Northern South America at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

Chapter 2 Northern South America at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

The real cédula of May 27, 1717, which announced the creation of the viceroyalty of New Granada outlined the territory that would fall under its jurisdiction. It included “all the province of Santa Fe, New Kingdom of Granada, those of Cartagena, Santa Marta, Maracaibo, Caracas, Antioquia, Guyana, Popayan and those of San Francisco de Quito, with all [the territory] and boundaries they comprise”.1 Although the city and province of Panama remained part of the viceroyalty of Peru, the reales cédulas also announced the suppression of its audiencia and suggested that putting an end to the political instability of that province was part of the motivations behind the radical overhaul of the administrative organization of northern South America.2 Indeed, political instability was one of three themes that permeated the his- tory of the region in the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth century, along- side contraband trade and defensive concerns. These three, often interrelated matters impacted directly upon the daily lives, networking strategies and interests of local elites and royal authorities. They determined external perspectives of the region, its problems and the role that it should play within the broader Spanish empire. Several major incidents linked to one or more of these three themes took place in the region in the years spanning the end of Charles II’s reign and the creation of the viceroyalty of New Granada in 1717. Their sig- nificance was enough to concentrate the attention of Spanish authorities and, eventually, to determine the implementation of radical solutions trying to prevent their possible repetition. They are particularly telling of the links and interactions between local elites, royal officials, peninsular authorities and foreign merchants; they are also indicative of the amount of self-government that local elites actually enjoyed and of the way in which local politics reflected the shifting balance of local interests and their connection to the wider Spanish and Atlantic worlds.

1 “Real cédula por la cual se crea el Virreinato del Nuevo Reino de Granada en 27 de mayo de 1717” reproduced in full in Jerónimo Becker and José María Rivas Groot, El Nuevo Reino de Granada en el Siglo XVIII (Madrid: Imp. Del Asilo de Húerfanos del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, 1921), pp. 200–203 at 201. 2 Ibid., p. 203.

This chapter offers a brief overview of the situation in northern South America in the two decades immediately preceding the first creation of the viceroyalty of New Granada. It focuses particularly upon a series of events that worried authorities in Spain and were alluded to, either directly or indi- rectly, within the documentation surrounding the creation of the viceroyalty: the French occupation of Cartagena de Indias in 1697; the overthrow of the president of the audiencia of Santa Fe, Francisco de Meneses, in 1715; and the chronic political infighting in Panama and Quito during the War of the Spanish Succession.

2.1 Northern South America and the Spanish Atlantic Empire

At the turn of the eighteenth century, northern South America was strategi- cally significant, but not economically or politically central to the Spanish American empire. In terms of population, generation of revenue and volume of trade it lagged behind the far wealthier kingdoms of New Spain and Peru. Moreover, as Anthony McFarlane has pointed out, most of the region existed largely “independent of the great colonial economic systems that focused around silver mining [. . .] and st[ood] as a separate and distinctive territory with a character of its own”.3 On the Caribbean rim, Cartagena de Indias and the province of Panama had enjoyed particular importance in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century because of their role in Spanish trade with Peru; but the decline in the frequency with which the galeones reached South America in the last quarter of the seventeenth century had taken its toll.4 Santa Fe, in the New Granadan interior, had never been more than a provin- cial administrative center. The once buoyant textile industry of the province of Quito was in decline and the provinces of Venezuela remained little more than a backwater of the Spanish monarchy, important mainly because of its proxim- ity to foreign settlements. The political organization of the region was complex. Prior to the creation of the viceroyalty, four different audiencias had jurisdiction over the four- teen different provinces which would become the viceroyalty’s territory, and each of these had its own governor. The audiencia of Panama governed the

3 Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence. Economy, Society, and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 1. This section draws exten- sively on McFarlane’s excellent description of the situation of New Granada at the turn of eighteenth century. 4 Between 1675 and 1700 only six convoys arrived in Cartagena, Ibid., p. 22.