Abstract
Spain’s eighteenth century opened in war. The Bourbon succession was contested by the British, Austrian Habsburgs, Dutch, and lesser powers, in what became the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13). This war was for the control of Spain and its colonies in Europe and the Americas, and pitted the Allies and their candidate, the Austrian Archduke Charles, against the Bourbon Crowns of France and Spain, in the person of Philip V.1 The war, with all its attendant circumstances, made the following quarter-century a unique period in Spanish history. Large bodies of foreign troops campaigned on Castilian soil for the first time in centuries, and the last before the Napoleonic invasion. The conflict was not only a general European one with a major theatre in the Peninsula, but a Spanish civil war that pitted Castile against the eastern kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia. Much of the Castilian nobility opposed the new dynasty, and the Catholic Church itself splintered along lines of region or hierarchy. A further distinctive characteristic was the great influence of foreign factions at court, where the French dominated from 1700 to 1709, to be displaced thereafter by Italians. The physical disruption and damage caused by the war, consequent fiscal ruination, and bitter factional strife surrounding Philip V combined to create an extreme political instability that paralyzed government.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
On the origins of the War, see M. A. Thompson, “Louis XIV and the Origins of the War of the Spanish Succession,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 4 (1954), pp. 111–34, and Duque de Frías, “El cumplimiento del testamento de Carlos II: La embajada del condestable de Castilla a Felipe V de España y Luis XIV de Francia”, Hispania 98 (1965), pp. 263–84.
Henry Kamen, The War of Succession in Spain, 1700–1715 (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969) was long the standard broad-based account of the war,
but see now above all Joaquim Albareda Salvadó, La guerra de sucesión de España (1700–1714) (Barcelona: Crítica, 2010).
Arthur Parnell, The War of the Succession in Spain during the Reign of Queen Anne, 1702–1711 (London: George Bell, 1888),
and David Francis, The First Peninsular War, 1702–1713 (London: Ernest Benn, 1975) are expert military histories.
A relatively recent bibliography, including French and northern European sources, is Calvin W. Dickinson and E. R. Hitchcock, The War of the Spanish Succession, 1702–1713: A Selected Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
Henry Kamen, “The Destruction of the Spanish Silver Fleet at Vigo in 1702,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 39 (1966), pp. 165–73.
Pedro Voltes, “Documentos sobre episodios del año 1706 en la Guerra de Sucesión,” Hispania 49:173 (Sept.–Dec. 1989), pp. 1,053–86;
John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 28–29.
Lynch, Bourbon Spain, pp. 32–34; Kamen, The War of Succession, pp. 20–21; Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y Estado en el siglo XVIII español (Barcelona: Ariel, 1976), pp. 29–32.
W. Michael, England under George I: The Quadruple Alliance (London: Macmillan, 1939).
Kamen, The War of Succession, p. 51; see also E. W. Dahlgren, Les relations commerciales et maritimes entre la France et les côtes de l’océan Pacifique (Paris: H. Champion, 1909), pp. 329–33, 342–43, 483, suggesting that Amelot “n’était pas loin d’être … le véritable régent de l’Espagne.”
Kamen, The War of Succession, pp. 95–96; Alfred Baudrillart, “Les intrigues du Duc d’Orléans en Espagne, 1708–1709,” Revue Historique 43 (1890), pp. 1–33, 241–73; Lynch, Bourbon Spain, p. 79.
Marqués de San Felipe, Comentarios de la guerra de España e historia de su Rey Felipe V, el Animoso (Madrid: Atlas, 1957), p. 269; Lynch, Bourbon Spain, p. 69.
Jacinto Hidalgo, “La abdicación de Felipe V,” Hispania 22 (1962), pp. 559–89; A. Danvila, El reinado relámpago. Luis I y Luisa Isabel de Orléans (1707–1742) (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1952).
