II.

Spanish America

European overseas expansion began tentatively in the first half of the 15th century with the Portuguese discovery and settlement of two of the small island groups in the eastern Atlantic Ocean—the Madeira Islands (1419) and the Azores (1439)—and gathered pace in the 1450s with the Portuguese settlement of the Cape Verde Islands (1456-1460), followed quickly by the establishment of fortified trading posts in the Gulf of Guinea. During this early period, the Iberian territories that came to form the core of the emerging nation-state of Spain in 1479, with the accession to the throne of Aragón of King Ferdinand II, husband of Queen Isabella I of Castile (they were joint sovereigns from 1474 until Isabella's death in 1504; thereafter, Ferdinand ruled as Ferdinand V of Castile, sole monarch of a united Spain, until 1516), remained preoccupied with the completion of the long war against the Moorish kingdom of Granada.

Four factors combined in the last two decades of the century to enable Spain to emerge as the dominant expansionist power in the west: (1) the extension of Castilian sovereignty to the Canary Islands in the 1480s and 1490s, following a treaty with Portugal in 1479 which ceded Portuguese claims to Isabella; (2) the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, the gateway into the Indian Ocean, by the Portuguese expedition of Bartolomeu Dias in 1488, a momentous development that convinced the Portuguese monarchy (rightly, as it turned out) that it had discovered the best route to the east; (3) the extraordinary persistence of the Italian navigator, Christopher Columbus, in persuading the Spanish sovereigns, after several years of pleading, to license a westward expedition in quest of “The Indies”; (4) the final capture of Granada by Spanish forces on January 1, 1492, thereby releasing Spanish resources, material and spiritual, for a new crusade to extend Spanish sovereignty, civilization, and religion to the New World about to be discovered across the Atlantic.

Columbus returned to Spain in the spring of 1493 from his famous first expedition of 1492, which had taken him as far as Cuba and Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), with small quantities of gold, exotic plants and creatures, and a small number of indigenous inhabitants—thereafter to be known generically as “Indians”—who were paraded through the streets of Barcelona (where the sovereigns were then resident), to the astonishment of the populace. The Spanish Crown responded with alacrity, authorizing Columbus's much larger second expedition (17 ships), which sailed from Cádiz in September 1493 to establish a permanent settlement on Hispaniola. Jamaica and Dominica were also discovered on the voyage. At a diplomatic level, negotiations were immediately opened with Portugal and the Papacy, leading in 1493 to a series of papal bulls authorizing Spanish evangelization, which came to constitute the basic legal claim of Spain to sovereignty in the New World, and, in 1494, to the famous Treaty of Tordesillas with Portugal, which granted Spain territory beyond a Line of Demarcation 100 leagues (about 483 km/300 mi) west of the Azores. As it turned out, this division entitled Portugal to the “bulge” of Brazil (as yet undiscovered), although Spain's indifference towards territory further west, which contained neither sedentary Indians nor easily accessible mineral wealth, allowed Portuguese settlers eventually to expand the frontiers of Brazil into vast regions nominally awarded to Spain.

The maritime nations of northern Europe—England, France, and the emerging Netherlands—paid little heed to the deals struck by Spain with the Papacy and Portugal, and by the 1520s their merchant ships were intruding with increasing frequency into the Caribbean Sea, supplying the principal islands with African slaves (much in demand, as the native Caribs—like the Guanches of the Canaries before them—were virtually wiped out by a deadly combination of ill-treatment and unaccustomed diseases brought by the Spanish), in exchange for gold, pearls, dye-woods, and sugar. However, serious attempts by these potential rivals to establish their own colonies in America were not made until the early 17th century (beginning in 1607 with the English settlement of Virginia). In the 16th century, the only real curbs on Spanish expansion were the natural limits to the material and human resources available for exploration and colonization, coupled with geographical obstacles, and, in some regions (notably Chile and northern Mexico), fierce resistance from semi-nomadic indigenous cultures unwilling to succumb to Spanish control.

By the second decade of the 16th century, the major islands of the Caribbean had been settled, and Spain's attention switched to the mainland of Venezuela (the Spanish Main of pirate stories), Central America—first crossed in 1513 by Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to see the Pacific Ocean—and Mexico. The famous 1519 expedition (from Cuba) of Hernan Cortés, which culminated in 1521 in the capture of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital (destroyed by the Spaniards and rebuilt as Mexico City), opened a major new phase in Spanish imperial expansion, which reached even greater heights in 1533 with the conquest of Cuzco, the fabulous Inca capital of Peru, by Francisco Pizarro. During these years, tough, avaricious conquistadores—many of whom, like Pizarro, had first come to America in the 1490s—rampaged through Middle and South America, seizing from native civilizations far richer and more sophisticated than those encountered in the Caribbean massive stocks of accumulated treasure. Twenty per cent of this was dutifully shipped to Spain for Charles I, the country's first Habsburg king and later Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. From Peru, further expeditions pushed northwards into Ecuador and Colombia and southward to Chile, and new expeditions from Spain, attempting to find alternative routes to the interior of South America, founded Buenos Aires in 1536 (refounded in 1580, following its destruction in 1541 by local inhabitants) and Asunción, capital of Paraguay, in 1537.

