Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (59 page)

There was nothing comparable in the Hispanic world to this massive movement of white immigrants into British North America during the first half of the eighteenth century, not least because of the crown's continuing formal prohibition on non-Spanish immigration, although a number of Irish and other foreign Catholics had been allowed to settle in the Indies during the seventeenth century, and officials showed a growing disposition in the eighteenth to relax the rules. A steady stream of Spaniards, however, continued to migrate, although apparently it flowed less strongly than in earlier times.27 As with British emigration in the eighteenth century, new tributaries were joining this stream. Just as, as in the eighteenth century, the British periphery was producing a growing share of the total number of white immigrants, so too the Spanish periphery was playing a larger part than before. During the seventeenth century increasing numbers of Basques, in particular, had joined the Castilians, Andalusians and Extremadurans who had preponderated in the first century of colonization. Eighteenth-century emigration saw the increased representation of immigrants from the northern regions of the peninsula - not only Basques but also Galicians, Asturians and Castilians from the mountain region of Cantabria - together with Catalans and Valencians, from the east coast of Spain.21

Some at least of this new wave of immigration from the periphery was encouraged and assisted by the Spanish crown. As the borders of Spain's American empire were pushed forward in the eighteenth century to counter the encroaching presence of the English and the French, great open spaces had somehow to be filled. There was little enthusiasm in Spain for migration to these remote outposts of empire, and successive governors of an underpopulated and ill-defended Florida begged Madrid to send them colonists. The crown responded by offering free transportation and other facilities to peasants from Galicia and the Canary Islands. The Galicians, clinging to their small parcels of land at home, were reluctant to be uprooted, but the crown enjoyed greater success with the Canary Islanders, whose tradition of emigration to America reached back to the earliest years of colonization. From the 1670s, as the population of the Canaries approached saturation point, islanders began to emigrate in significant numbers, in particular to Venezuela, with which the islands had maintained their connection since Cumana was conquered in the sixteenth century.29

The Canary Islanders tended to emigrate in family groups, and a number of families were resettled in the 1750s in St Augustine, the principal town of Florida. A small contingent of islanders had earlier been despatched to another distant outpost, San Antonio in Texas. The numbers of these government-sponsored immigrants, however, remained disappointingly few. As so often, Spanish bureaucracy proved the graveyard of good intentions."

Apart from the Spanish crown's policy of excluding the nationals of other European countries, there were good reasons why its transatlantic possessions should have proved less of a magnet to potential emigrants in the eighteenth century than those of the British crown. Although the population of Spain was growing again - from 7.5 million in 1717 to rather over 9 million in 176831 - it would take time to make up for the catastrophic losses of the seventeenth century, and especially those experienced in the realms comprising the Crown of Castile. Growth was stronger on the Spanish periphery than at the centre, and in so far as emigration was a response to population pressure at home, it was in the peripheral regions that the pressure was most likely to be felt.

In spite of new signs of economic vitality in many parts of Spanish America, the opportunities it offered for an immigrant population at this stage of its development are likely to have been less than those awaiting immigrants to the British colonies. As in British America, the import of African slaves - much of it in the hands of British merchants following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 - ensured a steady supply of labour for the haciendas and plantations. One reckoning of the number of Africans imported into Spain's American dominions between 1651 and 1760 puts the figure as high as 344,000.32 Growing numbers of slaves were needed to provide labour for territories on the fringes of empire, like New Granada, whose combined gold-mining and agricultural economy had become dependent on Africans to supplement a rapidly dwindling Indian population .31 in the cacao-growing province of Caracas in Venezuela black slavery was the predominant form of labour during the boom years which stretched from the 1670s to the 1740s.34 Another outpost of empire, Cuba, had a slave population of some 30,000 to 40,000 by the mid-eighteenth century. The mass importation of slaves into the island only began in the years after the brief British occupation of Havana in 1762, and was a response to the dramatic spread of the sugar plantations as sugar overtook hides and tobacco as Cuba's principal export.35