G. Syveton, Une cour et un aventurier: Le Baron de Ripperdá (Paris: n. pub., 1896).
“During these years of continual changes, Indies affairs passed through diverse hands” (Margarita Gómez Gómez, Forma y expedición del documento en la Secretaría del Estado y del Despacho de Indias [Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1993], p. 37); “thus shuffled around, the affairs of the former Secretariat of the Indies lacked the firm direction they would be given in January 1721”;
Gildas Bernard, Le sécretariat d’Etat et le Conseil espagnole des Indes (1700–1808) (Geneva: Droz, 1972), p. 33.
Manuel Tejado Fernández, “Cartagena, amenazada (datos para el estudio de las repercusiones en América de la Guerra de Sucesión (1701–1713),” Revista de Indias 11:43–4 (1951), pp. 179–92;
María del Carmen Mena García, “Santa Marta durante la guerra de sucesión española,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 36 (1979), pp. 569–702.
Among older work, see Analola Borges, “Los aliados del archiduque Carlos en la América colonial,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 27 (1970), pp. 321–70;
Carlos Daniel Valcárcel, “Precedente separatista,” Revista de Indias 26:103–4 (1966), pp. 127–31;
for a recent take, Aaron Alejandro Olivas, “The Global Politics of the Transatlantic Slave Trade during the War of the Spanish Succession, 1700–1715,” in Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso and Ainara Vásquez Varela (eds.), Early Bourbon Spanish America: Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era (1700–1759) (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 85–109). Olivas has a thesis in progress on loyalty and disloyalty to the Bourbons in the colonies.
This is the title to Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Historia general del Perú (Lima: Milla Batres, 1966), vol. 4, chap. 5, covering 1710–20; see also pp. 32, 44–45.
Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789 (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 36. Charles Frostin, “Les Pontchartrain et la pénétration commerciale française en Amérique espagnole (1690–1715),” Revue Historique 245 (1971), pp. 307–36, esp. pp. 333–34, discusses French influence over colonial appointments, concluding that “in this way, francophile elements, or at least elements so reputed, were placed at the head of the main Spanish settlements”; he lists five examples, among them Castelldosríus.
Vargas Ugarte, Historia general, vol. 4, chap. 1, pp. 11–34; Manuel Moreyra y Paz-Soldán (ed.), Virreinato peruano: Documentos para su historia: Colección de cartas de virreyes, Conde de Monclova, 3 vols (Lima: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1954–55).
Nuria Sala i Vila, “La escenificación del poder: El marqués de Castelldosríus, primer virrey Borbón del Perú (1707–1710),” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 61:1 (Jan.–June 2004), pp. 31–68, and “Una corona bien vale un virreinato: El marqués de Castelldosríus, primer virrey borbónico del Perú,” in Alfredo Moreno Cebrián and Núria Sala i Vila, El “premio” de ser virrey: Los intereses públicos y privados del gobierno virreinal en el Perú de Felipe V (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2005), pp. 17–150; significant earlier discussions include Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Tres Catalanes, virreyes en el Perú (Madrid: Hidalguía, 1962); Walker, Spanish Politics, pp. 34–48; Vargas Ugarte, Historia general, vol. 4, pp. 73–90;
Manuel de Mendiburú, Diccionario histórico-biográfico del Perú (Lima: Enrique Palacios, 1931–48), vol. 8, pp. 230–36.
Vargas Ugarte, Historia general, vol. 4, pp. 121–34; Mendiburú, Diccionario, vol. 8, pp. 16–28; Luis Merino, Estudio crítico sobre las Noticias Secretas de América y el clero colonial (1720–1765) (Madrid: Graf. Jura, 1959), pp. 93–94, note 8;
Antonio de Egaña, Historia de la Iglesia en la América española: Hemisferio sur (Madrid: Editorial Católica, 1966), pp. 816–17;
Enrique Sánchez Pedrote, “Los prelados virreyes,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 7 (1950), pp. 211–53. For accusations against Morcillo, see, for example, Marqués de Casa Concha to Crown, March 26, 1721, A.G.I., Quito 143; Francisco Xavier de Salazar to Crown, August 1, 1722, A.G.I., Lima 521; Castelfuerte to Crown, November 8, 1725, A.G.I., Lima 412.
