The Emergence of the Three Colonies System

The preservation of Spain's three colonial enclaves of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines marked the posthumous triumph of the Bourbon reforms. Britain's occupation of Havana and Manila made it extremely urgent to find a solution for the insular colonies.

There can be no mistaking the fact that although fiscal solutions were necessary, the objective was still essentially military. Furthermore, the defeat of the Spanish armies on the continent led to increased militarization in the Philippines and the Antilles, to which Spanish forces withdrew and where new punitive expeditions to the continent were being prepared.^[2298]

Though military priorities set the direction, the viability of the enclaves also required efficacious reforms signaling new directions for those peripheral societies. Their military installations—massive fortifications in capitals and ports, and militias—may have been similar, but their societies were varied. In the Antilles, the key problem was how to tax the emerging agricultural export sector, notably sugar but also coffee, tobacco, and other crops. The collapse after the 1791 slave revolt in French Saint-Domingue, which had been the world's leading producer of sugar, benefited the rising plantations, which consolidated during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The new sugar economy marked a decisive shift for the Spanish Caribbean, whose economy had previously been dominated by livestock and supplies for the transatlantic fleets.^[2299] The development of this new pattern required important changes in imperial policy that would end up placing particular demands on the administration both before and after the imperial collapse.^[2300] Before the Napoleonic wars, the challenge lay in ensuring colonists' essential supplies of slaves and access to European and North American markets.

It was a bottleneck that meant putting an end to the asiento system (state contracts with foreign slavetraders) and liberalizing the importation of slaves from Africa. This shift made it easier for the Spanish merchant marine to gain access to slave routes alongside ships of other nations, notably the United States and Portugal. At the same time, expansion of sugar plantations required massive imports of food for the slaves, including flour and cod from North America and salted meat (tasajo) from Rio de la Plata. As a result, mercantilist regulations underwent their first great collapse, leading to the deregulation of Cuban tariffs, which were completed in 1818. Later, the fundamental challenge was to protect agricultural exports and sugar mills from British anti-slavery initiatives, both official and abolitionist, starting in the 1820s.^[2301] The abolition treaty signed by the Spanish and British governments in 1817, which went into effect three years later, made trafficking of African slaves both illegal and clandestine.^[2302] Notorious violations of the treaty placed the Spanish government in a delicate situation, which lasted until the end of the Brazilian expeditions in the 1850s and the end of the US Civil War in the 1860s, which turned slaving into an anomaly. In the meantime, the number of slaves in the Cuban censuses grew steadily from 38,879 in 1774, to 286,942 in 1827, 323,759 in 1846, 374,806 in 1855 and 368,550 in 1862, before falling to 287,620 in 1871.^[2303]

Consolidation of the plantation economy was key to Spain's continued presence in the Antilles. Slavery grew in importance also in urban settings of personal service and artisan work.^[2304] In other European empires the old planters had lost ground; in the case of Spain, it was the opposite. The Madrid-Cadiz-Havana axis became crucial to the empire's sustenance, even when the sugar sector could no longer import neither enslaved Africans, nor indentured Yucatecans and Chinese after the US Civil War.

The social basis for this Spanish imperial meridian consisted in a trade-off between the great sugar fortunes, merchants and slave traders, and political power. This implicit pact had economic, social, and political aspects that need to be made explicit. The economic factors were subject to negotiations over participation by the tropical agricultural sector, merchants, shipowners, financiers, and the Spanish treasury in the extraordinary profits to be made from Antillean exports. The political factors primarily concerned internal defense regarding international slaving policy, an institution condemned by the Congress of Vienna. Early on, there was long disagreement over sugar tariffs; later, the question was whether tariffs should continue and the possibility (which was not put into practice) of direct taxes on land ownership. During the years leading up to the 1870s, the Cuban administration had to support a bloated army plus the expenses of the civil administration while also supporting the empire in the rest of America, and yet it managed to send money back to the metropolis (payments known as “overseas extras” [sobrantes de ultramar], a misnomer if there ever was one.) The occupation and war in Santo Domingo in 1861-1865—supposedly to help one of the political factions there—and the failed expedition by the tripartite alliance of France, Great Britain, and Spain in order to reinstate a monarchy in Mexico in 1862 signaled the collapse of that balance of interests. The first Cuban war of independence, from 1868 to 1878, along with the delayed impact of the war in the 1880s, only worsened the situation. Tax revenue in the Antilles should have been invested in the colony itself to meet ordinary expenses and eventually pay the interest on the debt. Nevertheless, Spain's foreign policy continued to focus on overseas treasuries, even in order to pay pensions for military officers and civil servants who had at some point been in the colonies.

