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'La Espaa Ultramarina': Colonialism and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara European History Quarterly 2004 34: 191 DOI: 10.1177/0265691404042507 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ehq.sagepub.com/content/34/2/191

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Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

La Espaa Ultramarina: Colonialism and Nation-building in Nineteenth-century Spain

Spain suffered two devastating movements of decolonization in the nineteenth century, brought on by the Spanish-American revolutions (180926) and the wars against Cuban and Filipino patriots that ended with intervention by the United States (18958). Historians of modern Spain have given far greater attention to the latter moment than to the former; 1898 is one of the iconic dates in Spanish history, forcing reflections by any scholar of the modern period. As one prominent historian observed amidst the wave of publications that surged forth during the centennial of 1898: Since then, and for a lengthy period of time, every espaolito has felt obligated to reckon with 98.1 Yet, amidst the copious writings there remains a strange silence; while talking incessantly of the loss of the colonies, historians have said almost nothing about the colonies themselves. This omission appears all the more glaring in light of recent discussions about modern European colonialisms that emphasize the dynamic political, cultural and economic interactions between colonies and the metropolis. Colonialism was not something that happened off-stage during the development of European conceptions of citizenship and the nation, but was always implicated profoundly in these processes.2 I would like to pursue these insights by showing the connections between colonialism and the articulation of national identity in Spain between decolonizations. Lately, the making, invention and imagining of the idea of Spain have received careful and sophisticated attention; but the role of the colonies in these political and ideological projects has gone unexamined. While I concur with many of the methodological assumptions of these works derived largely from Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm and
European History Quarterly Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi (www.sagepublications.com), Vol. 34(2), 191214. ISSN 02656914 DOI: 10.1177/0265691404042507

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Pierre Nora3 I differ by arguing that a retrenched colonialism, in its interface with nationalism, attracted and appeased powerful economic, political and intellectual forces throughout the Peninsula. Indeed, colonialism was a major vector for imagining the nation and its history.4 In presenting this argument, two aspects of colonialism and nation-building in the nineteenth century are explored. First, there is discussion of the centrality of the colonies (especially Cuba and Puerto Rico) to the political economy of the liberal regime that was consolidated in the 1830s. Spanish producers exported their goods to protected colonial markets and migrants to the Caribbean became major planters and merchants, while some who returned (indianos) invested their earnings in Spains nascent industrial economy. These sectors of metropolitan society actively defended their interests, representing the colonies as part of the national market whose loss would violate Spains national integrity. Second, the way in which the colonies figured into the imagined community of Spanish nation-builders is shown. The dense historical literature and archives created by Spaniards over the centuries to justify, explain and govern the Spanish Empire served as models for nineteenth-century patriots who were seeking to craft national histories after the destruction of the old regime. Furthermore, in nineteenth-century parlance the colonies were la Espaa ultramarina, integral parts of the Spanish nation-state. In the view of Spanish intellectuals, politicians, colonial officials and business leaders, the colonies were bound to the Peninsula not only by the national economy but also by centuries of Spanish rule that had implanted language, religion and political institutions in the Caribbean and Pacific, effectively assimilating, culturally and biologically, the conquered peoples into the march of Spanish history.

Reshaping Spanish Colonialism

A recent work on Spanish responses to the Disaster of 1898 has posed an intriguing question. Why did Spaniards respond with such passion to the defeat of that year and with such apparent indifference to the loss of the majority of the Empire in the Spanish-American revolutions in the 1820s? After all, as Jos

