Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (58 page)

Not surprisingly, the effort to reconcile these conflicting aspirations proved to be a source of tension and anxiety. The stronger the determination of creole communities to demonstrate their similarity to the mother country, the more obvious it became, not only to Europeans but also to themselves, that the resemblance fell short. This paradox had far-reaching implications both for their own future and for that of their parent societies. If ever the moment should arrive when, in an act of collective rejection, they should choose to base their identity, not on the expectation of similarity but on the assertion of difference, they would be turning their backs on that larger community in which their fondest dream was to be accepted as full partners by their transatlantic cousins.

When two Spanish naval officers, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, were ordered by Madrid in 1735 to accompany a French scientific expedition to the kingdom of Quito, they were instructed to gather information on the character and condition of Spain's Pacific coast territories. Their report, written in 1747 on their return after ten years of travel, contained a devastating account of administrative corruption and the ill-treatment of the Indians. But the two men also commented on the enormous wealth, both mineral and agricultural, of the viceroyalty of Peru, and described in their prologue the countries of the Indies as `abundant, rich and flourishing'.' Any mid-eighteenth-century visitor to the great viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru would certainly have been struck, not only by the splendour and obvious wealth of Mexico City and Lima, but also by the evidence of entrepreneurial activity, commercial vitality, and social mobility over large areas of territory.

Underlying the prosperity noted by eighteenth-century visitors to the two viceroyalties was the new-found buoyancy of their mining economies after a difficult seventeenth century.' The recovery of Peruvian production, where the Potosi silver mountain may have accounted for 80 per cent or more of total output in the viceroyalty in the early colonial period,' was slower and more hesitant than that of New Spain. This had the benefit of a larger number of mining centres, highergrade ore, a lower level of taxation by the crown, and lower labour costs. Presented with greater opportunities, the mining entrepreneurs of New Spain and their merchant backers had stronger incentives to take risks than their Peruvian counterparts. As a result, New Spain was to maintain its lead over Peru for the entirety of a century in which total Spanish American bullion production would achieve a fourfold increase, with Peruvian production up by 250 per cent and that of New Spain by 600 per cent.4

Apart from the development of subterranean blasting techniques, this impressive increase in output seems to have owed less to any major technological improvement than to changes in working methods and the employment of labour. The increase in production was a response to the apparently insatiable European demand for American silver, together with a greater availability of mercury from Spain for the process of refining, the opening of new shafts, and the willingness of entrepreneurs to sink their capital into risky but potentially highly lucrative enterprises. The entrepreneurs benefited, too, from the growth of population, which helped to keep wages down - a consideration that was particularly important in the mines of New Spain, always less reliant on forced labour than those of Peru.'

The wealth and activity generated by the eighteenth-century development of their extractive economies - especially of silver rather than gold' - had a pervasive influence across Spain's American territories. The proportion of their population directly engaged in mining activities was not in fact large - perhaps 0.5 per cent of the total labour force in New Spain.7 The numerous men, women and children, however, who flocked to the mining centres had to be clothed and fed, and the mines themselves required a steady stream of tools and supplies, many of which had to be brought long distances over and and difficult terrain.

All this activity could have a dramatic impact on local economies. Landowners who enjoyed relatively easy access to mining communities were given a powerful incentive to increase their production of maize, wheat and livestock in response to the market demand. Nowhere were the consequences more striking than in the Bajio region of northern New Spain, formerly a remote and scantily populated frontier area.' The growing prosperity of the mining region of Guanajuato - the most productive of all the eighteenth-century mining areas of Spanish America - made it a magnet for large numbers of people from central Mexico. By the end of the eighteenth century the city of Guanajuato, with its surrounding villages, had a population of over 55,000. A major beneficiary of this growth was the agricultural region round the nearby town of Leon, traditionally a region with many small proprietary farmers. Some of these took advantage of rising land values to sell out to the great estate-owners, while others succeeded in accumulating enough holdings to become hacienda owners in their own right. In the ownership and use of land, as in the development of the textile workshops of Queretaro, another rapidly growing city in the Bajio, the expansion of urban markets created by the mining boom was a powerful promoter of social and economic change.

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 what 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.