ABSTRACT
The Peace of Utrecht created a new geopolitical map for Europe with the territorial breakup of the Hispanic monarchy. This fact, the political and territorial consequences, along with the impact of diplomacy and military operations, has been among the most studied aspects of these treaties. While the peace brought the European war to an end, the treaties signed between 1711 and 1716 also had significant repercussions for the colonial world, and especially the Spanish system of trade with its American colonies. In the European sphere, the triumph of the House of Bourbon in Spain forced the Hispanic monarchy to undergo major territorial changes (the loss of its Italian territories and the Southern Netherlands). In the colonial sphere, it represented a triumph for British commerce, which obtained significant privileges in the territories of the Hispanic Atlantic. The enormous influence Britain would come to have in the Spanish Atlantic world represented a significant obstacle to French ambitions in the Americas, which it had sought to realise since the second half of the seventeenth century. The Peace of Utrecht and the preceding war brought about innovations that would prove highly important for the later development of Spanish America. They led to major changes in the Spanish system of colonial trade, as well as its underlying ideological and economic model. From this time onward, it would be heavily influenced by the international context and the expansion of European wars to encompass the Atlantic sphere. 1
In this chapter, I will be analysing the repercussions of the Treaties of Utrecht for Spanish colonial affairs and trade. I will also present some examples of the different currents of opinion circulating in Spain regarding the peace negotiations. It should be noted that the Spanish historiography on the War of the Spanish Succession and the Utrecht peace treaties has dealt mainly with two issues: one is the loss of European territories and the political consequences of this, together with Spain’s new position within the international context, which greatly affected how its state was modelled; 2 the other involves focussing on the internal consequences of the war and peace treaties, analysing the inner, civil conflict that occurred in Spain
often been placed on the dynastic change understood as an internal dispute between Habsburgs and Bourbons, the suppression of the old charters of the Crown of Aragon and the enactment of the Nueva Planta Decrees. 3 In more recent times, the repercussions of the treaties for the colonial and commercial dimensions have attracted greater attention, and it has been concluded that the European war was instigated in an attempt to bring about the collapse of the vast, global Spanish empire. 4
A document distributed in the court at Madrid shortly after the signing of the Treaties of Utrecht described the ‘war for the succession of Spain’ as a ‘universal war’. 5 The author of this work is not known, nor is there a date or place of publication. However, it may be a translation into Spanish of a report written by the French Huguenot legal expert, historian and journalist Jean Rousset de Missy, who fought at the Battle of Malplaquet. 6 The works of Rousset de Missy were widely disseminated in Spain, and in some of them, the author stated that the struggle over who would succeed Charles II ‘had ruined the balance of power in Spain’. 7 In the second half of the seventeenth century, this concept of ‘equilibrium’ was associated with two key interrelated aspects: one was military and naval supremacy, and the other, competition for maritime and commercial predominance. This idea is intrinsically linked to the theorisation of empire, which is found in even postcolonial debates. 8 The rise of maritime empires led to a shift in the relationship between political and military powers, to the extent that the reasons for expansion became more closely related to commerce. The judicial and military elites in mercantile states guaranteed the amassing of wealth through regulating and licencing the companies in charge of intercontinental commerce, as well as diplomatic assistance and financial independence. 9
There were two issues, which threatened this balance. First of all, the European nations were in the process of strengthening their states in order to gain more territory. The author of the ‘Historia secreta y política’ [‘Secret and Political History’] stated that: ‘as it is impossible for princes to expand without occupying the states of others, and in the world today, there is no land that does not belong to some sovereign, and as one of the rules of good policy is to wage war nearby, both because the conquests are adjacent to territories already held, and because they are waged with greater convenience and advantage’. 10
Second, some European nations had evolved into mercantile empires, with their economic progress and political hegemony being based on access to colonial resources. From the early days of European expansion overseas, major dynastic houses like the Bourbons, for example, had been interested parties and even shareholders in colonial businesses. This was especially
and Asia. In fact, it was the two crowns of the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish and the Portuguese, that in the sixteenth century had set examples to be followed by the other European nations with an interest in developing Atlantic trade routes. In Spain, it was Ferdinand the Catholic who authorised the first shipment of Negro slaves to the Americas just twenty-five years after the voyages of Columbus, becoming the first slave trader of the New World. 12 Over the course of the seventeenth century, the slave trade became a private business controlled by major trading companies such as the Dutch West India Company, or by asientos , contracts to supply slaves, which the Spanish crown signed with Portuguese traders. In the final decades of the seventeenth century, new economic opportunities began to emerge in parts of the Americas, which had been left off Spanish trade routes. If we look at the geopolitics of the empire in 1700, we see that areas such as the Lesser Antilles, some parts of northern Mexico and Florida, the southern cone of South America, and even little explored lands around the Isthmus of Panama, had become dangerous territories, as they were close to overland routes for the transport of silver. They were the target of armed attacks by the English, French and Dutch in the final decades of the seventeenth century, when Spain’s dynastic problems were already beginning to mimic the ‘crisis’ of Spanish control in the Americas.
