Abstract
Absolutist monarchy functioned fundamentally in the same way in Spanish America and Scandinavia during the hundred years between 1715 and 1815. Absolutism engendered its own political culture. Scandinavians and Spanish Americans related to the monarch in a broadly similar fashion, attempting to use the absolutist system to their own advantage, pushing for greater local autonomy, and reacting—violently if necessary—against corrupt officials, excessive taxation and conscription and reforms affecting what the commoners perceived to be normal economic activities. Spanish Americans and Scandinavians in the eighteenth century frequently expressed loyalty to the monarch, but this popular monarchism was neither mystical, unconditional, naïve or irrational. Nor was it necessarily conservative, traditionalist or reactionary. Often the commoners’ demands were innovative and radical, although it was usually and successfully couched in a language of a return to a just and utopian past. The commoners displayed limited personal loyalty to particular kings, but they needed a strong monarch who could potentially overrule ill-informed bureaucratic decisions, remove corrupt officials and impart justice. The governments’ responses to popular demands were also broadly similar.
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas Ewen Daltveit Slettebø, ‘først, som rettfærdig Dommer at straffe, og siden, som en mild Fader, at forlade’: Det dansk-norske eneveldets håndtering av Strilekrigen i Bergen 1765’, MA dissertation (University of Bergen, 2007), https://hdl.handle.net/1956/4030.
- 2.
Anthony McFarlane, ‘The “Rebellion of the Barrios”: Urban Insurrection in Bourbon Quito’, Hispanic American Historical Review 69/2 (1989).
- 3.
John Leddy Phelan, The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison, 1978).
- 4.
Karin Sennefelt, Den politiska sjukan: Dalupproret 1743 och frihetstida politisk kultur (Hedemora, 2001).
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Ingrid Fiskaa, ‘Statsmakta og Lofthusreisinga: styresmaktene si handtering av allmugereisinga i Nedenes og Bratsberg 1786–87’, MA dissertation (University of Oslo, 2009).
- 6.
Jan Szeminski, ‘Why Kill the Spaniard? New Perspectives on Andean Insurrectionary Ideology in the 18th Century’, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison, 1987).
- 7.
Edward Palmer Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1993), 246–258.
- 8.
Hanni Jalil Paier, ‘Of Structures, Culture and Other Demons: A Review of Late Eighteenth-Century Andean Insurrections’, CS (2011), https://doi.org/10.18046/recs.i7.1045; Anthony McFarlane, ‘Rebellions in Late Colonial Spanish America: A Comparative Perspective’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 14/3 (1995).
- 9.
Pasi Ihalainen et al. (eds), Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution: Nordic Political Cultures, 1740–1820 (Farnham, 2011).
- 10.
Both in the nationalist historiography produced in the nineteenth century, and in some of the post-1990 historiography, the notion exists that ‘independence was for Latin America what the revolution was for France’. François-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Mexico City, 1993).
- 11.
Some notable exceptions to this trend are Ole Teige’s very interesting work on corruption in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Ola Teige, ‘Bureaucratic Corruption and Regime Change: The case of Denmark and Norway after 1814’, in Les coulisses du politique dans l’Europe contemporaine. Tome 3: Scandales et corruption à l’époque contemporaine (Paris, 2014). Øystein Rian has questioned in a series of studies the supposedly benign character of the Oldenburg Monarchy. See for instance Øystein Rian, ‘Hvorfor var det ikke nordmennene som forlot Fredrik 6’, Historisk tidsskrift 93/1 (2014), https://doi.org/10.18261/ISSN1504-2944-2014-01-02. An interesting comment on this article is found in Finn Erhard Johannessen, ‘Nordmennene og det fjerne styret – replikk til Øystein Rian’, Historisk tidsskrift 93/3 (2014), https://doi.org/10.18261/ISSN1504-2944-2014-03-07.
- 12.
Thomas Ertman, Birth of the leviathan: Building states and regimes in medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), 10.
- 13.
Michael Bregnsbo, ‘The Crisis and Renewal of the Monarchy: Introduction’, in Ihalainen et. al. (eds.), Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution.
- 14.
For more on Struensee see Michael Bregnsbo ‘Struensee and the Political Culture of Absolutism’ in Ihalainen et. al. (eds.), Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution. Struensee’s predicament may fruitfully be compared to Esquilache’s in Spain, just six years prior. See for instance, Laura Rodríguez, ‘The Spanish Riots of 1766’, Past & Present, 59 (1973), 117–146.
- 15.
Ertman, Birth of the leviathan, 7.
- 16.
