Revolutions in the Atlantic World

A Comparative History

Wim Klooster

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814748268
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

In the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, revolutions transformed the British, French, and Spanish Atlantic worlds. During this time, colonial and indigenous people rioted and rebelled against their occupiers in violent pursuit of political liberty and economic opportunity, challenging time-honored social and political structures on both sides of the Atlantic. As a result, mainland America separated from British and Spanish rule, the French monarchy toppled, and the world's wealthiest colony was emancipated. In the new sovereign states, legal equality was introduced, republicanism embraced, and the people began to question the legitimacy of slavery.

Revolutions in the Atlantic World wields a comparative lens to reveal several central themes in the field of Atlantic history, from the concept of European empire and the murky position it occupied between the Old and New Worlds to slavery and diasporas. How was the stability of the old regimes undermined? Which mechanisms of successful popular mobilization can be observed? What roles did blacks and Indians play? Drawing on both primary documents and extant secondary literature to answer these questions, Wim Klooster portrays the revolutions as parallel and connected uprisings.

1
Introduction

Empires at War

On November 1, 1755, a powerful earthquake, followed by three tsunamis, largely destroyed Lisbon, Portugal’s capital city. With the faithful gathered for religious services or en route, three shocks struck, reducing churches and monasteries to rubble and leveling palaces and humble dwellings alike. The tsunamis made quick work of the ships, shipyards, quays, and warehouses. Where the water did not arrive, fires broke out that lasted for several days.¹ One in three residents died in Lisbon alone, many thousands more perishing in other parts of Portugal and in Spain and Morocco. The tremor would have a lasting impact on western theology and philosophy, but two decades before the start of the American Revolution, no philosopher or theologian could have foreseen a political earthquake. Political events rocking the foundations of empires were unknown. No contemporary Lenins were planning the revolution ahead, nor was there a precedent for the revolutionary turmoil that was to leave its mark on British North America (1775-1783), France (1789-1799), Saint-Domingue (1791-1804), and Spanish America (1810-1824).

What follows in this book is an overview of these four revolutions, followed by a comparative perspective.² Although each uprising (or set of uprisings) had its own causes, traits, and impact, they all created sovereign states that professed hostility to privilege and began to question black slavery. Between the bloodletting in Lexington and Concord in 1775 and the departure of the last Spanish troops from mainland America in 1826, these revolutions changed the Atlantic world beyond recognition.

Half a century has passed since R. R. Palmer published the first of two volumes entitled The Age of the Democratic Revolution.³ In this magisterial work, Palmer sought to show how the American and French revolutions formed part of a series of upheavals that spread the concept and practice of democracy in the Western world. Together with his French colleague Jacques Godechot, Palmer intended to develop, as he put it, “some integrating or unifying conceptions for this whole revolutionary movement in Europe and America taken together.”⁴ In doing so, Palmer became one of the pioneers of the modern field of Atlantic History. From today’s vantage point, however, Palmer’s work is incomplete. Making “Western Civilization” the focus of his study, he had a blind spot for Haiti, which gets just two paragraphs in the course of 1,118 pages, and Spanish America, whose many revolutions are not mentioned at all, since Palmer’s story ends in 1799.⁵

The objective of this book is to present the most significant revolutions of this era on their own terms, while emphasizing four aspects:

1. They cannot be understood outside the realm of international politics. Inter-imperial warfare called for reforms, which exposed the foundations of empires and jeopardized their existence by revealing and exacerbating enduring social, political, and ethnic inequities. In addition, individual events that were taking place an ocean away created a favorable climate for the revolutions.⁶

2. None of the revolutions was foreordained. Even if active fault zones were visible, the political earthquakes could have been avoided until the very moment that they hit. Nor were the revolutions guaranteed success once they broke out. Loyalty to the empire was considerable in the American colonies, and it was only in the course of wars that the revolutions triumphed.

3. Divided loyalties meant that these wars often had the overtones of civil wars, whose main protagonists were previously voiceless popular classes fighting for their own reasons, which often did not square with those of the elites.

4. Palmer saw the age of revolutions as the triumphal march of democracy. But democracy is no appropriate prism through which to see these uprisings. It was hardly more than a temporary by-product of some insurrections.