While the import of black slaves helped to meet local demands for unskilled labour in regions where indigenous labour was non-existent or in short supply, the older-established areas of Spanish settlement on the American mainland were less dependent on external sources of skilled labour than the majority of the British mainland colonies. As in British America, the eighteenth century was an age of population growth, and increasing numbers of Indians, mestizos and free blacks helped to swell an artisan class catering for an urban demand that was expanding, but was still limited by the poverty of all but a small elite.36

In the viceroyalty of New Spain, in particular, the total population showed a marked increase, from some 1.5 million in 1650 to 2.5-3 million a hundred years later - a figure larger than that of the total population of all the British American colonies combined.37 Across Spanish America, however, there were wide regional variations in the rate and extent of growth, just as there were also wide ethnic variations between the increase in the numbers of creoles and mestizos on the one hand, and Indians on the other. The Indian population of Peru, and still more of New Spain, was beginning to recover in the middle or later decades of the seventeenth century from the cataclysm that had overtaken it in the aftermath of conquest and colonization, but the recovery, while strengthening, continued to be fragile. In spite of improved resistance to European diseases, Indians remained vulnerable to waves of epidemics, like the one that ravaged the central Andes in 1719-20 or the typhoid fever that hit central Mexico in 1737. Indian mortality rates - and especially child mortality rates38 - remained significantly higher than those of the white and mestizo population. The recovery, too, would falter in the later eighteenth century in areas where the food supply was unable to keep pace with population increase.39

The creole population was also increasing. In Chile, where the Indian population continued its decline until it constituted under 10 per cent of the total population by the late eighteenth century, the creole community was growing at the rate of 1 per cent a year in the first half of the century, and the pace of growth would accelerate as the century proceeded.40 The figures for creole demographic increase were certainly assisted by the inclusion of those who, although not of pure Spanish descent, managed to pass themselves off as white. The most marked feature of eighteenth-century Spanish American life, however, was the rapid growth of the mixed population of castas.41 Its results were everywhere apparent, although less, for instance, in Chile than in New Granada, whose population by 1780 was 46 per cent mestizo, 20 per cent Indian, 8 per cent black, and 26 per cent `white' (creole and peninsular Spaniard). Creoles, for their part, constituted no more than 9 per cent of the total population of New Spain in the 1740s, although this rose to 18-20 per cent (no doubt including many mestizos) around 1800. In Peru in the 1790s 13 per cent of the population was creole, as against some 76 per cent in Chile.42 New Granada society was consequently more fluid than that of Andean Peru or the heavily settled regions of New Spain, where Indians accounted for 60 per cent or more of the population, and where the two `republics' of Spaniards and Indians continued to enjoy more than a purely nominal existence, at least outside the cities.43 Yet in New Spain and Peru, even if to a lesser extent than in New Granada, the growth of an ethnically mixed population was also changing the character of society and unleashing new forces which would sooner or later undermine traditional distinctions and erode Indian communities that had hitherto preserved a fair measure of integrity and autonomy.

One important consequence of eighteenth-century population growth throughout the Americas was an increase in the size of urban populations in both the British and the Hispanic colonial societies. Estimates suggest that the population of the five leading cities of mainland North America rose in the period 1720 to 1740 from between 29 per cent for Boston to 57 per cent for New York and 94 per cent for Charles Town. While this increase was impressive, these remained very small urban populations when compared with those of some of the major cities of the Spanish American world.44

1742 (to nearest thousand) 16,000 Boston 13,000 Philadelphia 11,000 New York 7,000 Charles Town Newport 6,000 1740s to 1760s (to nearest thousand) 112,000 Mexico City Lima 52,000 Havana 36,000 30,000 Quito 26,000 Cuzco 25,000 Santiago de Chile 19,000 Santa Fe de Bogota 19,000 Caracas 12,000 Buenos Aires

