Abolition, Emigration, and the Free-Trade Imperialism of Others

Spain's position in the world of empires began to change around 1860. Until then, the apparent stability of the three-colonies system had allowed Spanish govern­ments to carry out foreign attacks or put pressure on their old American possessions under the pretext of collecting debts.

The Cuban uprising revealed the contradictions at the heart of Spain's final co­lonialist phase, not just its questionable military capacity. In essence, this resulted from the Cubans demand for self-governance. A coalition gradually emerged from among the insurgents comprising diverse sectors of liberals and nationalists as well as landowners from the eastern part of the island who were less connected to slavery and Spain and closer to neighboring Caribbean societies. Missing from this political and social mix were the great sugar growers around Havana and the new plantation frontier toward the center of the island.

But, once again, the Spanish imperial collapse at the end of the century should not obscure the complexity of this last period. The final crisis of the system was shaped by a transformation in the international relationships of the three Spanish colonies. Economically, the port of Havana became one of the principal axes of Spain's foreign presence, yet even though Cuban and Puerto Rican sugar and coffee were gradually going to the United States and northern Europe instead of to the metropolitan market. The same pattern of a combination of formal and informal colonialism took place in the Philippines, which depended on trade with China, Great Britain, and Japan and on tobacco purchased by Belgian and Dutch firms.^[2309] Even with those restrictions, Spain protected its merchant marine, trading companies and manufacturers sufficiently well to maintain shipping relations between the metropolitan economy and the three colonies. Several factors allowed Spanish capitalism to gain ground not only in Manila but also in Luzon and the Visayas: the elimination of the tobacco monopoly in the Pacific archipelago, the opening of the Suez Canal, and the redesign of tariff policy throughout the Spanish possessions in favor of Spain's exports and finan­cial investments.

At the same time, emigration to the two Antilles and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines, grew. Spanish emigration to America had never received state aid aimed at ensuring internal stability or colonization of the frontier. After years of restricting emigration to American colonies (as well as independent countries in continental America) for demographic and military reasons, the policy was changed in the mid-nineteenth-century along the lines of similar tendencies in the Atlantic.^[2310] Until then, restrictions had meant that emigration was kept to a very modest level, limited to certain peripheral regions (Galicia, the Canary Islands) and to the traditional commercial areas (Catalonia, the Basque Country, and certain parts of Andalusia). Emigrants drawn by higher salaries and opportunities in the colonies and in southern America (Argentina and Uruguay) and Brazil compelled a liberalization policy from 1851 through the 1860s. Cheaper passages and steam ships took care of the rest, favoring increased conventional emigration along with seasonal emigration, typical of poor regions such as Galicia and the Canary Islands.

The impact of the Spanish-born population in the colonies was felt after the Pact of Zanjon, signed in February 1878, with ended the war in Cuba and launched a period of reforms. In exchange for the insurrectionist army recognizing Spanish sovereignty, the metropolis accepted the inevitability of a liberal system of represen­tation. In practical terms, that meant accepting a system of two monarchical parties (Conservatives and Liberals) along the lines of the established political system in Spain. While one party would fiercely defend Spain's interests, the Cuban and Puerto Rican liberals at some point defended the islands' economic interests and demanded home rule along Canadian lines within the British Empire. This agree­ment, watched over by the Spanish state, looked like it might be stabilized after the liberals took over in Spain in 1885.^[2311] But their inability (or the impossibility) to im­pose a reform program based on self-government, combined with anti-corruption campaigns in the Antillean public realm, spelled failure. Few Spaniards residing in the islands, many of them recent arrivals, were willing to give up their privileges and control, and few of the islanders were willing to play if the dice were loaded.

Another crucial aspect of the social and political changes in the Antilles resulted from the emancipation of the slaves from 1870 to 1886. Starting with the Cortes of Cadiz in 1811, this had been discussed many times, but it was postponed over and over again owing to pressure from Cuban vested interests and the fact that slavery offered stability in its last imperial phase. But the rise of Spanish liberalism, a fairly weak abolitionist movement and the Cuban uprising put slavery back on the Spanish reformist agenda. In the early 1870s liberal governments enacted the very moderate Moret Law (July 4, 1870), a “free womb law” that freed slaves born into slavery, those over 60 years old, “emancipated” slaves (Africans captured from slave ships and leased by the state to private owners), and those who had fought with Spain against the insurrectionists. Soon afterward, in March 1873, the Spanish First Republic ended slavery in Puerto Rico.

The final abolition of slavery in the Spanish Antilles clearly forms part of the last emancipatory cycle in other European colonies in the Caribbean, the United States, and Brazil.^[2312] This was a large-scale abolition, particularly in Cuba, where in 1877 there were still 199,094 slaves, a sign of the mid-century transformation of the sugar sector. But Spanish reformist liberalism was in an untenable position when it took power in September 1868, given the victory of the Union in the US Civil War three years earlier. Immediately, the Spaniards were trapped between the need to win the support of large sugar landowners and to undertake a reform program that would give them credibility, both nationally and internationally. This fatal dilemma turned even worse after the Cuban insurrectionist army drew slaves and former slaves to its ranks.

The situation in Spain's other Caribbean colony was different. In Puerto Rico, African slavery never reached Cuban proportions, as the island's economy remained divided between sugar plantations (for example in Ponce and Arecibo) and areas of free peasant labor, with only occasional slavery, which included the mountainous central region devoted to coffee.^[2314] No viable separatist or insurrectionary move­ment emerged after slavery was abolished in 1873. And, far away from the Antilles, the political situation in the Philippines also remained radically different. The country was fragmented, and the rapid emergence of an agricultural export sector spurred economic growth around port cities, particularly Manila-Cavite in Luzon and Iloilo in the Visayas. This development, beginning in the early part of the cen­tury, led to important struggles over land (the regular orders of the Church were important landowners) and foreign commerce, as Spaniards in the Archipelago and in Spain, the Chinese, mixed-blood Chinese, and European and North American business interests all established their positions.