When Lisbon lay in ruin, even the most radical Enlightenment thinkers did not challenge the established order. Jean-Jacques Rousseau may have “sharpened the distaste for the status quo,”⁷ but he was rather conservative in his recommendations for Poland’s constitutional reform. Voltaire, for his part, argued that equality was perhaps natural, but that in practice there would always be a class who command and a class who obey. The early modern Atlantic was, indeed, a world with pronounced social stratification. But it was not a static world. Population growth was unprecedented, both inside and outside city walls. In Europe, cities increased in number from 500 with a population of at least 5,000 in the year 1500 to 900 in 1800. Yet urbanization only climbed from 10 to 13 percent in the same period, since the rural population also grew remarkably.⁸

If urban pursuits played a lead role in economic change, agriculture remained the livelihood of most Europeans. From time immemorial, clergy and nobility owned most land, which had given them access to economic resources. Villages had originally had a lord, who let peasants work on his land and derived his income from the demesne, the section of his lands that tenants could not cultivate for their own sake and that the lord kept for his use, and from head taxes levied among all households within the lord’s jurisdiction. But by the eighteenth century, over half of the land was owned by peasants themselves, most of whom had become smallholders. In much of western Europe, the lord’s traditional sources of income had been reduced, due in part to peasant resistance. Many French peasants had, for instance, managed to gain control of their holdings at fixed rents, but at a price. By raising or reintroducing fees, the landlords made up for lost income after the middle of the eighteenth century.⁹

A lasting medieval legacy was that landownership not only entailed economic power for the landlord, but judicial authority over the peasants living on his lands. The nobility’s principal privileges were different, however, consisting of the right to be judged by one’s peers and exemption from some, though by no means all, taxes. Privilege was the organizing principle of the European kingdoms and their overseas colonies. Privilege was typical of all the corporate bodies that composed society in a manner seen as divinely inspired. These corporations included guilds, confraternities, the military, ecclesiastical bodies (including universities, monasteries, and the Inquisition), cities, rural communities, and family clans. Such bodies each had their own rights and duties, some of which had been formally recognized while others were based on tradition or tacit agreement. Keeping a firm grip on their privileges, the corporations ultimately obeyed the king, who regulated privilege and guaranteed the proper social hierarchy among the corporations. The social order and hierarchy were therefore closely connected.¹⁰

Clergymen and noblemen were therefore not the only beneficiaries of privilege. What is more, they did not necessarily lead privileged lives. In the eighteenth century, only a small section of the nobility was well-to-do. Numerous noble families had been impoverished and moved into trade and industry to make a living.¹¹ Among the clergy, it was also a small elite that was well-to-do: the bishops, abbots, and priors who owed their benefices to family wealth. The vast majority of clergymen were village priests who shared the living standards of their flock. Their chief legal privilege, exemption from taxation, was not even universally observed. So-called voluntary contributions to the national treasury, especially in wartime, were often substantial.

The old idea that two social classes bled the third has therefore been dismissed. Historians have shown that urban middling groups—merchants, goldsmiths, drapers, among others—acquired much land in early modern Europe, usually as an investment, but also to gain status. Some lent money to peasants and other landowners, receiving a fixed annual payment in return. Town and country did not always see eye to eye. Peasants associated the city with unscrupulous tax collectors and absentee landowners, urban dwellers saw the countryside as the root of the exorbitantly high grain prices. These prices, townspeople believed, had to be regulated and grain sold at a just price, not the prices peasants allegedly demanded. In reality, the rural population was also weighed down by rising prices.¹²

Privilege was also the main organizing principle of the Euroamerican societies that sprang up across the Atlantic Ocean. The most eloquent defense of a divinely inspired corporate society came from the pen of a prelate from Córdoba del Tucumán (in present-day Argentina), known as the Bishop of San Alberto. He repudiated the ideals of liberty and equality in response to Enlightenment philosophy and the French Revolution. In the heavens, he argued, we discern a wonderful inequality of planets, stars, and angels. Inequality of persons, classes, and conditions must therefore be according to God’s will. The bishop considered the pursuit of liberty at odds with subjection to the laws that God has constituted, stressing that it was natural that there existed a king for the bees, a head for the body, a husband for the wife, a father for the children, a master for the slaves, and a sovereign for the vassals. Starting a revolution would be to repeat the mistake made by Adam and Eve, who broke the law imposed by God and ate the forbidden fruit.¹³

Unlike in Europe, privilege had an ethnic component throughout the Americas. Whites assigned servile or otherwise subordinate roles to blacks, mulattoes, Indians, and mestizos. Until the late eighteenth century, the term español (“Spanish”) was used officially to refer to a white person in the Spanish colonies.¹⁴ Nor did official ethnic discrimination abate as colonial societies matured. Authorities did not question the connection between blackness and slavery, allowing African slavery to continue to thrive from Boston to Bahia and Buenos Aires; free mulattoes in the Caribbean even experienced an increase in legal discrimination in the 1760s and 1770s.