The vain quest for further fabulous cities and civilizations took Spaniards into increasingly remote and difficult regions, including the Amazon Basin (first penetrated from the west in 1541 by the Spanish expedition of Francisco de Orellana, searching for the mythical El Dorado), the borderlands of northern Mexico, and the Guiana Highlands. Here, as elsewhere, they tended to establish only isolated and often temporary outposts, concentrating their major and permanent settlements in central Mexico and the Andes, where they had access to relatively submissive and sedentary native populations—from whom tribute, often in the form of forced labour, could easily be extracted—and, from the 1540s, abundant supplies of silver from newly discovered mines at Potosí (in modern Bolivia), Zacatecas (Mexico), and a large number of less famous sites. From the mid-16th century, silver from Spanish mines, rather than treasure seized from indigenous groups, dominated local economies and trade with Spain, luring existing settlers in the Caribbean and Central America and a continuous stream of new migrants—about 2,000 a year were sailing from Seville, Spain's only licensed port, for America by this period—towards Mexico and Peru. The Caribbean became, as a consequence, something of a backwater, where, in the 17th century, Spain's emerging rivals had little difficulty in establishing their own settlements, on not only the isolated islands that Spain had bypassed but also on some of the larger islands, which had become underpopulated and poorly defended: these included Curaçao (seized by the Dutch in 1634), Jamaica (English from 1655), and the western half of Hispaniola, formally ceded to France in 1697 after several decades of informal occupation by buccaneers.

Given the enormous geographical extent of mainland Spanish America, it may be surprising that permanent foreign intrusions into territory claimed by Spain (leaving aside the expansion of Portuguese Brazil beyond the Line of Demarcation) were few and far between: principally at various dates in the 17th century with the Dutch/French/English occupation of the Guianas (modern Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana respectively) and the English occupation of Belize from 1638. The principal explanation has less to do with the strength of Spanish defences, sound though these were in key areas, and more to do with the relative disinterest of the other maritime nations in acquiring sovereignty over isolated, unproductive regions such as Patagonia. They preferred, on the whole, to profit indirectly from Spanish America by attacking shipping and settlements in times of war, and engaging in contraband trade in peacetime.

Throughout Spain's Habsburg era, which ended with the death of the childless Charles II in 1700, the nation fought a losing battle to maintain a monopoly of trade with and within Spanish America. Following the War of the Spanish Succession, Philip V, the first of the country's Bourbon kings, was forced to grant commercial concessions to the victorious British. His successors, Ferdinand VI and particularly Charles III, grew increasingly convinced that Britain had territorial as well as trading ambitions in Spanish America, a belief encouraged by the British capture of Cuba during the Seven Years' War. The island was restored to Spain in 1763, but only in exchange for Florida, hitherto Spanish, which Britain, in turn, returned to Spain in 1783 as part of the peace settlement that ended the American War of Independence. Charles III saw the development of the untapped economic potential of Spanish America as the means of raising the revenues required to resist further British penetration—territorial and commercial—and, in general terms, to underpin his aim of restoring Spain as a major international power. In pursuit of these aims he reorganized imperial defences, increased the efficiency of tax collection in America, and introduced a comprehensive package of commercial reforms designed to promote the agricultural development of hitherto neglected regions such as Venezuela, Central America, Cuba, and the La Plata region.

Increasingly, in the last quarter of the 18th century, hides from Buenos Aires and Montevideo, sugar from Havana, and cotton, tobacco, cocoa beans, and indigo from La Guiara “Venezuela” and Cartagena“Colombia” began to compete with Mexican and Peruvian bullion in transatlantic trade, although bullion production also increased sharply. The consequence was that Spanish Americans grew richer and more confident. As the efficiency of government in Spain declined during the reign of Charles IV, the powerful minority of white American Spaniards or creoles (who numbered some 3 million out of a total imperial population, of all races, of 17 million, as against Spain's population of 10 million by 1800), owners of the empire's estates and mines, realized increasingly that continued prosperity would depend on breaking free from Spain. This was particularly true when the outbreak of war between Spain and Britain in 1796 led to the blockade of Spanish and Spanish-American ports by the Royal Navy. In reality, many Spanish Americans had no quarrel with Britain, indirectly the main market for their colonial products and source of their manufactured imports.

Although the empire grew increasingly unhappy with Spanish rule during the long Napoleonic Wars, overt resistance to its continuation was muted until 1810, when, following the collapse of opposition in Spain to the French invasion of 1808, the citizens of Caracas overthrew the Spanish authorities in April 1810, and those of Buenos Aires followed suit in May 1810. They claimed to be acting in defence of the Spanish monarchy, given that Napoleon had imprisoned Ferdinand VII and handed the crown of Spain to his brother, Joseph Bonaparte. In reality, they were seeking independence, as, indeed, were the inhabitants of many other cities—including Cartagena, Bogotá, Santiago, and Quito—who followed their example.

The revolutions for independence which ensued were by no means simple affairs. The creoles of Mexico City and Lima, for example, fought for the royalist cause in essentially civil wars, which continued in some regions for 15 years, less for love of Spain than out of fear that independence might allow the Native American and mixed-blood masses to turn political revolutions into social upheavals. Ferdinand VII returned to Madrid in 1814, following the defeat of Napoleon, intent on restoring his sovereignty in America by force of arms rather than conciliation: the inevitable consequence was a series of gradual defeats of royalist forces, at the hands of Simón Bolívar and his allies, that culminated in the definitive loss by 1825 of all Spain's mainland territories. Only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained Spanish, partly because their planter minorities feared that political unrest might lead to the extermination of whites by blacks that they had seen in neighbouring Haiti in the 1790s. As the 19th century wore on, these islands were sucked increasingly into the economic orbit of the United States, which intervened decisively with military and naval force in 1898 to ensure the success of the Cuban revolution against continuing Spanish rule that broke out in 1895, thus ending at a stroke over 400 years of Spanish imperialism in the Americas.