Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

So, last time we did a big, expansive overview of the origins of the Spanish Empire up through to the end of the Habsburg era. And before we go any further, yes, I did biff the year of the Spanish Armada. It was of course 1588, not 1580. Sorry about that. It has been corrected. Well, today we’re going to cover the Empire as it undergoes reform under a new Bourbon dynasty. But we will do so with a particular interest in the Spanish domains that will, in the course of time, become Gran Colombia. Domains that emerge out of a new Viceroyalty that the Bourbons will establish: the Viceroyalty of New Granada. What began as something of an imperial backwater started to finally flourish a bit by the end of the 1700s. Just in time for everything to go to hell. 

So, as we established last week, Christopher Columbus was the first Spaniard to hit mainland South America. On his third voyage in 1498, he ran into the continent near the mouth of the Orinoco River in what becomes northeast Venezuela. He then continued along the north coast until he hit a little group of islands, the biggest of which he dubbed Margarita, and upon which he discovered an extremely rich pearl bed, which would be the focal point of early Spanish interest. But that early Spanish interest would be undertaken behind Columbus’s back. By this point, the Spanish Crown was unhappy with both Columbus and the capitulations of Santa Fe. And so, without Columbus’s knowledge, Bishop Fonseca (remember, he’s the minister who basically ran the first phase of Spanish exploration and settlement in the Americas) launched further expeditions led by men who had taken part in Columbus’s first two voyages and who now wanted to strike out on their own. So in 1499, three ships under Alonso de Ojeda followed the route of Columbus’s third voyage and then kept going along the north coast of South America, eventually reaching the Gulf of Venezuela and then down through a narrow strait into the great lake of Maracaibo. There is a map of this all at revolutionspodcast.com. 

Ojeda is the man officially credited with naming this region Venezuela, though I’ve seen two stories explaining why. The first is that it was just a riff on an indigenous name for the area. The other is that it reminded an Italian cartographer on Ojeda’s expedition of the Italian city of Venice. That cartographer was, of course, none other than Amerigo Vespucci, who would, thanks to the maps of the New World he wound up producing on this and future voyages, got his own name attached to the continent of the Western Hemisphere, which we now call the Americas. 

And then, in late 1499 and early 1500, another expedition under Rodrigo de Bastidas took two ships further west, trying to get a handle on the scope of the Caribbean basin and always looking for that eternally elusive sea lane to China. Bastidas discovered the mouth of a huge river that he dubbed the Magdalena. And then he kept sailing down until he reached the Gulf of Urabá, which is the body of water that serves as the pivot between South America proper and the Isthmus of Panama. Recognizing that they were dealing with an enormous landmass here as opposed to just another island, this northern stretch of South America got dubbed Tierra Firme, or the mainland. And then, as the Spanish subsequently spread out across Tierra Firme and Central America and the Gulf of Mexico, all of these possessions started getting short handed as the Spanish Main – the Spanish mainland as opposed to their island possessions, in case you’ve ever heard the term Spanish Main and wondered what it meant. 

But though these parts of future Venezuela and Colombia were the first mainland territories charted and settled, Spanish interest would quickly dwindle as the conquests of Mexico and Peru drew their attention to more potent and immediate riches. The islands off the Venezuelan coast, particularly the pearl beds, were, as I said, the principal focus of early settlement. The Spanish built a fort on the small island of Cubagua that underwent frequent bouts of abandonment and resettlement, as did their attempts to plant a base on the mainland.

But in 1515, the Spanish did finally plant what becomes the oldest permanently occupied European settlement in South America: Cumaná. And it is still there today. Then, a decade later, in 1528, the whole region actually falls under the authority of a German banking house run by the Welser family, and I am not kidding about this. They had lent a huge load of cash to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and in return, this German banking house got a license to exploit the province of Venezuela, which they tried to do, hiring mostly Spanish mercenaries to maraud around looking for treasure. But these mercenaries mostly came up empty. And eventually, the cruel reputation of the Welser regime got bad enough that King Philip II ultimately revoked their license to exploit the province of Venezuela in 1556, which also neatly coincides with his first declared bankruptcy in 1557. 

