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The colonization of America by Spanish colonists was one of the most important pages in the nation’s history. The colonial population, with abundant land and natural resources, was soon more than reproducing itself; and constant immigration, now increasing from non-British parts of Europe, added further impetus to its growth. By 1776 the population of the thirteen British colonies had risen to 2,600,000. Nothing comparable to this phenomenal growth occurred in the empires of other powers. A further attraction of the British colonies was that they were self-governing and largely free from the interference or regulation of the home government. This was exceptional, for most European states with colonies regarded them merely as provinces of the mother country beyond the seas and therefore subject to a central direction as close, if not closer, than that of the homeland. The pattern had been set by the Spaniards, who governed the whole of their empire from a council of the Indies sitting in Madrid. The colonial regional viceroyalties had little freedom of action, serving merely as channels for the transmission of orders from Spain to the corregidores who represented the king at the local level. Yet, in practice, this system was slow, cumbersome, corrupt, and vitiated by the venality of offices at all levels. This was one reason why the reforming ministers of Charles III began to introduce, as in Spain itself, a system of intendants modeled on that of France.
Women played a crucial role in the colonization of America and the development of society. The home government held that this act was not a measure of taxation at all but rather one of trade regulation. As such, it fell into a sphere in which only the central government of the empire was competent to make policy. This was axiomatic among all the European powers with colonies. However varied the motives of those who emigrated, and however unconcerned they and their descendants became about the affairs of Europe, all governments viewed colonies as primarily designed to enrich the mother country. If they had no economic value, they had no value at all. Their trade must therefore be controlled and regulated so as to promote the home country’s interests. Here again, Spain set the example. Theoretically, all trade with her American colonies had always been channeled through the agency of the ‘House of Trade’ in Seville, transferred in 1717 to Cadiz. From here, a small syndicate of merchants shipping goods to and from selected ports in America. As far as possible American exports were concentrated in two great annual convoys sailing for Spain. But by the end of the seventeenth century, this system was falling apart. Convoys sailed irregularly, and in many years not at all; the number of ships was also much diminished. Interlopers from Holland, France, and England traded directly with most Spanish American ports in relative freedom, and smuggling accounted for perhaps two-thirds of the total trade of Spanish America by 1700. At the Peace of Utrecht, Spain attempted to fob off foreign interlopers by allowing the British and the Dutch to send a ship a year each of goods to Central America.
The most striking and spectacular feature of towns was the poverty of most of their inhabitants. Being more concentrated than in the country, it was more noticeable, although not necessarily easier to measure. The really poor, without regular employment or other visible means of support, paying no taxes, and having no fixed address, often did not appear in official records. But their share of the urban population was always substantial. In Paris, a great capital, or Mainz, an average German cathedral city, the proportion was about one-quarter. Opportunities fluctuated so that many of the unemployed and indigent at any time were only temporarily in that state. Even so, a large proportion never found any work, and this proportion grew over the eighteenth century. An illustration of the scale of urban poverty is the number of abandoned children, offspring whom parents could not afford to keep. In Paris in the late seventeenth century, around 3,000 foundlings a year were taken into charitable institutions. But most were the product of poverty all the same. Many must have been illegitimate precisely because fathers wished to avoid burdening their marriage. Large numbers must have been the direct result of prostitution, a major industry of larger towns, and the most obvious way for a poor or underpaid woman to earn badly needed money.
Admittedly, those who provide the figures tended to include a very wide range o women; young widows, for instance, were often stigmatized as whores on suspicions hardly justified by the evidence. Yet, the pressures driving poor women into prostitution were obvious, and the scale of the problem was not to be denied. Nor were foundlings the only obvious result; venereal diseases ravaged European cities in the later eighteenth century as never before. Beggars set their children to work almost from the moment they could walk and talk; they operated in family units because children, by their number and their readier impact on the consciences of passers-by, were often the most effective earners. But the intended victims were mostly well aware of how easily they could be hoodwinked, and their reaction was often to withhold alms rather than give them to cases that might not be truly deserving.