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Alvarez Junco points out, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines represented a miniscule percentage of the vast empire that had been constructed in the early modern period. He concludes that Spanish response to the Spanish-Cuban-American War was a clear case of exaggeration, an erroneous perception of the importance of the rump empire to Spains political and economic fortunes.5 Arguably, both elements of Alvarez Juncos argument are in need of revision. First, the fervid reactions to military defeat in 1898 reflected an understanding of the central role of the colonial empire in Spains economy, as well as the pain of losing what was perhaps the single most important colony in Spains long history of rule in the Americas: Cuba. Alvarez Junco is correct to note that studies of economic responses to 1898 have shown that Spain recovered quickly and successfully from the loss of the colonies. Moreover, more Spaniards migrated to Cuba in the first third of the twentieth century than in any period of direct Spanish rule. Yet contemporaries in Spain had no way of predicting these outcomes. As this article will show, their anguished response had deep political, economic and intellectual roots.6 Second, the assumption that Spaniards responded passively to the break-up of the majority of the American Empire in the 1820s is incorrect. To the contrary, the Spaniards responses were active, decisive and diverse. Both Alvarez Junco and Martin Blinkhorn have argued that Spaniards were indifferent to the colossal colonial losses of the 1820s because they viewed the Indies as the personal possessions of the Spanish monarch, not as integral parts of Spain.7 However, several studies have shown that many Spaniards were greatly preoccupied with the colonial question during the Spanish-American revolutions. For merchants and producers throughout the Peninsula, the Americas were not the kings patrimony but their market for their flour, wheat, oil, wine, and textiles, all of which were transported in their ships in voyages financed with their capital. Thus, the consulado of Cdiz, the most important merchant guild in Spain in the early nineteenth century, responded energetically to the colonial wars by taking upon itself the task of raising troops and transporting them to the Americas.8 The most vigorous, and most clearly understood, responses to war and decolonization were the economic decisions made by merchants and producers on the Spanish periphery. In particular,

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Cuba figured as one of the cornerstones in the reconstruction of the Spanish economy after years of colonial, European, and civil wars. The Spanish-American revolutions forced Spanish producers and merchants to find new markets in the early nineteenth century. Until the French revolution, the American colonies were by far the single biggest market for Spanish manufacturers and agriculture, receiving some 40 per cent of Spanish exports, while mercantilist trade policies also favored the interests of Spanish merchants and carriers. With those lucrative protected markets lost through war and separation, Spaniards recast the export economy. Europe came to play a larger role in the Spanish economy, especially France and England which for most of the nineteenth century each absorbed about 3035 per cent of Spanish exports. However, after those European markets, Cuba steadily remained Spains third largest export market, accounting for about 1520 per cent of Spanish goods. As under the old regime, high tariffs and duties privileged the entry of Spanish goods and the services of Spanish merchants.9 Reconfiguration of the export economy was only one aspect of colonial retrenchment. More important was the internal restructuring of the colonies, especially Cuba and Puerto Rico, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Slavery was the key in the making of the biggest plantation economy in Spanish-American history. Between 1780 and 1867 (the year that the Cuban slave trade was finally suppressed), Cuba imported approximately 780,000 slaves. To get some sense of how unique Cuba was, it is telling to note that between the early sixteenth century and the later eighteenth century, all of Spanish America combined imported approximately 700,000 slaves.10 Beginning in the late eighteenth century, contemporaries (such as the Cuban planter Francisco Arango y Parreo) were aware that the growth of Cuban sugar and slavery was unprecedented in Spanish colonial history.11 For most of its rule in the Americas, Spain had built a mercantilist system that was geared principally towards bullion extraction from the imperial centers, Mexico and Peru. However, Cubas wealth derived from its insertion into the world market of sugar and slavery; this was a commerciallybased colonialism that resembled more closely the colonial exploitation practiced by the British and French in colonies such as Barbados, Jamaica and St Domingue.12 The Spanish-American revolutions accelerated this process,

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which included Puerto Rico from about 1815, as Spanish investors concentrated their interests on the more stable Caribbean colonies. Many Spaniards played a prominent role in the development of colonial slavery in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, some of the major planters (hacendados) of the period were Spaniards such as Julin Zulueta and Francisco Ibaez, perhaps the two largest slave-owners at the time of Cuban slave emancipation in 1886. Long after many Creoles demanded the suppression of the slave trade, Spaniards such as Zulueta, Ibaez and Juan Manuel de Manzanedo began importing slaves in record numbers and using them to open large-scale plantations in the province of Matanzas, just east of Havana. While many of these Spanish planters remained in Cuba, there were probably more Spaniards who made their fortune through slavery, the slave trade, banking or commerce and returned to Spain to invest in property, manufacturing and firms linked to the colonial trade. These indianos often rose to prominent positions in Spanish society and politics. For example, Manzanedo was the wealthiest man in Madrid in the later nineteenth century: he became a senator and received the title of Marquis de Manzanedo. After a successful career in Cuba, the Cantabrian Antonio Lpez y Lpez became the founder of the Compaa Trasatlntica, a huge company that dominated business with the government as it pertained to the colonies. He invested in Barcelonas developing manufacturing sector and was eventually given the title of Marquis de Comillas.13 Spanish merchants, producers and immigrants received considerable support from the liberal regime. In the 1830s, Spanish liberals chose to retrench on the national and colonial fronts and to retreat from the radical democratic project of the Cortes of Cdiz (181014) and the Constitution of Cdiz (1812), the holy grail of Spanish liberalism in the first third of the nineteenth century. This political shift was the result of the death of King Ferdinand VII in 1833, a fierce defender of the old regime who had refused to recognize the Constitution of Cdiz upon his return from being held in captivity by Napoleon in 1814. Although Ferdinands throne passed to his infant daughter Isabel (under the regency of her mother Mara Cristina), Ferdinands brother, Don Carlos de Borbn, contested the inheritance and launched a major insurgency against his nieces claims. The key issues that separated the Carlists and Isabels supporters con-