And over on the Colombian side, Rodrigo de Bastidas eventually founded the port of Santa Marta. But he did not do so until 1525, because early attention in the region had shifted over to the Isthmus of Panama and its short land route to the Pacific. Then, in 1533, another port called Cartagena was founded, and ultimately, it would be Cartagena that became the principal port of the region. 

So it was not until the 1530s that expeditions finally started heading out into the interior, specifically up the Magdalena River. Expeditions that always hovered around the famous legend of El Dorado, one of those cities made of gold that was always just over the next horizon. So in 1538, the Spanish launched a torturous expedition to go all the way up to the headwaters of the Magdalena. Eight hundred men set out, and only two hundred made it to the end. They did not find El Dorado, but they did run into the most advanced Amerindians in the whole region, who lived in settled agricultural communities, though nothing on the scale or sophistication of the Inca and Aztec. The Spanish then proceeded to conquer everything in sight and renamed the whole territory New Granada. And in 1538, they plopped down a city that was officially called Santa Fe, but would become known to all by a mangling of the native word for the area: Bogotá. So, 1538, that’s the founding of Bogotá. 

Around the same time, the further expeditions were then traveling up and down the Orinoco River in Venezuela, but all were similarly coming up empty in the search for El Dorado. The region between the coast and the Orinoco River, for example, turned out to just be huge stretches of worthless grassland, run through with river beds that were flooded out between May and October and then bone dry from November to April. The whole swath of territory being filled with roughly one gillion bugs, but no precious metals. 

But though El Dorado was never discovered, decent gold deposits were eventually uncovered in the interior of what is now Colombia. But what we’re talking about here is panning for gold in creek beds as opposed to massive mining operations. Certainly nothing like what was being discovered in Mexico and Peru. But light settlement did proceed, and in 1567, Caracas, the future capital of Venezuela, was founded, removed just enough from the coast to make life not quite so unbearably hot and disease ridden. And then I should mention here that a few years later, a Spanish noble who had been helping administer Hispaniola migrated down to Caracas and was awarded extensive land grants and political privileges. That noble: Simón de Bolívar. And for the next seven generations, the Bolívar family would form a core part of the inner circle criollo aristocracy in Venezuela, that is the white aristocracy born in the Americas. Until that long legacy fell onto the slender shoulders of a reckless youth who also inherited the name of the family’s original patriarch, Simón Bolívar. 

So from that point on, a Spanish settlement and interest was pretty much confined to the coasts. Aside from Bogotá and the gold producing regions, the interior was pretty much ignored by the state and left instead to the church. Catholic missionaries started moving in to convert the native Amerindians, first Franciscans and Dominicans, and then eventually the Jesuits, who we will talk about more at the very end of today’s episode. The only export of any real value coming out of all this was the gold now being shipped out of Cartagena. And the population numbers do tell you where Spanish priorities lay. By 1700, Cartagena had maybe 5,000 people, Caracas had 6,000, Bogotá about the same. And this was at the same time that Lima, the capital of Peru, was pushing 40,000. So for the whole of the Habsburg era, the whole of what would become Gran Colombia, was not particularly important. But with the arrival of the Bourbons, changes in the balance of power back in Europe and pressure from arrivals in the Caribbean led the Spanish to take a more active interest in the region’s development. And to kickstart that discussion, we need to head back across the Atlantic to cover the chaotic transition from the Habsburgs to the Bourbons. 

So, we left off last time with the unfortunate King Charles II of Spain, right on the brink of death in November 1700. Now, because Charles II was both developmentally disabled and sterile, everyone in Europe was super nervous about what was going to happen once he finally died. With no direct heirs to the Spanish throne, the matter was about to be kicked out into the Byzantine world of competing royal bloodlines, all of which were ultimately interconnected. And when it came to claiming the Spanish crown, it boiled down to two sides. On one side you have the great King Louis XIV, who had by now been ruling France for over 50 years. Louis himself was the grandson of King Philip III of Spain, and his wife was the oldest daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. Then on the other side, you have the Austrian Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, who had been Holy Roman Emperor now for over 40 years. Leopold I was also a grandson of King Philip III and married to the younger daughter of King Philip IV. The long rivalry between King Louis XIV and Emperor Leopold had helped define European politics for the last two generations. And they were about to have one last go of it over the Spanish succession. 

