THE NEW DYNASTY

The question of how to interpret Spanish aims and achievements with respect to America in the eighteenth century is one which continues to preoccupy historians. Was it, as the ministers of Charles III and the historians of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who accepted their interpretation insisted, a period of unhindered progress and prosperity, when the implementation of a rational reform programme awakened Spain from its slumber of the seventeenth century, and then enabled it to ‘rediscover’ America, and turn it into the material and spiritual force for the further regeneration of the metropolis? Or, as the more critical historiography of the late-twentieth century suggests, should it be characterised as a period when Spain fumbled with imperial structures, pursuing reforms in a hesitant, uncertain way, and succeeded only in bringing its American possessions to the levels of maturity and confidence required for their transition to independence in the early-nineteenth century? These, and related, questions continue to preoccupy historians concerned with the general thrust of Bourbon policy towards America between 1700 and 1810. They should also be kept in mind when reading this chapter, which will outline the economic and commercial policies pursued by the early Bourbons, as a preliminary to more specific and detailed analysis in Chapters 9–10 of the attempts of Charles III (1759–1788) and his ministers fundamentally to restructure the imperial commercial system and develop the American mining industry in the last third of the eighteenth century.

The first and most immediate problem which faced the new Bourbon dynasty of Spain, headed by Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV of France and María Theresa (the daughter of Philip IV of Spain, whose marriage to the French king 40 years earlier turned out to be one of the more significant dynastic alliances of the seventeenth century) was that his very succession to the Spanish throne in 1700, upon the death of the childless last Hapsburg, Charles II, unleashed the aptly-named War of the Spanish Succession.