John R. Fisher, Government and Society in Colonial Peru: The Intendant System, 1784–1814 (London: Athlone Press, 1970), this is the title to Chapter 1. See also the same author, Bourbon Peru, 1750–1824 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), Chap. 1, discussing “Antecedents: The Viceroyalty of Peru prior to 1750.”
The organization of Spanish Atlantic trade throughout the Habsburg and early Bourbon periods has been the subject of numerous studies since Clarence Haring’s early Trade and Navigation between Spain and the Indies in the Time of the Hapsburgs (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1918). Pierre and Huguette Chaunu, Seville et l’Atlantique, 1504–1650, 8 vols (Paris: A. Colin, 1955–59), is monumental, exhaustive, and more cited than read;
John R. Fisher, The Economic Aspects of Spanish Imperialism in America, 1492 –1810 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), is more accessible.
For a wide-ranging and expert discussion, see Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), esp. Chaps. 1–3.
Sergio M. Rodríguez Lorenzo, La Carrera de Indias (la ruta, los hombres, las mercan-cías) (Esles de Cayón: El Municipio, 2012) is an excellent recent synthesis.
Lawrence A. Clayton, “Trade and Navigation in the Seventeenth-Century Viceroyalty of Peru,” Journal of Latin American Studies 7 (1975), pp. 1–21 see pp. 3–4.
John Lynch, The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change, 1598–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 278–79.
José Muñoz Pérez, “El comercio de Indias bajo los Austrias y la crítica del proyectismo del XVIII,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 13 (1956), pp. 85–103. Muñoz Pérez notes, however, that polemical criticism of the system only became widespread after ca. 1760, when government itself became committed to change, and the fleets themselves had already been largely abandoned; see p. 86.
On taxation, see Antonio García-Baquero González, Cádiz y el Atlántico (1717–1778): El comercio colonial español bajo el monopolio gaditano, 2nd ed. 2 vols. (Cadiz: Diputación de Cádiz, 1988), vol. 1, pp. 183–93; on confiscations and arbitrary fines,
see John H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 76, 157, 254, 368, 452–53, 519; Lynch, The Hispanic World, pp. 237–38.
Interest in foreign communities in Cadiz, long centered on the French, has more recently embraced other nationalities. For the British, see María del Carmen Lario de Oñate, La colonia mercantil británica e irlandesa en Cádiz a finales del siglo XVIII (Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, 2000),
and Nélida García Fernández, Comunidad extranjera y puerto privilegiado: Los británicos en Cádiz en el siglo XVIII (Cadiz: Universidad de Cádiz, 2005);
for the Dutch, see above all Ana Crespo Solana, Mercaderes atlánticos: Redes del comercio flamenco y holandés entre Europa y el Caribe (Cordoba: Universidad de Córdoba/Cajasur, 2009), esp. section 2.
Woodrow Borah, Early Colonial Trade and Navigation between Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954);
Sergio R. Villalobos, Comercio y contrabando en el Río de la Plata y Chile, 1700–1811 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria, 1965),
Enrique M. Barba, “Sobre el contrabando de la Colonia del Sacramento: siglo XVIII,” Investigaciones y Ensayos 28 (1980), pp. 57–76,
and José Torre Revello, “Un contrabandista del siglo XVII en el Río de la Plata,” Revista de Historia de América (Mexico City) 45 (1958), pp. 121–30;
Lance R. Grahn, “An Irresoluble Dilemma: Smuggling in New Granada, 1713–1763,” in John R. Fisher, Allan J. Kuethe, and Anthony McFarlane (eds.), Reform and Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 123–46;
Mariano Ardash Bonialian, El Pacífico hispanoamericano: Política y comercio asiático en el imperio español (1680–1784): La centralidad de lo marginal (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2012).