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cerned the future of the Spanish state and economy: should Spain continue under the old regime, the besieged absolutism of Ferdinand, as the Carlists wanted, or should Spain finally make the transition to a constitutional monarchy and introduce capitalist property relations, as the liberal defenders of Isabel hoped? These competing visions of Spain divided the Peninsula for the remainder of the decade, as the civil war dragged on.14 The Carlist challenge had major implications at home, forcing Spanish liberals to abandon the radicalism of Cdiz and the Liberal Triennium (18203) and to elaborate a moderate regime that resembled more closely the cautious constitutional monarchies of other mid-nineteenth-century European countries. Although the 1812 constitution was briefly restored in 1835, the new Cortes decided to revise it significantly. What resulted from the new 1837 constitution was a more conservative regime: rather than the universal male suffrage of Cdiz, the franchise was restricted to property owners; rather than a unicameral legislature, the new government was bicameral with a senate of appointed members. In subsequent constitutional revisions, liberals made even bigger compromises with the old regime by vesting sovereignty not in the people alone, but in the people and the Bourbon monarchy; these compromises gave the Crown a powerful voice in everyday politics by making it the practical executive with the right to name governments and dissolve the Cortes.15 The economic reforms of the 1830s were more subversive. Recent studies have shown that the Spanish government had begun to chip away at old-regime forms of property in the later eighteenth century, especially aristocratic and ecclesiastical land entailments, in an effort to modernize the agrarian economy. The liberals of the 1830s pursued this policy at full speed, abolishing entailments and putting massive amounts of aristocratic (and especially ecclesiastical) property up for sale to private buyers. While the resulting transfer of property did not create the broad class of small, profit-oriented farmers that was envisioned by some reformers, it did smash the Church as major economic player and set in motion a steady, if not spectacular, rise in agricultural production over the course of the nineteenth century. It also antagonized the Carlist camp, whose supporters rallied around the defense of the Church and resisted the restructuring of the agrarian economy.16

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Carlism and political retrenchment had major implications for the colonies as well. One senses a powerful paranoia in the political reports from the colonies in these years. Captain generals such as Miguel Tacn, who governed in Cuba between 1834 and 1838, saw themselves menaced by Carlists, Creole separatists, rebel slaves and English abolitionists. After abolishing slavery in the British Caribbean (18348), the English abolitionists would set their sights supposedly on Cuba and Puerto Rico. As Tacn put it in one of his dispatches to Madrid: all work against the interests of Spain.17 The mood in Madrid was receptive to such dire reports. Consolidation of the new regime concerned the liberals of the 1830s, especially as the Carlist War raged across northern Spain. Moreover, after the Spanish-American revolutions, Spanish distrust of the Creoles ran high, even in Cuba and Puerto Rico. The reasoning of Ramn de la Sagra, a colonial bureaucrat and natural scientist who had spent many years in Cuba, appealed to the Cortes desire to maintain the colonial status quo. He argued that it was too risky to undertake political reforms in the colonies during a moment of crisis. In particular, the expansion of the slave population in Cuba, which imported approximately 180,000 slaves during the 1830s, made the introduction of the Spanish constitution imprudent. In his view, Creole planters were content to pursue their economic interests and to leave political reform for a later day:
What alarms the inhabitants . . . of European race is not the tranquil exercise of liberty, nor its influence in all social transactions, but the public exercise of political rights: popular elections, freedom of the press, the division of authority; in short, the consequences of the feverishness that characterizes free peoples and which are dangerous in slave countries. The public exercise of political rights is a true insult to those classes still deprived of civil rights, a mockery of their abject state and their servitude. There, such an example can be fatal.18