Now, if things had just unfolded blindly, the death of Charles II would have kicked the line of succession over to his sisters. Since the older sister was married to Louis XIV, their children, so a bunch of French princesses, would now have the principal claim to the Spanish throne. But recognizing that a shift in the balance of power that enormous could not be allowed to just unfold blindly, rounds of diplomatic negotiations in the late 1690s tried to allocate Spanish holdings amongst various claimants to satisfy everyone’s ambitions, keep the balance of power, and somehow avoid a war when Charles II inevitably died. And in 1698, everyone finally did agree to a hypercomplex reallocation of territory and giving the Spanish Crown and its American empire to one of Leopold’s grandsons: Joseph Ferdinand, the Elector of Bavaria, who was all of six years old at the time. But unfortunately, that poor kid died a year later and the whole arrangement was undone. 

At this point, eminent Spanish nobles were getting nervous about being swallowed whole by either the Austrian Habsburgs on the one hand, or the French Bourbons on the other. And so, as Charles II lay on his deathbed in late 1700, these nobles forced the dying king to fix his whole inheritance on a younger grandson of King Louis XIV, 16-year-old Philippe, Duke of Anjou. Now, a clause in the will stipulated that to claim the Spanish throne, Philippe had to legally disavow any future claim to the French throne. The Spaniards hoped this would induce the Austrian Habsburgs to agree to the deal, since it would preclude the much dreaded unification of Spain and France under a single king. When King Charles II finally did die in November 1700, Philippe headed over to Madrid and accepted his inheritance, becoming King Philip V of Spain. 

Now, at this point, war maybe could have been avoided, but then King Louis XIV started making aggressive moves, advancing French troops, for example, into the Spanish Netherlands, which were not actually his, they were his grandsons. And then he also announced that he would not be removing the new King Philip V of Spain from the French line of succession, reraising the hideous specter of Franco-Spanish unification. This intolerable possibility alarmed the whole of Europe, which then descended into the War of the Spanish Succession that ran from 1701 all the way until 1714. Now, we are going to sidestep the intricate details of that conflict, but suffice it to say that the next 13 years of war pretty much exhausted everyone without coming to a decisive result anywhere. So rounds and rounds of diplomacy arranged a new balance of power everyone could live with. The upshot for us here is that King Philip V was confirmed as King of Spain, and he agreed to renounce all claims to the French throne. On top of that, his royal relatives in France agreed to renounce any future claims that they might make on the Spanish throne. 

So the Bourbons now controlled both France and Spain, but they would not be united. To secure this arrangement, however, the Spanish Crown had to parcel out most of its European possessions to the other powers. And if you remember from our cycle of episodes on the French Revolution, this is the point in history when the British forced the Austrians to take on what was then called the Spanish Netherlands and what thus then became the Austrian Netherlands, or as I always called it, Belgium. Austria would then spend the next 75 years trying to give the Austrian Netherlands away until it all got rolled up into the wars of the French Revolution. 

So that convoluted little tale that you probably did not follow in all of its details takes us to a place where the kingdoms of Spain are now firmly united under the Bourbon king, Philip V, who would proceed to rule, with one brief interruption, all the way until 1746. And though his European possessions outside Iberia were parceled out, he did retain sovereignty over the entire overseas Spanish Empire, which was still the largest and most lucrative in the world. Now finally free of war and without domains elsewhere in Europe to worry about, Philip and his Bourbon heirs would undertake what they hoped would be the revitalization of the Spanish Empire. Because at the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Spanish Crown was all but bankrupt, its military resources were nonexistent, and it had no internal economic development to speak of. The Bourbons hoped to change all that. 

