradual economic recovery, which became quite marked in the second half of the 18th century. It is doubtful that much of this revival was the work of conscious but often confused government policy. Thus, the famous decree (1783) “ennobling” the mechanical trades had little practical result; the attempt to establish government factories and replace religious charity by the productive employment of the poor was a relative failure. Government policy had little to do with the growth of population, which rose during the century from 8 million to 12 million. The increased demand for food and the consequent sharp rise in prices encouraged agriculture, benefiting the large landowners of the south and the small farmers near growing towns such as Barcelona. The most remarkable feature of this economic revival was the emergence in Catalonia after 1745 of a modern cotton-based textile industry. The industry benefited from a protected market in Spain and the colonies. In the Basque provinces the archaic iron industry began a slow process of modernization. In Galicia, Catalan immigrants established a flourishing fishing fleet. The brandy trade brought sudden prosperity to the ports of Catalonia and their hinterland. Nevertheless, government actions of earlier years, such as financial reforms and the abolition of internal customs duties, removed obstacles to the expansion of the internal market, and the opening of the American trade acted as a strong stimulant.
Most of these developments occurred not in the old Castilian core of the monarchy but in the peripheral regions and in the towns rather than in the countryside. Price rises were steepest on the periphery; in Barcelona, for example, they outstripped wages and thus created the beginnings of a social problem. The role of Catalans in the economic revival lies at the origins of the Castilian stereotype of the Catalans as selfish, thrusting businessmen, indifferent to traditional values and exploiting their fellow Spaniards. Imperial problems
Charles III maintained that the key to Spain’s prosperity lay in the development of an American market in the Indies. He saw clearly that Spain alone could not preserve an overseas market closed to the outside world against Britain. Ricardo Wall’s policy of strict neutrality had allowed Britain to make gains in Canada that were bound to weaken France—the only other anti-British power in America. If Britain would respect Spain’s possessions, or if Charles could mediate between France and Britain in such a way as to preserve the balance between them in America, then to commit Spain to the French alliance was a dynastic luxury. Once it was clear to Charles that British terms were nonnegotiable, then the Bourbon Family Compact of 1761, a mutual-defense treaty with France, was a piece of realpolitik, signed by the “Anglophile” Ricardo Wall.
The consequence of such an alliance was involvement in the Seven Years’ War—too late to save France. In 1762 the British occupied Havana—the greatest single blow sustained by Spain in the war. Spain theoretically allowed no foreigners to share directly in the colonial trade, the effect of which was to starve the colonies of necessary imports and to encourage smuggling. In 1762, 15 ships entered the port of Havana; during the 11 months of British occupation, 700 did. This was a dramatic indication to the colonists of the drawbacks of the Spanish monopoly, especially when that monopoly was exercised by what was, in European terms, an underdeveloped country.
The Treaty of Paris (1763) concluded the Seven Years’ War and destroyed France as an American power. Spain lost the territory between Florida and the Mississippi, in return gaining Louisiana from France. Spain also had to recognize Portuguese advances in the Río de la Plata (the fort of Sacramento) and the British right to cut mahogany in Central America. The Family Compact was therefore an immediate military failure, and it was only the revolt of the North American colonies against Britain that enabled Spain to recover the ground it had lost; the successful alliance with France to aid the colonists resulted in the Treaty of Versailles (1783), which gave back Sacramento, the two Floridas, and Minorca. Not until later did it become apparent that an alliance of revenge with colonial insurgents was a shortsighted policy for an imperial power.
Driven by fears of British and Russian expansion, Spain also undertook a more aggressive policy in the far north of its American possessions: California, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. These were reorganized into a single administrative unit, the Internal Provinces, under a unified military command. A string of missions was established in California to assert Spanish control.
The problems of imperial defense were thus temporarily solved by British weakness after 1765. The positive side of Charles III’s imperial policy was an attempt to create an efficiently administered colonial empire that would provide the crown with increased revenues and with a closed market for the exports of an expanding Spanish economy, a program known as the “Bourbon Reforms.”
The rationalization of the administration of the Indies had started before Charles III with the creation of a new viceroyalty at Santa Fé de Bogotá (present-day Colombia) in 1717. To protect the south against the British and against Portuguese incursions from Brazil, the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was created in 1776. The centrepiece of Caroline reform was the introduction of the intendant system in the colonies to tighten up local administration. Most dramatic of all was the abolition of the monopoly of Cadiz, by which all trade to the colonies had to go through that port. Beginning in 1778, non-Castilian ports could trade directly with the colonies.
The new policies brought some immediate and striking results. Energetic viceroys and ministers and ruthless intendants doubled or tripled imperial revenues. The volume of Spanish goods in the American trade increased 10-fold in 10 years, prompting British concern at the Spanish revival. But imperial free trade would not satisfy the growing demand from Creole producers for free trade with all nations. Nor did the colonial oligarchs desire efficient government and higher taxation; they preferred bad government that let them control their own affairs. They showed their discontent in a series of revolts in the 1780s; only the fear of the native Indians drove them back to allegiance to the Spanish crown. Domestic reforms
The domestic reforms of Charles III are more interesting for what they intended than for what they accomplished. They were not, as has often been maintained, directed at fostering a “bourgeois revolution.” The middle classes were too weak, in a predominantly agrarian country, for the role of a modernizing elite; nor did Charles III contemplate a frontal attack on the traditional nobility. The purpose of reform was to remove what seemed to civil servants to be “traditional” constrictions on economic growth and administrative anachronisms that prevented the efficient exercise of royal power. The reformers’ view of the inadequacy of the existing system was well expressed by Pablo de Olavide, an active administrator who would later fall afoul of the Inquisition:
A body composed of other and smaller bodies, separated and in opposition to one another, which oppress and despise each other and are in a continuous state of war…Modern Spain can be considered a monstrous Republic of little republics which confront each other because the particular interest of each is in contradiction with the general interest.