Although Sagra took it upon himself to speak for the Cuban dominant class, Creole attitudes were mixed. Some Cuban intellectuals concurred with Sagra that [c]onstitution, liberty, equality are synonymous. To these terms, slavery and inequality are repulsive. Only in vain can we seek to reconcile these contrary terms;19 but others pointed to historical and contemporary examples, such as ancient Athens and the US, to show that liberty and slavery were compatible. In either case, most Creole

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lites did not believe that the growth of slavery should prompt their exclusion from the Cortes.20 Nevertheless, Madrid did choose to exclude the colonial lites from the program of political reform. The deputies of 1837 followed Sagras recommendations against the political incorporation of, and constitutional rule in, the colonies. This marked a significant rupture with the colonial policies of Cdiz and the Liberal Triennium, when Spain had tried to incorporate Spaniards from the colonies into the new polity under the same laws. Now, however, the more conservative mood of Spanish liberalism dictated political order above all else. Not only were colonial deputies excluded from the Cortes in 1837, but increasingly, political control came to be located in the office of the captain general. In the event, the new regime subjected Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to exceptional rule for more than thirty years as the Cortes sporadically contemplated the special laws that would govern la Espaa ultramarina.21 The new colonial order faced several major challenges over the course of the century, including three wars with Cuban patriots (186878, 187980, 18958). Opposition existed within Spain, too, as there was disagreement within the political class over the best manner in which to govern the colonies, i.e. whether through exceptional rule or the full incorporation of the colonies into the Spanish constitution as equal provinces. The moment of most profound confrontation erupted with the convergence of metropolitan and colonial revolution in 1868, what came to be known as the September revolution (186874) in Spain and the Ten Years War (186878) in Cuba.22 One of the most pressing questions that faced the revolutionary regime in Madrid in 1868 was the fate of Antillean slavery. Several factors produced an acute crisis: slave emancipation in the US (1865), the founding of the Spanish Abolitionist Society (1865), renewed Anglo-American pressure on the Spanish government to abolish slavery and the slave trade, the abolition of the slave trade to Cuba (186770), and the increasingly abolitionist bent of the Cuban insurgency. The new regime came to power with a broad liberal and democratic domestic agenda and was tempted to begin dismantling colonial slavery. But the furious response from planters in the Antilles and business groups in Spain made the government hesitate. In the end, Cuban slavery was not abolished until 1886, almost twenty years after the

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Spanish and Cuban revolutions put it on the political agenda.23 The breadth of the Spanish response to the possibility of slave emancipation gives some sense of the centrality of colonial slavery and markets to Spanish liberalism and conceptions of the nation during the nineteenth century. Whenever the government debated legislation regarding colonial slavery, or the Spanish Abolitionist Society held public rallies in Madrid, Barcelona and other major Spanish cities, proslavery groups immediately answered with petitions and public meetings of their own to oppose abolition. Who were these groups? In Spain, most came from agricultural, commercial and manufacturing centers: merchants and industrialists from Barcelona, Santander, Bilbao, Valencia and Vigo, among other cities; and cereal-growers from Valladolid and Seville. In short, they were those groups that had turned their trade towards Cuba after the Spanish-American revolutions and that feared any disruption of the colonial economy, especially in the form of slave emancipation.24 Most opponents of slave emancipation couched their defense in nationalist terms. They were defending not only their protected markets but more importantly the national integrity.25 Interestingly, the language of the nation cut across the peninsula. Perhaps the most vociferous defenders of la Espaa ultramarina were indianos, merchants and manufacturers in Catalonia. In the nineteenth century, colonialism worked as an important rallying point for the peripheral bourgeoisie; Catalans and Basques implicated in the colonial project defended and promoted the Spanish nation as fiercely as any Castilian. This defense of slavery and the colonial regime demonstrates how colonialism could reconcile the tensions inherent in nationbuilding in the Peninsula. For most of the century, Catalonia sought greater administrative decentralization from Madrid, although these demands did not decant into a nationalist movement until the very close of the nineteenth century. Barcelonan lawyers defense of Catalan common law against Madrids attempts to create a uniform civil code is an example of the multiple friction points that existed between Madrid and different regions in Spain, especially Catalonia and the Basque provinces. But when addressing the issue of colonial reform, most Catalan representatives were staunchly centralist, insisting that Madrid protect the national market in the Antilles and

