In the course of just 75 years, the Spanish Empire went from being a leading trans­oceanic political entity to being a second-ranked player.1

During the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), in which Spain fought alongside France and lost, Spain's posi­tion still appeared to be strong. However, by 1830 and the end of the internal and external conflicts sparked by Napoleon's invasion, the empire's geographic exten­sion and military capacity had visibly and inexorably diminished.

Understanding the decline entails a clear grasp of two key issues: what the Spanish Empire actually was, and which features distinguished it from similar po­litical entities. The Spanish colonial world did not develop along the same lines as those of Britain, Holland, or France.² The critical difference lay in the very basis of the project and the chronology of its particular build-up. The Spanish presence in America was, from the start, based on intensive mining of precious metals that were essential for international commerce and the consolidation of sophisticated monetary systems in Europe and Asia. This pattern relied upon a combination of forced Amerindian labor and wage labor (plus the slavery of Africans in New Spain's mining districts). Those productive arrangements were embodied within the sophisticated social fabric and legal solutions that emerged in the aftermath of the demographic collapse of pre-Columbian societies.

¹ These pages are part of a research effort funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, project HAR2012-39352-CO2-01.

² The best comparative study is Elliott 2006.

Josep M. Fradera, Late Spanish Empire In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0036.

990 JOSEP M. FRADERA

Map 36.1. The Spanish Empire at the Dawn of the Spanish-American War. Copyright: Oxford University Press.

New France, were devoted to agriculture and the collection of hides. In the end, Spain's competitors occupied geographically limited enclaves where they actively traded cloth and spices between Asia and Europe at the same time as they built, along with the Portuguese, a large-scale economy of sugar and tobacco based on African slavery - products that were in high demand in European countries. The fierce inter-imperial competition in trade and conquest in North America and the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia starting in the seventeenth cen­tury can thus be seen as the manifestation of the shifting balance of power among rivals whose productive models and institutional and social structures were quite distinct from one another.

In analyzing the eighteenth and nineteenth-century decline, one must be careful to avoid commonplaces adopted by contemporaries who were also engaged in a fierce ideological battle. In this sense, insofar as its long-range social and economic organization is concerned, the Spanish imperial complex can be seen as the integra­tion of three related empires: that of peninsular individuals and corporations, both lay and ecclesiastic; that of the Crown; and that of the colonists themselves.

The Crown's extractive and regulatory functions among colonial societies, and between these societies and the metropolis, were established in the late sixteenth­century. The passage of precious metals both guaranteed and expressed the su­premacy of the monarchical state and its will to exercise control over a significant part of American resources, and to make the Americans pay for most of their own defense. This latter demand found expression in the transfer of earmarked financial resources from one part of the empire to another, known as situados. These finan­cial instruments ensured steady redistribution from richer areas to those unable to generate sufficient resources to provide for themselves. The northernmost part of New Spain, Chile, the captaincy general of Venezuela and Cartagena de Indias, the viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, and, most especially, the Philippines and the Spanish Antilles (Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Puerto Rico) received enormous amounts, which were also partly channeled to the metropolis through commerce between Spain and America.^[2283]

The empire of the colonists was established after the conquest and the initial settlement in order to meet the needs of two strategic economic sectors: precious metal mining and transatlantic trade. Food, clothing, and transport supplied by the local economies all became notably independent throughout the seventeenth century, relatively unscathed by the waning and waxing of European political powers immersed in warfare. This was the zone that became the site of the most important transactions between pre-European productive and social organiza­tional forms and those that slowly came to be regarded as defining the nature of colonial society. In the eighteenth century, demographic growth in some regions and increasing trade boosted the importance of the colonial economy, which was of concern to the Spanish Crown, that desperately needed to augment its resources. The colonial economy and transatlantic trade generated income that flowed into the Crown's tributary or tax structure, which in turn distributed resources through the aforementioned situados, which finally stimulated commerce and agriculture and extended beyond the Crown's fiscal jurisdiction.