The growth of cities did not in itself mean a progressive urbanization of society. Indeed, as the population grew and spread outwards to cultivate new areas of land, so the proportion of town-dwellers in British America tended to decline. Even on the eve of independence, only 7-8 per cent of the mainland population lived in towns of more than 2,500 inhabitants.45 In Spanish America, too, population growth also seems to have led to a fall in the urban share of the population. With an estimated 13 per cent living in cities of 20,000 inhabitants or more in 1750, however, it was far above the North American percentage, and in line with European levels, although the cities of Spanish America were far more thinly distributed over space than their European counterparts.46

Even in the still relatively small cities of British America, urban growth brought in its train an expanding underclass, whose existence gave rise to mounting civic concern.47 In Boston, where the problem of poverty emerged for the first time on a serious scale during the war of 1690-1713 - a war which created many war widows and fatherless children, and left seamen and carpenters jobless when it ended - a quarter of the population were living below the poverty line in 1740.48 This was a problem with which Spanish American towns had long been familiar. The insurrection in Mexico City in 1692 was an unpleasant reminder of what could happen when a large and ethnically diverse population, living at or below the poverty line in crowded tenement houses and insalubrious conditions, was suddenly confronted with sharp rises in the price of maize and wheat.49

In the Hispanic world there was a well-established tradition of charitable giving, and the founding of convents and hospitals from the early years of settlement offered the possibility of relief for some at least of the poor and homeless. By the late seventeenth century, too, a network of municipal granaries had come into existence across the continent to hold down food prices and respond to sudden shortages. But the 1692 Mexico City riots were an indication that more drastic measures would be needed to tackle the problems of poverty, vagabondage and urban lawlessness, all of which increased as the cities of Spanish America expanded and hovels and shanties multiplied. During the eighteenth century both the imperial administration and municipal governments began to turn away from reliance on indiscriminate charity and move in the direction of more interventionist policies, confining the distribution of alms to the `deserving poor', and setting up institutions to confine the indigent.50

The Protestant world of the North American colonies lacked the institutional safety net of religious foundations and charitable fraternities which offered a measure of relief in Spanish America to the needy and abandoned. Heirs to the ethos of Elizabethan England, the colonists regarded idleness as a major cause of poverty, and carried with them to America the harsh corrective traditions of the Elizabethan poor laws. Indeed, poor law legislation in Massachusetts was even harsher than its English original. Stern measures were taken to set the poor to work, and `warn out' unwanted paupers and exclude undesirable immigrants, especially the Scots-Irish, when shiploads of them began arriving in Boston in the second and third decades of the eighteenth century.5' Yet the colonists also brought with them from their homeland an appreciation that the care of the `impotent poor' was a communal responsibility. They devoted money, in increasing quantities, to poor relief. In Anglican Virginia, in particular, the costs of welfare rose dramatically in the early eighteenth century, and charitable grants and other relief measures placed a growing burden on the parishes.52

While vestrymen and churchwardens struggled to keep pace with the increasing numbers of paupers, especially in the seaport towns, philanthropic associations sprang up to provide additional sources of relief.53 The responses to the problem of poverty in the Spanish and British colonial worlds did not therefore differ as much as their differing religious traditions might suggest. During the eighteenth century there appears to have been a growing convergence of attitudes to a common problem, as Spanish America, better endowed with religious and charitable foundations, moved in the direction of more interventionist and authoritarian measures, while British America, even if initially inclined to impute poverty to individual failings, displayed a growing awareness of the need to supplement restrictive legislation with communal and individual charity.

It seems plausible to assume, however, that poverty was proportionately much more widespread and acute in the teeming urban world of Spain's American territories than in the far smaller coastal towns of the British mainland colonies. There was always the safety valve of an expanding agrarian frontier in the British colonies, offering space and opportunity to indigent immigrants prepared to try their luck. The poor of the overcrowded Spanish colonial cities had fewer possibilities for escaping and making new lives for themselves, in a world where so much land was concentrated in the hands of large lay and ecclesiastical landowners, or was reserved for the use of Indian communities.