For many women, it was even difficult to marry and get up a family unless the master was prepared to support them all, which was a rare event. Domestics were also isolated from other employees by the distinct pattern of life, their frequent participation in their employers’ privileges, and their obvious dependence as signified by the wearing of liveries. No doubt many took pride in the glory reflected upon them from their masters, but the French Revolution was to show, through innumerable denunciations, that a nobleman’s most dangerous enemy might be his former servant. Domestics knew that despite the relative comfort of their lives, they were despised by other workers. Employers were known to recruit servants from naive and malleable rustics rather than from the more self-assured natives of towns. In Lyons, the wealth of domestics tended to be greater than that of the silk-weavers who were the mainstay of the city’s economy, but this hardly ever induced the children of weavers, let alone their parents when temporarily unemployed, to go into ‘service’ for a living.
The distinction between town-born and immigrant, in fact, persisted long after the immigrants’ absorption into urban life through the types of occupation they found. Most immigrants who did not slide into beggary or become servants ended up as casual or day laborers. Thirteen percent of the population of Paris in the 1780s fell into this category, which included dockers, porters, chairmen, waiters, shop assistants, and a whole range of manual workers. These groups had, if anything, even less organization than servants. They drifted in and out of employment, begged or stole when there was none, and married fellow immigrants. They lived in overcrowded cellars or garrets among their own kind, largely cut off both from servants and more skilled artisans. It was among them primarily that gin-drinking was rife in London between the 1690s and the 1750s, a cheap and effective way of forgetting the miseries of life. Admittedly not all immigrants were unskilled. The seasonal laborers in the building and construction industries provide an example. Unlike unskilled immigrants, they were extremely well organized, extremely tough, and often united by their origin from quite small geographical areas, like the Limousins, who were the mainstay of Parisian building trades.
These features isolated them just as completely from the sedentary world of the urban artisan. Not all was harmony in the community of skilled workers. As among servants, there were well-established hierarchies, which were a source of much tension. Apprentices at the lowest level were often hard to differentiate from servants. They lived with their masters and waited upon them in return for instruction in a trade rather than wages. As servants, they were usually completely within their master’s power. The wealth of all these groups was mainly liquid, fundamentally different from the largely proprietary fortunes of the ruling orders. This is not to say that it was much more easily realizable. Apart from those of manufacturers or shipowners, with their extensive and costly equipment, assets tended to be largely invisible, tied up in stocks, credits, and negotiable paper. Nor was affluence evenly spread. The bulk of bourgeois wealth, like that of the nobility, was concentrated in very few hands.
After two years in which tensions with the colonies seemed to relax somewhat, 1772 saw new provocations from both sides. In America, the defiance of the customs service culminated in the burning of a customs schooner. North’s government, meanwhile, launched a new scheme to provide the governor of the most turbulent colony, Massachusetts, with an independent income. Above all, North approved a proposal to help the crisis-ridden East India Company by allowing it to import tea surpluses into America at prices that undercut both legitimate merchants and smugglers. The result, in 1773, was the Boston Tea Party, when colonists disguised as Indians threw the first consignment of tea into Boston harbor. Meanwhile, the Boston town meeting had inaugurated a network of correspondence between the main colonial cities in order to co-ordinate resistance to further British moves. These protests illustrate a further important feature of the economic network based on sugar – the bitter divisions between groups involved in it. Metropolitan merchants antagonized planters by their support for exclusive trade regulations. Planters antagonized merchants by evading the regulations, as well as by incurring large debts to the homeland, which a shortage of coinage in the colonies made it impossible for them ever to clear. But even the colonists themselves were deeply divided. The richest West Indies proprietors were almost always absentees, spending their lavish revenues in Europe and neglecting the plantations which were their source, despised and often cheated by the white managers they left in the isles, who, along with smaller resident proprietors, felt they alone represented the islands’ true interests. Yet, these claims in their turn were contested by the growing numbers of mulattos.
Bibliography
Freeman, V. Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North
America. Steerforth Press; 1 edition, 2002.
Powers, K. Women in the Crucible of Conquest. University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
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