Apart from the Swiss cantons and the Dutch provinces, kings held sway in the European countries and their empires. They controlled foreign policy and the armed forces, appointed ministers and officials, and regulated trade and industry. Monarchical power began to expand in the sixteenth century, but could only be achieved in close collaboration with local institutions. The ascendance of monarchies, therefore, went hand in hand with the strengthening of local representative bodies, as kings bestowed rights, privileges, and representative institutions where they had not existed before.¹⁵ Indirect rule also marked the way in which European states governed their American colonies. Consent rather than coercion was the preferred instrument of empire. The term “colonialism” obscures the working of the administrative machinery in the overseas provinces. Colonies generally formed their own power base before metropolitan authority was established. Even then, the combination of distance, local interests, and the small size of the bureaucracy made it impossible for the mother countries to impose their will on their colonies. Only by negotiating with colonial elites could metropolitan authorities hope to achieve policy goals. The inevitable price they paid was to recognize the right of settlers to enjoy some form of self-government.¹⁶ As long as the mother countries did not tamper with the principle of negotiation, colonial elites would not call into question their loyalty to the imperial center.

A Quarter Century of Warfare

When the Lisbon earthquake hit, reform, rather than revolution, was in the air all over Europe. Sweeping domestic and international changes made the reorganization of the European states inevitable. Rapid population growth, a serious food shortage that affected much of southern Europe, competition over colonies, and, perhaps most important, demands of military expenditure to keep up with powerful neighbors, compelled governments to introduce the reforms. French king Louis XIV (1638-1715) had set an example to others, privileging four areas of domestic reform: the police, poor relief, education, and public works. Reforms required not only raising existing taxes but tapping new sources of money. Church and nobility, however, stood in the way, each tenaciously defending its vested interests. In their battles with these estates, monarchs often took their cues from enlightened ideas, achieving libertarian ends by autocratic means. The Enlightenment lent an air of legitimacy to the destruction of old privileges.¹⁷

What opened the door to reform in the middle decades of the eighteenth century was international warfare, lasting from 1739 through 1763 and interrupted by only six years of peace (1748-1754). With theaters in Europe, the Americas, and India, European rivalry assumed a global character, inaugurating a contest over colonies that would last into the twentieth century. Riches from other continents had occasionally tempted Europe’s main powers to engage in colonial hostilities in earlier eras, but never on this scale. Louis XIV spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy on warfare, but exclusively on the European mainland—the two wars that he fought with Britain saw fighting in the Low Countries, southern Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Mediterranean.

How did war in 1739 come about? After the War of the Spanish Succession ended with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, relations between France and Britain were generally good, but they deteriorated largely because of the similarity of the two countries’ economic and geopolitical interests. Both French and British ships depended for their masts and timber on the Baltic, had strategic interests in the Mediterranean, and both were large producers and sellers of textiles and, as the eighteenth century advanced, also of sugar. Increased French competition in the West Indies seemed irreversible and could not be offset by British commerce with the Spanish Empire.¹⁸ The conditions for such commerce seemed promising at the Peace of Utrecht, when Britain was awarded the asiento, the monopoly to supply African slaves to Spain’s American provinces. But under the cover of the asiento much smuggling took place, coming on top of the decades-old contraband trade in which Jamaican settlers engaged with Spanish colonies.¹⁹ The Spanish answer to such trade was to fit out coastguard vessels that frequently seized ships sailing between the British islands and ports in the Spanish Caribbean. Britain’s ministry was now so concerned about the rise of the French Caribbean islands as sugar producers that she went to war over the Spanish American “depredations” in 1739, thus unleashing the so-called War of Jenkins’ Ear.

By 1740, the Anglo-Spanish war (which accomplished little) merged into the War of the Austrian Succession, when Prussia used the death of Austrian emperor Charles VI to seize Silesia, which was part of the Habsburg monarchy. Prussia’s goal was to increase her landmass and population and thereby prevent both Austria and Russia from meddling in her affairs, but the official reason given was her refusal to recognize Charles’s daughter Maria Theresa as the new Austrian empress. Although many observers considered Prussia and her population too small to succeed in a war against the mighty Habsburg monarchy, King Frederick the Great sent his professional standing army into Silesia, which he began capturing in late 1740. Within a few months, Prussia could count on the support of France.²⁰ Two years later, France also aligned herself with Spain in the so-called Second Family Compact, which gave the Spanish a powerful ally on the high seas against British shipping.

The main focus of the war was on the European continent, where Britain sent a sizeable army to establish herself as the arbiter of Europe while siding with Austria. Her chief foe was not Prussia, but increasingly France. It was in the course of this war that France became anti-British and Britain anti-French. The French seized numerous British ocean-going ships, conquered the Austrian Netherlands (today’s Belgium), placing themselves just across from England, fomented the Jacobite rebellion in Britain, and tried unsuccessfully to invade Britain. The French government also had British Madras in India occupied in 1746, primarily in response to the French loss of the North American fort of Louisbourg on Isle Royale (now Cape Breton Island), close to the cod fisheries off Newfoundland and those in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.²¹

The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) of 1748 that c...