To effect that change, the first thing we need to note is that the Bourbons brought with them a more modern view of an activist centralized monarchy, as opposed to that more limited hodgepodge of domains that the Habsburgs had been running. The Bourbons had a different idea of how the Spanish Crown should operate. So if you remember from last week, there was a lot of talk of Castile and Aragon, Navarre, Catalonia, and the Habsburgs then unifying the kingdoms of Spain, plural. The Habsburg royal title was in fact ‘King of the Spains and of the Indies’. While the Bourbons tellingly refashioned themselves as ‘King of Spain’, singular and ‘Emperor of America’, and as they progressed through their reforms, they always, always kept one eye on unifying their domains and centralizing political, economic and social authority. And this was a process that would culminate in the thoroughly enlightened despotism of King Charles III, who would rule from 1759 to 1788. 

But since we are mostly interested in the American aspects of the Bourbon Reforms, we’re not going to worry too much about their work in Iberia and instead focus on their overseas domains. So in 1717, bureaucratic stagnation in the Casa de Contratación, the House of Trade, led Philip V to relocate the whole operation to Cádiz to give it a fresh start. And then in that same year, he created the Viceroyalty of New Granada. This third viceroyalty would occupy the middle territory between New Spain and the north, and Peru to the south, covering the future nations of Colombia, Venezuela, Panama and Ecuador, depending on the nebulous border between New Granada and Peru. Now, up until this point, the whole of Spanish South America was technically being run out of Lima, which meant that really, nobody was minding the store up in the north. And indeed, when the new viceroy arrived in his new capital of Bogotá, he discovered a hotbed of corruption and tax evasion, with local authorities conspiring with merchants to undervalue merchandise and turn a blind eye to outright smuggling. But though introducing a viceroyal government directly into the region seemed like a good idea in theory, in practice, the second viceroy, who came in in 1719, immediately started a letter writing campaign to shut the thing down. He said that New Granada and its adjacent provinces were not rich enough to support the effort and expense of maintaining a viceroyal government. And in 1724, the Council of the Indies agreed and the thing was shuttered. So not off to a great start. 

But a few years later, tension between Spain and Britain exploded into a war that necessitated a vigorous defense of the Spanish Main. And so the Viceroyalty of New Granada was reformed in 1739. And though the capital would technically be Bogotá, the new viceroy, Sebastián de Eslava, would spend almost his entire run in the port of Cartagena. Eslava was a general in the Spanish army, and a damn good one, to be honest. And it was thanks to his efforts, strategic, administrative and tactical, that the British made absolutely no inroads during the subsequent war. 

Now, for those of you who know a bit of history, you know that the war I’m talking about here is the War of Jenkins’ Ear. The origins of this war go back to the treaties that wrapped up the War of the Spanish Succession, because in those treaties, the Spanish granted a commercial monopoly to the British for traffic of African slaves into the Americas. The Spanish authorities suspected, quite rightly, that British merchants were using this conceited access to Spanish markets to smuggle in a whole bunch of other stuff they were prohibited from carrying. In 1731, one such merchant, Robert Jenkins, had his ship boarded and searched, and in the ensuing confrontation, the Spanish commander cut off Jenkins’ ear. Fast forward a few years, anti-Spanish feelings are running high in Britain, and the story of poor old Jenkins is revived. And he’s brought in to testify before Parliament, and according to what is likely an apocryphal story, he brought with him his pickled ear in a jar to show off to much dramatic gasping. This and assorted other grievances, real and imagined, led Parliament to all but force Prime Minister Robert Walpole to declare war on Spain in 1739. 

So a British fleet under Admiral Edward Vernon was then dispatched to the Caribbean to attack Spanish holdings there, and he did a pretty decent job of it through 1739 and 1740. But really, Vernon was just building up ahead of steam for the really big attack he planned on the port of Cartagena in early 1741. For this operation, he mustered in Jamaica fully 186 ships and over 25,000 men. This is a really big operation. Ten thousand of those were regular army, twelve thousand were sailors, and then there were four companies of Virginians numbering four thousand total. One of those four companies was led by Captain Lawrence Washington, that is the beloved older half-brother of our old friend George Washington. And unlike many of his comrades, Washington managed to survive the coming ordeal, and when he came home to Virginia, he built a plantation on a hill beside the Potomac River that he named after his old admiral, Vernon, hence Mount Vernon. 

