Making Imperial Futures: Concepts of Empire in the Anglo- Spanish Sphere, 1762-71
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Making Imperial Futures: Concepts of Empire in the Anglo- Spanish Sphere, 1762-71 By David James Stiles A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Toronto © Copyright by David James Stiles 2012 Making Imperial Futures: Concepts of Empire in the Anglo- Spanish Sphere, 1762-71 David James Stiles Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Toronto 2012 Abstract My dissertation, Making Imperial Futures: Concepts of Empire in the Anglo-Spanish Sphere, 1763-71, engages the grand narrative of exploration at the point at which that very concept was reaching the point of exhaustion and argues that the rough completion of European cartographical knowledge of the world had a profound impact on the evolution of the imperial experience. I examine the evolving concept of empire within a context of cross- imperial knowledge and rivalry, Enlightenment ideals and the changing ways in which Europeans related to the concept of a progressive future. Furthermore, I challenge the historiographically dominant notion that the British and Spanish experiences of empire are best categorized and isolated as distinct historical subjects. The first section shows that British successes in the Seven Years’ War energised the British imperial imagination, generating a broad-based debate on how best to exploit the situation and opening up the opportunity to put more than one approach into action when Britain and Spain went to war in 1762. But the Peace of Paris brought discord, and a perceived need for the government to discipline the imperial imagination and to establish an approved ii pathway for the future of empire in the Atlantic world. The second part looks at how the Spanish government applied state power in direct pursuit of the pan-Atlantic imperial project. In particular, it re-examines the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish empire in 1767 and makes the argument that the expulsion was a response to the perceived Jesuit threat to pan- Atlantic imperial norms. My third section suggests that the experimental burst of modern, state-centric imperialism that began in the wake of the Seven Years’ War suffered a reversal during the Falklands Crisis of 1770-1, during the general historical moment in which Europeans finished constructing their shared cartographical conception of the world. Although the growth of state power and impetus was temporarily reversed to some extent in the 1770s, this period helps prefigure the more extensive shift from empires primarily based on exploration and tenuous consolidation to empires that depended on dense, active exploitation to lend validity to their ontological claims. iii Acknowledgments It seems an almost impossible task to properly thank each and every person who has helped me along the way, not just through this dissertation project, but through my entire post- secondary education. But I will try. Professor David C. Johnson of the University of Alberta was responsible for introducing me to the historical study of the Hispanic world when I was in the first year of my undergraduate degree. His love of the subject and excellent teaching helped determine my choice of major and started me down the path to this dissertation. Professor E. Ann McDougall was also a key mentor in those days, and always challenged me to think about history in different ways. During my time at the University of Texas at Austin, Professors Susan Deans-Smith and Mark Lawrence furthered my development as a historian and made my experience as an M.A. student a very positive one. At the University of Toronto, I owe a great debt to my co-supervisors, Professors Ken Mills and Jennifer Mori. Without their expertise in the histories of the early-modern Spanish and British worlds, respectively, it would have been a great deal harder to complete this fundamentally transnational project. I also greatly appreciated their willingness to let me attempt what must have initially seemed like a vague research agenda and their continued faith that it would all eventually turn into an acceptable dissertation. I would also like to thank Professor Mark Meyerson for his support and helpful feedback along the way, and Professor David Wilson for taking an interest in the project late in the game and for agreeing to serve as my internal examiner. In addition, I am grateful to Professor Anthony Pagden of UCLA, whose willingness to serve as my external examiner was very welcome news. iv A great many friends and relatives have helped me through this process as well. I cannot mention them all here, but a few have made particularly important contributions. In Toronto, Anthony Cantor has been an especially vital interlocutor throughout my time in the Ph.D. program, and has always challenged me to think a bit harder. I am indebted to Maureen Amar and Richard Jenkins and to Janice and Brian Thorburn for their repeated hospitality