Theorizing Imperial Ambivalence

Spanish imperialism in the Americas was a selfless endeavor that, despite being misguided, greatly benefited the colonies in the long run. That, at least, is the ambivalent characterization of the early modern Spanish Empire that Ángel Ganivet (1865–1898) offers in his essay Idearium español (1897), a work that has been described as “el texto clásico y fundante del nacionalismo español” [the classic and founding text of Spanish nationalism] (Abellán, “Introducción” 15). Written and published in the midst of the imperial crisis sparked by the Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898), Idearium español addresses Spain's transition from an imperial to a post-imperial nation in a curious manner. While it remains silent about Spain's “new colonialism” in the nineteenth century in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, it has much to say about other European colonialisms in Africa and Spain's “old colonialism” in the Americas – that is, about the colonial practices that took place in the territories of what contemporaries knew as the Monarquía hispánica.

In addition to various references to British imperialism (123–24), Belgian imperialism in Africa (139), and the status of Spain's former colonies in Latin America (202–16, 226–27), one often finds the early modern Spanish Empire metonymically associated with some of its main figures (from Charles V and Philip II to the conquistadors) and cultural dispositions (the spirit of conquest itself). But one would be hard pressed to find a single reference to the system of administrative domination and fiscal exploitation that Spanish Liberals established in their colonies in the Antilles and the Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century. This system, which was based upon the enslavement of African peoples in the Antilles and the forced labor of Filipino peasants, the fiscal pillaging of local treasuries, and the political repression of the rights and aspirations of colonial societies, saw its successful institutionalization between 1858 and 1861. Shortly thereafter, it revealed its many weaknesses – just recall that the Ten Year's War against Spain broke out in eastern Cuba a mere seven years later in 1868. By 1897, when Idearium español was published, the definitive crisis of the nineteenth-century Spanish colonial system was evident to all, but Ganivet only made occasional references to it in his works, characterizing it as a pre-modern colonial system, and thus inherently “spiritual” and generous, as if it were an idealized continuation of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century empire.