The Spirit of Conquest and the Spanish Commercial Empire

In the late sixteenth century, England, France, and the Dutch Republic jealously observed Spain’s imperial expansion in the New World. However, as the Iberian polity began to decline, so too did its international reputation as an empire worthy of emulation. As a result, the English and the Dutch developed what has come to be known as the Black Legend, the idea that Spain’s rapacious conquerors almost completely destroyed the New World’s population and territories for an irrational pursuit of gold and silver. By the late seventeenth century, European thinkers agreed that Spain’s “spirit of conquest” inevitably led to decline.

This paper reconstructs how eighteenth-century Spanish ministers appropriated this critique towards Spain’s spirit of conquest to design an ambitious project of imperial reform centered on stimulating trade and economic improvement. To do so, they imagined the Spanish Monarchy as a kind of machine, with the king as its engineer and imperial officials as scientific advisors. They implemented free internal trade to harness colonial markets and increase production in the metropole. They expected that this new system of trade would transform Spain’s “composite” monarchy into a powerful commercial empire capable of competing with Britain and France.

But, Spanish imperial ministers not only emulated the British and French models of commercial empire; they also improved upon them. They understood that the viability of the new imperial project depended on the effective integration of the colonies as essential components of the empire. It was for this reason that the Spanish crisis of empire (1808-1812) culminated with an Atlantic solution that included an imperial parliament and a constitution that applied to subjects from both hemispheres. While the project for a Spanish parliamentary commercial empire ultimately failed, its history brings into sharp relief how Atlantic empires emulated and improved upon each other’s systems of imperial government.