in London, and to everyone at the Victoria League for Commonwealth Friendship Student House. They have all made my research process much more pleasant and productive than it might otherwise have been. My parents have always been very supportive of my graduate education and of my pursuits in general and I am grateful to them for that. Finally, my journey through the last phase of the process has been made so much better by the wonderful companionship of Laura Shasko. Thank you all! v Table of Contents Introduction – The Resurrection of Apocryphal Imperial Futures 1 Part I – British Confrontations Prologue – Dressing the Imperial Set 15 Chapter One – Sorrows to the Stones: Havana/Manila, 1762-5 24 Chapter Two – The Peace of Paris and the Struggle for British Imperial Consensus, 1762-5 62 Chapter Three – Imperial Ideology, Aesthetics and Geography from Manila to Central America, 1763-70 89 Part II – Spanish Assimilations Prologue – The Demise of Early Modern Empire 132 Chapter Four – Evolving the Spanish Empire in the British Shadow, 1759-66 139 Entr’acte – Lord Rochford and the Esquilache Riots, 1766 192 Chapter Five – Death of a Future: The Path to the Jesuit Expulsion, 1766-7 198 Part III – Atlantic Ententes Prologue – Into the Sublime Pacific 236 Chapter Six – The Falklands and the Revelation of Unknown Space, 1766-71 246 Conclusion – The Spatial Status Quo and the Coming of Modern Imperialism 285 Bibliography 289 vi Introduction The Resurrection of Apocryphal Imperial Futures Let us talk about the future – not about what lies ahead for us in the twenty-first century, but about potential imperial futures that once resided in the imaginations of eighteenth-century Britons and Spaniards. I have chosen this approach to the historical study of imperialism because looking forward is far more endemic to the human experience than looking back. In the succinct words of philosopher Barry Dainton, “our deliberations are oriented toward the future, not the past. No one spends time wondering about what to do yesterday.”1 If we show concern about past events, it is largely because we are concerned about how they will affect our futures. So it should follow quite reasonably and intuitively that a considerable part of scholarly inquests into the history of human thought and ambition should also be focused on the problem of what people of past eras thought was going to happen next, in spite of the fact that the world never unfolds precisely as anyone predicts. In fact, the dynamic asymmetries and dissonance between differing visions of the future are important factors in ensuring that the actual unfolding of the human experience is distinct from what any given person anticipates. The temporal knowledge asymmetry – our knowledge of past but not future – makes it far easier to write about what has come before than about what might happen next. It is also a problem for historians, as it creates a bias that strongly privileges events that actually occurred over the many additional imagined futures that may have seemed equally valid to the denizens of past eras. If we want to construct a more nuanced and textured understanding of the factors that have driven human history, it is important to work at the reconstruction of a complete temporal context – a sense of how past 1 For a succinct explanation of these and several other temporal asymmetries in the human experience, see Barry Dainton, Time and Space, 2nd Edition (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010), 45-7. 2 people viewed their unknown futures. This effort is particularly important for the history of the past few hundred years. I will suggest in these introductory pages that the mid-eighteenth century represents a pivotal moment in the history of the Atlantic world because it was home to an important shift in how people throughout that sphere interacted with both time and space. The Atlantic sense of reality, and the boundary between the known and the unknown, was irreparably transfigured from one primarily oriented toward space to one that was primarily oriented toward time. By the end of the 1760s, almost the entire world had became known, measured, and mapped, and the sublime terror of unknown geographical reaches was rapidly fading away. As a consequence of that development, all potential utopias and apocalypses had to be relocated from exotic spaces into exotic times – because of the knowledge asymmetry, almost always into some possible future. Perhaps the best way to show what this idea means is to refer to the fantastical works of two French writers, one from the mid-seventeenth century and the other from the mid-eighteenth. They are important, representative signposts that shine some light on the evolution of the conceptual interface between the known and the unknown over the century between them. Signposts of a Transformation The first of these two men is Jacques Guttin, whose romance Epigone, histoire du siècle futur (Epigone, Tale of a Future Century) arrived on the scene in 1659.