The siege of Cartagena, though, turned out to be a complete disaster for the British, and a combination of the city’s excellent fortifications and yellow fever induced catastrophic casualties, a good 10,000 dead and another 7,500 sick or wounded, before the British withdrew in May 1741. But by that point, back in Europe, the War of Austrian Succession was now under way, and the War of Jenkins’ Ear was just folded in as a little side theater of that new long European war, as Spain wound up naturally allied with their cousins in France, who had joined Prussia in a fight against their common nemesis, the Austrian Habsburgs, who were allied now with the British and Dutch, among others. The war lasted from 1740 to 1748, and we are not going to worry about it one little bit. Instead, we’re going to keep right on trucking to the next big European war that does so much to alter the course of history in the Western Hemisphere, and which I have now concluded as the widest discrepancy ratio between historical importance and frequency of discussion: the Seven Years War. 

So this will now be the fourth series in a row in which we have to talk about the significance of the Seven Years War and those seven years were 1756 to 1763. For the American Revolution, of course, it was British financial and political reforms introduced into their North American colonies at the end of the war, like after they kick out the French, that gets the ball rolling on American independence. For the French Revolution, the Seven Years War is the beginning of that diplomatic revolution of 1756. Remember? That was when a new British Prussian alliance forced France and Austria into an utterly unnatural and mutually loathed counter alliance. French hatred of the Austrian alliance played a major part in the early days of the French Revolution and ultimately helped drive the whole project off a cliff once the Girondans got everybody whipped up with war fever and declared war on Austria in April 1792. And then for the Haitian Revolution, remember that having lost all their North American possessions as a result of the Seven Years War, which every patriotic Frenchman naturally blamed on the Austrians, the French ministry tried to strengthen the metropolitan hold on its remaining Caribbean colonies by introducing a system of racial apartheid, which, of course, did nothing but spin that web of tension in Saint Domingue even tighter. 

OK, so here we are once again talking about the role of the Seven Years War and the part it plays in the emergence of Spanish American independence. Seven Years War. Very, very important war. 

So now, Spain did not immediately join the Seven Years War, but it did finally join the beleaguered French and Austrians in 1762, just in time for them all to get beat. But though the resulting settlement was catastrophic for France (they lose all their North American territories), it actually turned out not so bad for Spain, because while they had to give up Florida to the British, they managed to take over possession of the Louisiana Territory, which they were granted to pay off a war debt owed to them by the French Crown. And that’s how Spain winds up controlling Louisiana. That is, until Napoleon takes it away from them in 1800 and tries to use it as a centerpiece for a new French empire in the Americas, a dream that subsequently died of yellow fever in Saint Domingue in the summer of 1802. 

But it was during the Seven Years War, though, that the great King Charles III ascended to the Spanish throne. Charles had been the King of Naples and Sicily since 1738, but he gave up those titles to become King of Spain after his half-brother Ferdinand died in 1759. King Charles III is one of the quintessential enlightened despots who emerged out of the bubbling intellectual cauldron of the Enlightenment, joining a cohort of contemporary reformist monarchs like Frederick the Great, and Catherine the Great, and the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. And it would be the sweeping reforms made by Charles III at the conclusion of the Seven Years War that would really help start to set the stage for the coming Spanish American Revolution. 

Now, the point of the reforms was to strengthen and stimulate his new empire by introducing financial reforms to create a more efficient tax system, political reforms aimed at greater centralized authority, military reforms to empower the colonies to defend themselves, and economic reforms to dramatically increase the rational productivity of the whole enterprise. 

Now, not all of these reforms originated with Charles III. In many cases, he was just expanding on pre-existing reforms or continuing with a process started by his predecessors. But it really all does come to a head under Charles III. And aware that you can’t just dive in with both feet into the center of an entrenched system and just start mucking around, Charles III and his Council of the Indies began at the margins and then worked their way towards the center. And at this point, the Viceroyalty of New Granada was still pretty much the margins. 