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resist Creole demands for political autonomy and trade liberalization.26 A most vocal articulator of the essential unity between Spain and the colonies was the premier lobbying group for Barcelonas leading merchants and manufacturers: the Fomento de la Produccin Nacional (later known as the Fomento del Trabajo Nacional). In one of its anti-abolition petitions, the Fomento argued that increased commerce between Spain and the provincias de Ultramar would put an unbreakable seal on the great nationality that still flies its flag in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, and in America.27 That aggressive defense of empire continued throughout the century. Pedro Bosch y Labrs, the president of the Fomento in the 1880s, not only defended the status quo but saw imperial expansion as crucial to Spains future:
[F]or all the talk of universal peace and the fraternity of peoples, the brutal reality is that, as Bismarck said, la force prime la droit. This has always been true in the past, as it is in the present and probably will be in the future. Weak nations will never be truly and effectively independent.28

The Fomento and other peninsular groups did not act alone in defending slavery and empire. Associations formed in the colonies, especially in Havana, took the leading role in coordinating Spanish and Antillean resistance to slave emancipation. Here, we see the strong connections between colonies and metropolis that shaped the Spanish political order. Major Spanish planters such as Zulueta and slave traders such as Manzanedo coordinated the Hispano-Antillean defense of slavery. Basing themselves in Havana and Madrid and allying themselves with important figures from the Spanish military and political lite, such as General Francisco Serrano y Domnguez, the colonial interests effectively rallied supporters landowners, merchants, manufacturers and indianos from throughout the Peninsula to petition the Spanish government and to take to the street in support of slavery. One such example was a petition against proposed legislation sent from Barcelona and signed by Women born in the Antilles. Like most of the anti-abolitionist petitions and proclamations of the period, the authors claimed that they did not support slavery itself but opposed slave emancipation because of its potentially disastrous social and economic effects: we are wives and mothers and our hearts instinctively sense that something serious hides behind the proposed reforms.29

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The events of the September revolution, as well as the decisionmaking of Spanish politicians and merchants in the 1820s and 1830s, demonstrate that the vociferous protests of 1898 were not unprecedented; indeed, their roots lay deep in the nineteenth century and were entangled with efforts to define and imagine the nation. Challenges to the colonial order had the potential to mobilize Spaniards throughout the Peninsula and across the Atlantic in defense of their political and economic interests. Far from being an exaggeration, the vehemence expressed by intellectuals, businessmen, politicians and soldiers in 1898 was structured by the retrenched political economy of Spanish liberalism an order that was shaped not only by agrarian change and the beginnings of industrialization in Spain, but also by the dramatic reshaping of the colonial regime during and after the SpanishAmerican revolutions, most notably through the spectacular growth of Cuban slavery and sugar. Moreover, defenders of the status quo decried reforms as threats to the national market and the national integrity. The explosive reaction to the Disaster of 1898 was born of the energetic responses to decolonization in the 1820s and the linkage between the new colonial order and nationbuilding. Recognizing these links provides some answers to Alvarez Juncos provocative question.

Colonialism and National History

More than crude economic interest and political calculation went into the remaking of Spanish colonialism in the nineteenth century. Historians of other European colonialisms (especially the British, French and Dutch) now argue that, while overseas expansion and colonization certainly had economic and geopolitical motivations, the consequences of conquest were varied. Not least, the colonial crucible was a space in which Europeans developed new forms of scientific and scholarly knowledge, the most well-known case being the disciplines that composed Orientalism.30 Recent work also makes a strong case that the colonial encounter played a defining role in shaping concepts at the heart of European liberalism and republicanism, including citizenship, the nation and the family.31 That the colonization of the New World forced Spaniards to reorder their conceptual universe is well understood for the

