This page presents information related to the thirteenth class session of J. B. Owens's fall 2002 upper-division undergraduate and graduate course, History 360/560, The Spanish Empire. This course is part of the core curriculum in comparative and world history of the Department of History, Idaho State University. The sole purpose of this page is to provide an orientation to the reading assignments and class session for those students enrolled in History 360/560. See the source page for the complete Dublin Core standard metadata.

You may return to the course main page or to the reading assignments and lecture topics page.

See a full description of your research project. You will produce a dataset describing the routes that linked your assigned location with other places. This dataset is due, in digital form, at the beginning of class on 19 November. At the same time, you will submit a short essay in which you will explain how the economic, political, and cultural interactions made possible by these routes helped shape the history of your selected location. This project will be worth roughly 15% of your final grade.

The "New Colonialism" and Latin American independence

In the eighteenth century, the Bourbon and Bragança monarchies, to some degree as pioneers, developed "colonial" policies about the role of overseas territories in their relationship to the peninsular ones. These policy shifts created both resentment among American elites who felt that their interests were being illegitimately subordinated to those of Iberian elites and fear that "reforms" would damage the American elite control over the massive, coerced, and largely non-white "commonwealth" (república) of the non-Europeanized population whose labor and subordination made possible the very disproportionate share of resources and production enjoyed by both American and Iberian notables.

The fear and resentment created by the "New Colonialism" of the Lisbon and Madrid governments, coupled with the designs of other European groups on the Americas, created the context for the independence in the early nineteenth century of most of Latin America, although it took the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula to set off the series of events that finally produced the creation of "sovereign" Latin American countries. The two Iberian kingdoms were left with overseas empires, Portugal with a rather large one, which both have now completely lost.

Reading: Burkholder and Johnson, chs. 7 and 8; Thornton, chs. 10 and 11; Payne, vol. II, chs. 16, 18 (pp. 403-414), 19 (to p. 435) and 22 (to p. 520).

  1. Why was Robert Clive's victory in 1757 at the battle of Plassey in Bengal so important to the overseas interests of Portugal and Spain?
  2. Why were the royal governments of eighteenth-century Portugal and Spain so intent on gaining greater administrative and economic control of their American territories? Why was movement toward greater control so slow?
  3. Why wasn't the Spanish Monarchy able to build up the financial and military might to challenge the extension of British power in the Americas?
  4. How do you assess the importance to the Spanish Monarchy of its ties to Bourbon France?
  5. What were the consequences for Portugal and Spain of the Seven Years War?
  6. Since the Portuguese and Spanish monarchs had a great deal of influence over the appointments to Church positions in the Americas, why did these governments begin to have more trouble with Catholic authorities in the eighteenth century?
  7. From where did the investment capital come to expand rapidly Brazilian gold production and slave importation after 1695?
  8. Why did both Portugal and Spain change in the eighteenth century from the Atlantic fleet system of transporting valuable cargoes to the Asian pattern of licensing individual ships?
  9. Why did Andean Indian revolts become increasingly more frequent from the 1750s? What consequences did these revolts have for the Viceroyalty of Peru?
  10. What role did the continuous resistance of black slaves to their conditions play in bringing about independence movements in Portuguese and Spanish America?
  11. What are the differences between petit marronnage and grand marronnage among black slaves in the Americas?
  12. Why was social position (class) the dominant factor among slaves in petit marronnage while the social and cultural environments of the African background were much more significant in grand marronnage?
  13. Why didn't slave resistance at all times take the form of attempts to overthrow the slave system?
  14. What factors might "enter into a person's decision to work below his or her potential" (Thornton 1998: 275)?
  15. By what means could individual slaves gain freedom in Portuguese and Spanish America?
  16. In what ways did Native American communities play a role in the escape of black slaves?
  17. What impact did runaway black slaves, as "transfrontiersmen" and "transfrontierswomen," have on the unconquered Native American communities with which they made contact?
  18. Why didn't the tremendous growth of Mexican wealth in the eighteenth century lead to a fundamental transformation there in the patterns of interaction among groups with different roles in the region's social environment?
  19. What factors lead to sharp increases in world food prices in the 1780s and afterwards? Do you suppose that these increased food prices had something to do with the economic develop of the peripheral areas of Spanish America?
  20. What factors led to increased European per capita consumption of sugar and tobacco in the eighteenth century? What impact did this increased consumption have on the Atlantic slave trade?
  21. What factors led to the creation of new viceroyalties, audiencias, and other administrative units in Spanish America in the eighteenth century?
  22. What were the consequences of the expansion of the market economy throughout Iberoamerica in the eighteenth century?
  23. What impact did shifting control of the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century have on developments in Ibero-America?
  24. There were three great revolutions in the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century: that of British North America, out of which the United States developed; the French Revolution; and the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. Why is it that only the former two still receive frequent international recognition, while the latter, despite the fact that it is the only one that ended slavery, is generally unknown outside of Haiti?
  25. What impact did the wars of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods have on Portugal and Spain?
  26. Why was the course of independence in northern and southern Spanish South America different from that in Peru and Mexico?
  27. Why did king Ferdinand VII of Spain have so little success in restoring his government's authority in Argentina and Venezuela? Why was he ultimately unable to salvage his authority in any of his continental American territories?
  28. There are modern Mexican states named for Hidalgo, Morelos, and Guerrero. Why is none named for Iturbide?
  29. Why did all the newly-independent countries of Spanish-speaking America quickly adopt republication institutions and, except for Paraguay, written constitutions?
  30. Why was it so difficult for most newly-independent Spanish American republics to establish stable political regimes? What were the causes of military conflicts among some of them?
  31. Why did Brazil become independent of Portugal while retaining monarchical institutions and a Braganza ruling dynasty?
  32. Why was Spain able to retain its control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines until 1898?

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J. B. Owens

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Revised: 1 September 2002




URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/spemp/readver5.13.html