So on the political front, the biggest innovation was the introduction of the intendants, a new type of official copied from the French example. The intendants and their staffs were salaried civil servants answerable directly to the Crown back in Madrid. And though technically subordinate to the viceroy, the proliferation of intendants made them independent powers in their own right, wielding a wide range of authority over justice, finances, legislation and economics. The proliferation of intendancies after the Seven Years War was greeted by the American criollo elite with a mixture of acceptance and resentment. Because, on the one hand, getting an intendant planted in your city, as, for example, Caracas did in 1776, well, that was a huge boon to the political and economic prestige of the local criollo elite. But at the same time, their practical access to political power started to wane, because unlike the old audiencias, which were heavily staffed by criollo nobility, the intendancies were typically staffed by peninsulares. And it wasn’t just the intendants themselves who were peninsulares, the growing bureaucracy they led was also staffed by peninsulares, but those guys were just low born civil servants, and those common bureaucrats now had authority over rich criollo nobility, which was not going to be a recipe for harmony in the socially conscious world of the Spanish elites. 

Now, another ingredient that was part of no recipe for harmony was that one of the principal objectives of the intendants was a more efficient collection of taxes, and who likes to pay taxes? But to be fair, this was not some ham fisted shakedown. Charles III and his Council of the Indies could think of no better way to grow their tax base than to modernize and stimulate the whole Spanish imperial economy. And so, it’s immediately after the Seven Years War that you get a sea change in economic thinking. And so last time we talked about how everything was kept under very tight control and run through the single House of Trade. The American port colonies were not even allowed to trade with each other, barring a few exceptions here and there. Well, now everything is going to be loosened up. In 1763, American ports were finally allowed to deal in just single ship trade, as opposed to having to deal with the huge convoy system. Then, in 1765, the first of a network of the Economic Society of the Friends of the Country was founded to develop and promote modern economic thinking. And those societies then spread from Europe over to the Americas. And then, in 1778, comes the biggie: the Freedom of Trade Decree. The power of the Casa de Contratación was restricted, and 13 Spanish ports were now allowed to trade directly to the Americas. And even more critically, those American ports were now free to trade with each other. The intendants were also empowered to not send all of their tax receipts back to Spain, and instead, maybe reinvest a portion of it in improving roads and sanitation and the water supply, basically upgrading the entire civil infrastructure to facilitate greater productivity. 

But free trade was not really free trade the way that we mean it today. This is all still rooted in mercantilist theories of a closed imperial trading system. So, free trade inside the Spanish Empire, but you’re still trying to block out the British and the French and the Dutch, at least as much as humanly possible. But even inside the Spanish Empire, it was not really free trade, because though the grand monopoly of the House of Trade was curtailed, it was really just being replaced with a plethora of smaller monopolies, covering either geographic regions or, like, an economic sector. The Crown itself, for example, had a monopoly on all tobacco trade, from the prices paid to farmers, to the prices charged to consumers. But though this was not ideal, it did do a much better job rationally allocating economic resources. And perhaps more importantly, it cut mightily into the contraband trade, which had always made a fortune, and avoided a fortune in Spanish taxes, by filling the inevitable gaps in the old closed off system.

But the Free Trade Decree was not universally beloved, because one of the big objectives of the decree was opening up American markets to newly emerging Spanish production in, for example, textiles. But the resulting flood of cheap goods from Spain into the Americas ruined many local merchants and manufacturers, which, as you can imagine, left them pretty ticked off. 

But in the main, and especially from Madrid’s perspective, this was all a very big success. And the value of trade between Spain and the Americas increased 400% in value between the early 1780s and late 1790s.

Now, since we’re interested in how this all shakes out for the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the whole of the political and economic reforms for the entire Bourbon era helped precipitate their rise in stature. So around Caracas, for example, large haciendas, that is, big commercial estates, had taken root, and they were now exporting wheat flour and then really started turning a major profit when they got in on the cacao boom. And then out in those worthless Venezuelan grasslands, cattle and horses introduced in the early days of the Conquest now roamed in wild herds, and a population of mostly mixed race cowboys had moved in and were making a go of it in hides and meats. And those cowboys are going to be really super duper majorly important, so please don’t forget about them. Caracas itself, meanwhile, had grown in importance and now sported both an audiencia and an intendancy. So, by the time our man Simón Bolívar was born in 1783, his native Venezuela was fairly well thriving. 