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early-modern period, but this ongoing process has been explored little in the historiography of modern Spain.32 However, it is suggested that colonialism continued to play a key role in forging the ideologies of Spanish modernity. In particular, as Spanish patriots sought to construct a new nation-state and national imaginary out of the wreckage of the old regime, they made use of narrative and rhetorical strategies and documentary sources that had been developed to comprehend and justify the empire. This blurring of the lines between nation and colonies was apparent in the battles over slavery during the September revolution. When the defenders of slavery invoked national integrity, their abolitionist opponents often denounced them as crass hypocrites who cloaked their greed in patriotic colors.33 Yet Spanish abolitionists and anti-abolitionists alike generally concurred in their definition of the nations limits, even if they disagreed over how it should be governed and how wealth should be gained. Across the political spectrum, there was consensus that the colonies were not separate countries or nations with their own histories. Rather, they were integral parts of the Spanish nationstate and formed chapters in the march of Spanish history. In other words, colonial history was national history. Jos Alvarez Juncos most recent work offers important tools for conceptualizing the crafting of patriotic histories that folded the colonies into the narrative of Spanish history. Building on the insights of The Invention of Tradition and Imagined Communities, Alvarez Junco argues that national history was a collective saga of founding fathers adorned with heroes and martyrs, all defenders of an essential community, forming a crucial part of a shared culture that integrated the individuals of the new nationstates.34 In Spain, patriotic historians revived the Numantines (numantinos), Don Pelayo and El Cid as early geniuses and defenders of the Spanish nationality. However, in so doing they confronted a dearth of historiographical precedents. Alvarez Junco has noted that nineteenth-century historians could rely only on the works of foreign historians or Juan de Marianas venerable work for histories of Spain; indeed, the stirrings of a national historiography originated in the desire to rebut the orientalism of French and British historians.35 The present author agrees with Alvarez Juncos characterization of the anxieties of patriotic historians in the nineteenth century and their desire to defend Spain against foreign histories

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and historians.36 However, it can also be argued that these anxieties and responses have a longer history, especially if we look at the rivalry between Spaniards and other Europeans over writing the history of the New World, a subject carefully explored by Jorge Caizares-Esguerra.37 Spaniards in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrote monumental historical works to comprehend, describe, justify and criticize Spanish deeds in the New World. Oviedo, Las Casas, Gmara and Herrera were historical giants upon whose shoulders their nineteenth-century acolytes could build a new historiography, although it was one constructed in the name of the nation rather than the empire. Moreover, patriots could turn to an extremely rich eighteenth-century revival of histories of Spanish exploration and colonization, epitomized by Juan Bautista Muozs Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1793) and often written in response to foreign critics who used Spain and its American colonies as negative foils for their definitions of economic rationality, science and political justice.38 Patriots such as Muoz and his fellow Valencian Gregorio Mayans called for an intellectual revival that built on the geniuses of the Spanish Renaissance, such as Antonio de Nebrija, Juan Luis Vives, and Cervantes, rather than borrowing wholesale from French and English intellectual trends as some ilustrados advocated. For a historian such as Muoz, this meant rejecting foreign histories of Spanish colonialism for example, William Robertsons widely-admired The History of America (1777) and crafting a definitive history of the New World with the use of Spanish sources. That ambition drove Muoz to place Spanish historiography on firm national foundations. In preparing his Historia del Nuevo Mundo, of which he was able to publish only one volume, Muoz scoured Spanish archives and libraries for sources that shed light on the age of Spanish exploration and colonization. In so doing, he created not only the rich manuscript collection that still bears his name at the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid but also organized Spains major colonial archive, the Archivo de Indias in Seville, a standard reference point to this day for any historian of early Spanish colonialism.39 Although Muoz expressed skepticism about the accuracy of sixteenth-century Spanish chronicles, a skepticism he shared with the northern European critics that he generally scorned, his