Jean-Paul Duviols, “Les côtes du Vénézuela au XVIIIieme siècle: Témoignage d’un contrebandier,” Cahiers des Amériques Latines 32 (1979), pp. 5–17, reproduces an interesting eyewitness account, while Germán de Granda, “Una ruta marítima de contrabando de esclavos negros entre Panamá y Barbacoas durante el Asiento inglés,” Revista de Indias 36:143–4 (1976), pp. 123–46, contains an extensive bibliography of earlier studies of smuggling in South America.
Much of this debate was played out in the pages of the journal Past & Present. Jonathan I. Israel, “Mexico and the ‘General Crisis’ of the Seventeenth Century,” Past and Present 63 (May 1974), pp. 33–57,
and John J. Tepaske and Herbert S. Klein, “The Seventeenth-Century Crisis in New Spain: Myth or Reality?” Past and Present 90 (Feb. 1981), pp. 116–35, with contributions to the following volume of the same journal, provide a good summary.
John H. Elliott, “The General Crisis in Retrospect: A Debate without End,” in John H. Elliott, Spain, Europe & the Wider World, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 52–73, see p. 63.
This boom in French smuggling has generated a substantial literature. The outstanding work is still Dahlgren’s early (1909) Les relations commerciales; Carlos Daniel Malamud Rikles, Cádiz y Saint Malo en el comercio colonial peruano (1698–1725) (Cadiz: Diputación Provincial de Cádiz, 1986) is undermined by the lack of detailed reference to sources;
see also Frostin, “Les Pontchartrain,” and Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína Bueno, Política naval española en el Atlántico, 1700–1715 (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1982), pp. 141–69, which gives a detailed survey of French arrivals at major Pacific ports.
Enrique Tandeter, Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), pp. 5–10.
Adrian J. Pearce, British Trade with Spanish America, 1763–1808 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2007), pp. 18–25.
On the South Sea Company, see also Victoria G. Sorsby, “British Trade with Spanish America under the Asiento, 1713–1740,” Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of London, 1975; the early studies by Donovan and Nelson, cited in the bibliography; and Colin Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981). For the “Utrecht Treaty Complex,” including extensive discussion of the British Asiento, see Stein and Stein, Silver, Trade, and War, pp. 136–44.
Vera Lee Brown, “The South Sea Company and Contraband Trade,” American Historical Review 31:4 (July 1926), pp. 662–78;
María Dolores Gómez Molleda, “El contrabando inglés en América: Correspondencia inédita de la factoría de Buenos Aires,” Hispania 10 (1950), pp. 336–69;
also Allan Christelow, “Contraband Trade between Jamaica and the Spanish Main, and the Free Port Act of 1766,” Hispanic American Historical Review 22 (1942), pp. 309–43.
María Encarnación Rodríguez Vicente, Economía, sociedad, y Real Hacienda en las Indias españolas (Madrid: Alhambra, 1987), pp. 334–36, annex 1.
Kendall W. Brown, “La crisis financiera peruana al comienzo del siglo XVIII, la minería de plata y la mina de azogues de Huancavelica,” Revista de Indias 48:182–83 (Jan.–Aug. 1988), pp. 349–81, which includes statistical data.
Adrian J. Pearce, “The Peruvian Population Census of 1725–1740,” Latin American Research Review 36:3 (Oct. 2001), pp. 69–104, esp. pp. 97–99.
Adrian J. Pearce, “Huancavelica 1700–1759: Administrative Reform of the Mercury Industry in Early Bourbon Peru,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79:4 (Nov. 1999), pp. 669–702, see pp. 674–77.
Peter Bakewell, “Registered Silver Production in the Potosí District, 1550–1735,” Jahrbuch fur Geschichte von Staat, Wirtshaft, und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 12 (1975), pp. 67–103, see esp. graph 1.
Peter Bakewell, “Mining,” in Leslie Bethell (ed.), Colonial Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 203–49, fig. 2, p. 219; Pearce, “Huancavelica 1700–1759,” fig. 2, p. 694, and fig. 4, p. 702.
