The Spanish Theory of Commercial Empire, c. 1740–65

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century a host of Spanish ministers began to argue that “the purpose of the colony is to benefit the patria, to whom it owes its existence.” Such statements embodied not just a commitment to centralize the Spanish Monarchy, but, more accurately, a desire to transform a composite monarchy into a commercial empire with a metropole in the Iberian Peninsula and dependent colonies in the Americas. In other words, these ministers envisioned an imperial system in which the colonies’ exclusive function was to consume metropolitan commodities. For these ministers, American dominions were indispensable for the metropole not simply because of their abundant stock of precious metals, but, more importantly, because of their great potential for consumption. As Simón de Aragorri put it in 1761, “one of the core maxims of American commerce is to have the colonies in a complete dependence of their metropole, which is to say, in the obligation to extract from the dominions of their sovereign everything they need for their consumption.”  Aragorri, like many of his contemporaries, insisted that to harness the consumption of the colonies for the benefit of the metropole it was necessary to abolish the old fleet and galleon commercial system and to implement internal comercio libre, a policy that materialized in 1765 with the first comercio libre decree. This paper scrutinizes the intellectual coalescing of this new imperial program among a key set of Spanish ministers. It contextualizes this imperial vision in Enlightenment debates concerning commerce, consumption and early globalization. The paper concludes by highlighting that while many European thinkers paid great attention to international trade, Spanish ministers focused almost exclusively on colonial markets. As a result, unlike British and French statesmen, Spanish reformers envisioned a self-sufficient and closed commercial empire.