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contemporaries busily edited and published historical accounts that had languished in archives for centuries. For example, Andrs Gonzlez de Barcia, one of the founders of the Real Academia Espaola, published works by Fernando Coln, Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedo and Alvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca, among others.40 His fellow academician, Juan de Iriarte, also explicitly linked the retrieval of Spains historical and literary tradition to a rejuvenated patriotism: [Foreigners] affirm that all Spanish science can be reduced to two verses and four syllogisms. The patriots response should be to praise the great men of our nation by resurrecting their memories.41 Historians of the nineteenth century carried on these innovations, but with greater efficacy. Institutional and court rivalries had hindered the publication of numerous histories in the eighteenth century. In contrast, nineteenth-century historians published voluminous collections of documents, monographs and new editions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century histories. For example, Martn Fernndez de Navarrete, director of the Real Academia de la Historia Espaola, published the first volume of his Coleccin de los viages y descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los espaoles desde fines del siglo XV in 1825, fully twenty-five years before the first volume of Modesto Lafuentes Historia General de Espaa which Alvarez Junco identifies as the first effective step in the crafting of a patriotic historiography.42 Indeed, foreign historians, including the great US hispanists Washington Irving and William Hickling Prescott, and the German scholar of the New World, Alexander von Humboldt, relied heavily on Spanish authorities and sources in writing their histories of Spanish colonization and American prehistory. For example, Irvings popular Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) was a synthesis of Navarretes Coleccin de los viages, while Prescott consulted the Real Academia de la Historias manuscript collections and Spanish historiography to write his histories of the Catholic kings and the conquests of Mexico and Peru.43 In a letter to the Spanish politician and man of letters, Francisco de Paula Martnez de la Rosa, Prescott acknowledged his debt to Spanish scholarship:
The kindness which I have experienced from your countrymen, and especially from the venerable Navarrete, in facilitating the historical investigations on

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which I am now occupied, binds me still closer to the nation whose glorious achievements have so long been my study and the object of my admiration. I have fully endeavoured in my history of the Catholic kings to pay the full tribute of respect which I owe to the scholars who have gone before me in my researches honored names Clemencn, Navarrete, Llorente, Marina, Sempere . . . 44

Meanwhile, Humboldt praised the labors of Muoz and Navarrete as major additions to knowledge of the New Worlds history, vindicating the great sixteenth-century chronicles and histories of Oviedo, Acosta and others as invaluable works on pre-conquest American civilizations.45 Rather than arguing that historians had to create a patriotic historiography virtually from scratch, and in response to foreign perspectives, it is suggested here that many of these tensions and the strategies for resolving them were already present in the histories of la Espaa ultramarina. By looking at the interaction between metropolis and colonies, we can see that the empire bequeathed to nineteenth-century patriots a deep layer of scholarly authority, historical sources, responses to foreign critics of Spain and rhetorical styles for forging national histories. Moreover, empire shaped the very contours of the nations imagined community in the nineteenth century. Historians from across the political spectrum tacitly agreed that the remaining colonies were a part of the national territory because Spain had recreated itself overseas. While the present author recognizes fully that there was considerable difference between the historical visions of a republican such as Emilio Castelar, and a conservative Catholic such as Marcelino Menndez Pelayo, it can also be argued that when seen in dialogue and contention with Creole histories of Spanish colonization, these works display telling similarities. The same is true not only across politics but also methods, from Menndez Pelayos study of Spanish-American poetry to Miguel RodrguezFerrers anthropological study of Cuba.46 In the nineteenth century, colonial patriots, such as the Puerto Rican Agustn Stahl or the Filipino Jos Rizal, crafted their own national histories that emphasized the pre-conquest, indigenous roots of their nations. In both Cuba and Puerto Rico, the African contribution to the nation also became part of the conversation, although generally in muted tones.47 In contrast, the impact of Indians and Africans on the

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Americas and the peculiarities of national cultures were of relatively little interest to Spanish Americanists. Rather, their works were studies of the Spanish nation in the Americas. There were two overlapping versions of this national narrative. On the one hand, Spain had swept aside the savage peoples of the conquered lands and created a more perfect civilization in their stead. On the other, Spain had assimilated, Indians and Africans into the Spanish nationality, both culturally and biologically. This latter vision was an extension of nineteenth-century understandings of the Peninsulas own history, as Joshua Goode has recently shown. According to anthropologists such as Manuel Antn, Spaniards were not a pure race but an alloy of the peoples who had traversed Spain over the centuries, a process of fusion that the conquerors repeated in the Americas and the Pacific.48 While there were differences between these renderings, both implied that, despite the yearnings of colonial patriots, the colonies did not have distinct national histories their history began with the Spanish conquest. For example, the republican politician and scholar Emilio Castelar vacillated between the two versions of Spains impact upon the New World. At times he emphasized the emptiness and pristine quality of the Americas before the conquest. That emptiness allowed the Spaniards to recreate a more perfect Spanish civilization in virgin territory. America was:
[A] land of progress, of liberty, of democracy, of the republic, of all the new ideals. They were more easily realized in that Nature without ruins, in that society without memories than here in this overworked Nature where we carry within ourselves, in our very spirit, as in an immense cemetery, so many dead.49

