THE ABDICATION OF ECONOMIC AUTHORITY

It seems appropriate that this study should conclude with some general reflections about the importance of economic causation in creating revolutionary situations in Spanish America by the early nineteenth century by discussing briefly the principal conspiracies and insurrections of the late colonial period prior to 1810, with a view to determining, first, the extent to which they were ‘revolutionary’ and, second, and more specifically, the relative importance of economic grievances in their formulation and motivation.

The point has already been made in Chapter 11 that even in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when Spain had lost effective economic control of America, the abdication of economic authority actually helped to preserve Americans’ political allegiance to the metropolis, for it satisfied, albeit in a cumbersome and inadequate way, the urgent need for producers to obtain direct access to the markets for their agricultural and mining production and to import manufactured goods directly from non-Spanish producers. This was a period in which Spanish America had already broken free from peninsular commercial control to become much more closely integrated than in the early-eighteenth century into the economic life of Europe as a whole, one complex consequence—and cause—of which was the diminishing importance of America as a source of international conflict between the great powers. Although by the late-eighteenth century Great Britain retained Canada, and major islands in the Caribbean, its diplomatic and imperial strategy after 1783 relied increasingly, perhaps as an attempt to rationalise the loss of its traditional colonies in America, upon commerce rather than conquest. France, too, remained a significant imperial power in the Caribbean, but the impending loss of St Domingue (which finally secured actual independence as Haiti in 1804, although France did not recognise it as such until 1824), coupled with its withdrawal from Louisiana, marked in its case, too, a territorial abdication from American affairs. The fledgling United States, for its part, had not yet embarked upon the process of westwards expansion which in the 1830s and 1840s would see it gobble up enormous areas of territory bequeathed to Mexico by Spain in 1821; the new republic, like its English forbear, relied in the final decades of the eighteenth century upon commercial rather than territorial penetration of Spanish America.