Now, to defend this new, thriving economy, without that defense draining off all the profits, the Spanish also reoriented their military posture. It was simply too expensive to ship Spanish troops over to garrison the Americas. So the army started creating regiments drawn directly from the American population, and then to augment that local strength, they vastly expanded the existing militia system. Service in both the regular army and the militia became a principal avenue of upward mobility, and was especially attractive because it put the enlistee under special military law that was far more responsive and rational than local justice. It also trained generations worth of young men in the art of war, and then their sons tended to follow them into service. So when the wars of Spanish American independence got going in the 1800s, there was a deep well of military training and experience they could all draw from.

And then in 1777, Venezuela was upgraded again to become a Captaincy General, which meant that a senior military officer would now reside in Caracas who held independent authority over the region’s defenses. And that was just in time for Spain to join the European coalition that aided Britain’s North American colonies in their dramatic fight for independence. And as we will see next week, many young Venezuelan officers joined that fight and in particular helped capture Pensacola in 1781, including the man who will be at the center of next week’s episode, Francisco de Miranda. 

Now, we’ll end today’s episode with one of the most controversial of Charles III’s reforms, a reform that caused widespread resentment in the Americas and helped begin the formation of a distinct American identity, especially in the upper classes. I am speaking of the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish Empire in 1767. 

Now, we haven’t talked about the Jesuits too much around here, but to be brief, they were a Catholic order formed in 1540, and were officially called the Society of Jesus. And the thing that makes the Jesuits unique is their belief in the value of a good education. When their order arrived in the New World, they brought with them that focus on education, and local elites were all too happy to send their sons off to get a Jesuit education. And beyond just educating the next generation of criollo elites, the Jesuits turned more than a few of those guys into the next generation of criollo Jesuits. 

But the Spanish Crown was always a little concerned about the Jesuits. Though we haven’t talked about it, this is still the age of the Inquisition, when dogma, both political and religious, was enforced by force. You are not supposed to be reading heretical books, thinking heretical thoughts, or saying heretical things. Censorship in the Americas was officially pretty tight, though it was impossible to stop the spread of the really interesting books and ideas that were floating around out there, especially after the Enlightenment gets going. So the Spanish authorities attended to look at the Jesuits and that focus on education as a hotbed of heretical sedition. The Jesuits also happen to run by far the most humane of those Amerindian reductions that we talked about last week, and the Indians under Jesuit charge were generally left to live in their own manner without forced conversion to European modes of living, and the Jesuits constantly defended the Amerindians from Spanish abuse. 

So in 1767, King Charles III decided to clear out the troublesome Jesuits by expelling them all from his empire. Go on, get out. You’re not welcome here anymore! But the thing to understand is that the Jesuits in the Americas were not peninsulares who had traveled to the Americas. They were now born and raised criollo. So we’re talking here about natives of Mexico and Venezuela and Peru being exiled from their homes and forced to relocate to some safe haven in Europe. And it’s during that exile, and thanks to their education, that these guys started developing and promoting the idea that there was such a thing as a purely American identity that was distinct from, and even superior to, the Spaniards who presumed to rule, despite the fact that it was clear to everyone that the strength of Spain was in America, not in Spain itself, which was a hopeless decrepit wreck. 

One of the founding documents of Spanish American independence was, in fact, written by one of these Jesuit exiles, a Peruvian named Juan Pablo Viscardo. Exiled in London, he penned his famous Letter to the Spanish Americans, which explicitly promoted the idea of Spanish American independence. Now, of course, by then, he had the American Revolution to point to as an example. And then also the French Revolution is getting underway, and liberals across Europe are getting pretty excited about the possibility of remaking the world anew, and they might be willing to listen to what it might take to break Spanish America away from the Spanish. 

But it would be a little while yet before revolution came to Spanish America. And as you may have noticed, the project doesn’t get going until 1807. But in the lead up to that all important break, though, unrest, revolt and upheavals did start to hit the Spanish Americas with alarming frequency, including a full blown Amerindian revolt in Peru in the early 1780s. And next week, we will talk all about those precursors to Spanish American independence. And then, of course, talk all about the man whose tireless dedication to Spanish American independence earned him the historical honorific: the precursor – Francisco de Miranda.

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