In this context, the Filipino case is noteworthy.

While the crucial player in the Antilles had been sugar (with coffee and tobacco in lesser roles), in the Philippines it was the production and sale of tobacco, consumed even by the archipelago's most modest classes and also an important export good. The establishment of the tobacco monopoly in the area around Manila in 1782 therefore comes as no surprise, as it was part of the general implementation of military and fiscal reforms throughout the empire. The monopoly (as well as the opium consumed by the huge Chinese population in Manila) was organized along the lines of New Spain Bourbon monopoly as a response to the historical scarcity of disposable resources in the most remote possession.^[2305] The need for reform was made clear in 1762-1763 by a set of interrelated factors: the seizure over an entire year of the capital and port of Manila by a British fleet at the very same moment that Havana had been taken, the “betrayal” by Manila's Chinese inner population, and finally the questionable loyalty demonstrated by the Church, largely by members of regular orders who distrusted the state reforms in the archipelago. The transformation of the monopoly itself from being a way to pump resources into the central treasury to becoming the basic compensatory mechanism of the disruption of the trans-Pacific axis (silver from New Spain in exchange for Asian products) is an essential part of the explanation for Spain's continued rule over the Philippines. It was the Spanish administration in Manila that ensured self-sufficiency of the islands, which were increasingly isolated from the metropolis and the viceroyalty of New Spain.

The late-eighteenth-century reforms were a combination of two very different impulses: a new imperial direction based on new administrative models, and an unfettered ability to exploit colonial societies. In the Philippines, the process was as intrusive as elsewhere, albeit somewhat different. The establishment of the tobacco monopoly ruined native growers and the mixed-blood Chinese who distributed the leaves, forced a shift from other crops in the provinces where tobacco would be grown, and gave rise to an impressive distribution system around a product now regarded as a basic commodity.^[2306] When tobacco was released from its monopoly in Cuba in 1817, the result of pressures from Cuban sugar growers connected to the increasing international demand for sugar, administrators in the Philippines paid no heed to the winds of liberalization.

In the late 1820s Spain took the important step of building a production region in Cagayan (from which a second center, Isabela, would break off in 1860). This coleccion, consisting of20,000 peasant families devoted exclusively to growing tobacco for the monopoly, spurred internal consumption and a distribution network controlled by the state. Leaves were shipped to Spain's equivalent monopoly (with shipping paid for by the Philippines) and tobacco auctions open to foreign merchants were organized in Manila, which became one of the elements (along with opening up Luzon and the Visayas Islands to foreign trade) that allowed cash payments to peasant growers. This quite elementary system of colonial exploitation through taxation lasted until 1882, when the tobacco monopoly was eliminated, with much of it moving into the hands of a large Spanish company (funded in part with French capital) established for that very purpose. Previously, the tobacco monopoly had fulfilled several objectives: it ensured the colony's financial self-sufficiency, maintained the interest of international commerce in the archipelago, and allowed the development of incipient, lightly taxed export sectors, such as rice, Manila hemp, sugar, and coffee, many of which were in the hands of Britons or Filipinos.^[2307]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

The Emergence of the Three Colonies System

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