David A. Brading and Harry E. Cross, “Colonial Silver Mining: Mexico and Peru,” Hispanic American Historical Review 52 (1972), pp. 545–79, see pp. 573–77; Bakewell, “Registered Silver Production”, p. 89; Pierre Chaunu, “Notes péruviennes (XVIieme, XVIIieme, XVIIIieme siecles). Aristote et le Potosí,” Revue Historique 224 (1960), pp. 59–74, see pp. 70–72, considers the crisis already apparent by the late seventeenth century.
Jeffrey Cole, The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), fig. 3, p. 120.
Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Las minas de Huancavelica en los siglos XVI y XVII (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1949).
Marqués de Castelfuerte, “Relación del estado de los reynos del Perú … ” (1736), in Manuel Atanascio Fuentes (ed.), Memorias de los vireyes que han gobernado el Perú durante el tiempo del coloniaje español, 6 vols. (Lima: F Bailly, 1859), vol. 3, p. 347.
See respectively Kenneth J. Andrien, “The Sale of Fiscal Offices and the Decline of Royal Authority in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1633–1700,” Hispanic American Historical Review 62 (1982), pp. 49–71,
and John H. Parry, The Sale of Public Office in the Spanish Indies under the Hapsburgs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), p. 51;
Alfredo Moreno Cebrián, “Venta y beneficio de los corregimientos peruanos,” Revista de Indias 36:143–44 (1976), pp. 213–46, see p. 215;
and Mark A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, From Impotence to Authority: The Spanish Crown and the American Audiencias, 1687–1808 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977), p. 18.
Domínguez Ortiz, “Un virreinato en venta” Mercurio peruano 49 (Jan.–Feb. 1965), pp. 46–71.
Antonio Kenneth J. Andrien, Crisis and Decline: The Viceroyalty of Peru in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), pp. 117–21.
Jorge Tovar Velarde, “La Audiencia de Lima (1706–07). Dos años de gobierno criollo en el Perú,” Revista Histórica 23 (1957–58), pp. 338–453, see pp. 403–5; on Núñez de Sanabria,
see also Alfredo Moreno Cebrián, “El regalismo borbónico frente al poder vaticano: Acerca del estado de la Iglesia en el Perú durante el primer tercio del siglo XVIII,” Revista de Indias 63:227 (2003), pp. 223–74, esp. pp. 265–66 (where he is mistakenly described as from Cáceres in Sp a i n).
For a general survey, see Josep M. Barnadas, “The Catholic Church in Colonial Spanish America,” in Leslie Bethell (ed.), Cambridge History of Latin America, vol 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 511–40.
The absolute peak of Church wealth may have been reached by 1687, when a huge earthquake destroyed many churches, and much land and income was alienated to pay for reconstruction; Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Historia de la Iglesia en el Perú, 5 vols. (Lima: Imprenta Santa María, 1953–62), vol. 3, pp. 211–16.
The moral condition of the Church, and especially of the religious Orders, was criticized at length in what remains the best-known contemporary portrait of the “decadent viceroyalty,” that of Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa: Noticias secretas, Chaps. 5, 8, and 11. Merino’s Estudio crítico is a measured refutation of Juan and Ulloa’s accusations; see esp. Chap. 3. See now also especially Charles F. Walker, Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 111–16; Moreno Cebrián, “El regalismo borbónico,” esp. pp. 238–54.
Mercury production at Huancavelica fell below the levels of this early period only with the final crisis of the mines from the 1780s, with a catastrophic structural collapse and wholesale but fruitless administrative reform into the 1790s; see Arthur Preston Whitaker, The Huancavelica Mercury Mine: A Contribution to the History of the Bourbon Renaissance in the Spanish Empire (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1941), Chaps. 5–7.
Copyright information
© 2014 Adrian J. Pearce
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pearce, A.J. (2014). Imperial Hiatus: War in Spain and Crisis in Peru, 1700 to 1720s. In: The Origins of Bourbon Reform in Spanish South America, 1700–1763. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362247_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362247_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47262-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-36224-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)