Making Imperial Futures: Concepts of Empire in the Anglo-Spanish Sphere, 1762-71

309 Pages·2012·2.08 MB·English

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.
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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.
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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!
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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
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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. While broadly judged to be the first
novel of its kind – the prototypical futurist work – Guttin’s novel was not yet truly focused on
displacement in time. As Paul K. Alkon astutely points out, it is not especially important that Epigone
takes place in some distant future century. Guttin wanted to create a distant, exotic space to set his
story, one that was primarily concerned with lampooning French customs and the more general state of
European affairs at the time. Just as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe would go on to illustrate in English-
3
language literature in the early eighteenth century, separating one’s audience from one’s characters by
placing them in a faraway land makes it possible to critique society in an oblique but purposeful manner.
Guttin took this idea even further – he amplified the sensation of distance by adding temporal
displacement to the already obvious spatial displacement that came from setting his story in an exotic,
non-European location.2 This rationale, which continues to be well-understood and utilized by writers of
contemporary speculative fiction, is fundamentally about space and about removing the audience from
their immediate, personal spatial context, thereby making them more receptive to social criticisms that
apply as much to their own society as to the imagined, exotic one.
Much changed over the next hundred years. In 1771, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440: rêve
s'il en fut jamais (The Year 2440: a Dream if There Ever Was One) became the first literary work to
explicitly show a future version of a well-known European locale. Mercier’s contribution differed from
Guttin’s in two crucial respects. First, it pioneered the use of a specific future year as the setting (and
title) of a story – a practice that would later be most famously repeated by George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949). Secondly, it provided readers with a protagonist who was from their own time – a
Parisian man whose long slumber leads him to wake hundreds of years in the future, in a much
improved and far more secular Paris with wide boulevards and happy, reason-loving people. This tale
was no idle fantasy. It did not merely seek to obliquely attack French society with vague analogues.
Rather, it drew a clear and undeniable connection between France in the era that immediately followed
the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) and one of the many possible future destinies for that country. Mercier
did not claim to be a prophet. His vision was based on a reasoned extrapolation of how Paris might
evolve over the centuries to come, and it was rapidly consumed by an audience with a clear thirst for

2 Paul K. Alkon, Origins of Futuristic Fiction (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), 18-9.
The works of Defoe and Swift that I refer to are, of course, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
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such speculations about the future. By the end of the eighteenth century, L’An 2440 had gone through
eleven editions in the original French, and had been translated into English, Dutch, Italian and German.
By the time of Mercier’s death in 1814, it had sold something on the order of 63 000 copies. Its status as
a book of great importance was further emphasized by how it infuriated authorities, who banned it in
France immediately upon its first publication and subsequently in Madrid in 1778. The author, who was
fully aware of the reaction that he was likely to get, initially published the book anonymously and did
not officially take credit for his work until 1791, when the rising tide of the French Revolution had
considerably altered the political scene.3
French and Spanish authorities did not appear to fully appreciate that Mercier’s work, and the
others that followed in his wake, were not the source of such agitated speculation about the future. It
was merely a symptom of another conceptual awakening. As David Wilson discusses in The History of
the Future, the eighteenth century was the period in which the notion of progress – “the triumph of
technology and reason over nature and passion” – truly came into its own as a force in human affairs.4
Mercier’s futurist dream was simply reflecting what was going on around him in the European world.
During the French Revolution, the Comte de Volney and the Marquis de Condorcet solidified the basis of
this new temporal-utopian genre by publishing similar works that reinforced the optimistic ideal that
progress and rationality would offer a brighter future for humanity, even as the radical terror of the
revolution wrapped itself around them. As Wilson explains, they cherished “the assumption that human
nature was infinitely malleable and could therefore be programmed for perfection.”5 In Future: A Recent
History, Lawrence S. Samuel also acknowledges the three-way connection between the Enlightenment,
the idea of “progress,” and the active practice of futurism as it began to be practiced by the likes of

3 Alkon, 117.
4 David A. Wilson, The History of the Future (Toronto: McArthur & Company, 2000), 4.
5 Wilson, 153.