For the success of Bourbon tax collection in Spanish America after 1759, see for instance Alejandra Irigoin and Regina Grafe, ‘Response to Carlos Marichal and William Summerhill’, Hispanic American Historical Review 88/2 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-2007-159; Carlos Marichal, ‘Money, taxes, and finance’, The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America 1 (2006); Alejandra Irigoin and Regina Grafe, ‘Bargaining for Absolutism: A Spanish Path to Nation-State and Empire Building’, Hispanic American Historical Review 88/2 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-2007-117; J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic world: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, 2006), 292–324; Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge, 1993), 202–227.
- 17.
Examples from Norway on corruption, Jens Johan Hyvik, ‘Embetsstanden bak fasaden’, Heimen 55/4 (2018), https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1894-3195-2018-04-03. On the development of bureaucratic states in Scandinavia, see for instance: Frisk Jensen Mette, ‘The Building of the Scandinavian States: Establishing Weberian Bureaucracy and Curbing Corruption from the Mid-Seventeenth to the End of the Nineteenth Century’, in Bureaucracy and Society in Transition: Comparative Perspectives, eds Haldor Byrkjeflot and Frederik Engelstad (Bingley, 2018); Teige, ‘Bureaucratic Corruption and Regime Change’.
- 18.
Teige, ‘Bureaucratic Corruption and Regime Change’; Anthony McFarlane, ‘Political corruption and reform in Bourbon Spanish America’, in Political corruption in Europe and Latin America, eds Walter Little and Eduardo Posada-Carbó (London, 1996); Christoph Rosenmüller (ed.), Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks (Albuquerque, 2017); Stephan Ruderer and Christoph Rosenmüller, ‘Introducción: la nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina’, in “Dádivas, dones y dineros”: aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina desde el imperio español a la modernidad, eds Stephan Ruderer and Christoph Rosenmüller (Madrid and Frankfurt, 2016).
- 19.
Francis Fukuyama relies on a modified version of Ertman’s categorization, and an argument can be made that all three monarchies (Spain, Denmark and Sweden) along with France prior to the revolution were ‘weak absolutisms’ to use his nomenclature. They had in theory a more or less absolute monarch, a nominally free peasantry at least in parts of the realms, and limited possibilities for the gentry and aristocracy through legal political means of limiting taxes imposed by the king. Yet, according to Fukuyama, the king could not in these weak absolutist states act as a despot because he was constrained by the interests of the bureaucracy and had to justify new measures in terms of law that was often a very cumbersome process. Francis Fukuyama, The origins of political order: From prehuman times to the French Revolution (1st edn, New York, 2011), 334–372; Francis Fukuyama, The origins of political order: From prehuman times to the French Revolution (London, 2012), 334–372.
- 20.
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the absolutist state (London, 1979).
- 21.
See for instance Santiago Ibáñez Rodríguez, Noemí Armas Lerena and José Luis Gómez Urdáñez, Los señoríos en La Rioja en el siglo XVIII (Logroño, 1996).
- 22.
For a short but useful introduction to this topic, see ‘Gårdsrätt’ in Bernhard Meijer et al., Nordisk familjebok: konversationslexikon och realencyklopedi (Stockholm, 1904).
- 23.
Sergio Serulnikov, ‘Lo que invocar la figura del Rey y la justicia regia significaba (y lo que no): Monarquismo popular en Charcas tardocolonial’, Varia Historia 35 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-87752019000100003.
- 24.
David Martin Luebke, His majesty’s rebels: Communities, factions, and rural revolt in the Black Forest, 1725–1745 (Ithaca, NY, 1997).
- 25.
Sennefelt, Den politiska sjukan.
- 26.
For an interesting sceptical critique of the term, see Alan Knight, ‘Is Political Culture Good to Think?’, in Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750–1950, eds Nils Jacobsen and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada (Durham and London, 2005).
- 27.
Sennefelt, Den politiska sjukan, 54–63.
- 28.
Ibid., 61.
- 29.
Phelan, The People and the King, 79–88.
- 30.
Ibid., 73.
- 31.
See for instance John H. Rowe, ‘The Incas under Spanish Colonial Institutions’, Hispanic American Historical Review 37/2 (1957).
- 32.
Charles F Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru (Durham, 1999); Alberto Flores Galindo et al., In search of an Inca: Identity and utopia in the Andes (Cambridge, 2010).
- 33.
David Cahill, ‘First among Incas: The Marquesado de Oropesa Litigation (1741–1780) en route to the Great Rebellion’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 41 (2004).
- 34.
Georg Sverdrup, Lofthusbevægelsen (Kristiania [Oslo], 1917), 66–85.
- 35.
Ella Schmidt and Ward Stavig, The Tupac Amaru and Catarista Rebellions: An anthology of sources (Indianapolis, 2008), XXIII–XXX.
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Sæther, S.A. (2023). Popular Royalism in Scandinavia and Spanish America Before 1814. In: Artola, A., París, Á. (eds) Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s-1870s. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_3
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