That refined spirit of Spanish liberty was the moving force behind the Spanish-American wars of independence in the early nineteenth century. The war between Creoles and peninsular Spaniards (peninsulares) was not one between the colonized and the colonizer but between son and father:
Look at the names of those who fought for American independence . . . and you will see that the Bolvars, the Itrbides, the Egaas, the Hidalgos belonged to our Spains most conservative classes and regions, children of our magistrates and governors.50

However, Castelar did have to admit that more than Spaniards lived in the Americas. There were indeed Indian civilizations that the Spanish had conquered over the course of the sixteenth

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century. In his historical rendering, Spain built over these flawed civilizations and assimilated the Indians into the laws and customs of Spain and Europe. Castelar compared Spain to Greece and Rome in its historical role. Like its predecessors, Spain eradicated the barbaric rites of conquered peoples, such as human sacrifice, and welcomed them into a superior civilization.51 Unlike its contemporary European rivals, especially England, Spain based its colonizing mission on assimilation and benevolent treatment of the Indians, a mission most clearly expressed by the Dominican friar Bartolom de las Casas. While many patriotic historians in the nineteenth century recoiled from Las Casas because of his fierce criticisms of the conquistadors, Castelar and many other scholars embraced him as the avatar of Spains civilizing mission. The lesson to be learned from Las Casas was not Spanish brutality but Spanish benevolence and belief in human equality. As Castelar argued: [I]nstead of exterminating the Indians and pushing them into the wilds as our proud Saxon rivals did, we accepted them into our society.52 Thus, whether representing the colonies, past or present, as an empty Eden or as lands peopled by benighted barbarians, Castelar implied that the colonies had no history before 1492; their history was Spanish history. In the blunt words of Wenceslao Retana y Gamboa, Spains leading nineteenthcentury historian of the Philippines: The history of the Philippines is little more than the history of its conquerors.53 This interpretation of Spanish history found its way into contemporary debates over colonial policy. Its presence is hardly surprising, since so many of the nineteenth-centurys most prominent historians of Spain overseas, such as Retana, Cesreo Fernndez Duro and Antonio Mara Fabi, had served in the colonial bureaucracy in various capacities. Fabi was a protg of the conservative political leader Antonio Cnovas del Castillo and served as Ministro de Ultramar in 1890. He was also a leading scholar of Las Casas, publishing a two-volume study of Las Casass writings in 1878. In a congress of American history held in Madrid in 1881, Fabi had distinguished himself as a stout defender of Las Casas against hostile Spanish commentators. Before a broad European and American public, Fabi held up Las Casas as the guiding spirit of the Spanish conquest. His constant and vociferous attacks against encomienda and the repartimiento de indios, two forms of exploiting unfree Indian

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labor that were used by the Spanish, eventually led to their suppression by the monarchy. Instead of exploiting or exterminating the Indians,
the Spaniards [had] the honor (and I believe that this is the occasion to say it) of being the only conquering people in America to have conserved the indigenous races in their dominions and to have fused with them.54

The Catalan man of letters, Vctor Balaguer, who served as Ministro de Ultramar three times in the later nineteenth century, shared Fabis vision of Spanish colonization. Spain fused with the conquered peoples and assimilated them into the Spanish nationality. Balaguers particular interest in colonial matters was the Philippines, Spains major Pacific colony, which he hoped to develop to the benefit of Spanish and Catalan business during the Restoration. He was the organizer of the large Exposicin Filipina that was held in Madrids Retiro Park in 1887. In commenting on Spain in the Philippines, Balaguer argued that the weakness of the connection between Peninsula and archipelago could be overcome if Spain followed the examples of its colonizing mission in the Americas, by fully incorporating the peoples of the Philippines into the Spanish race and nationality. Spain should hispanize the country by the extension of the peninsular race. By mixing with the indigenous, it will give rise . . . to a mestizo people, energetic and hard-working, from which we can expect much.55 The fusion of races would put in harmony the interests of both, to the benefit of all, following the healthy precept of our wise laws that the colony should always be the continuation of the metropolis by the extension of the race.56

National Integrity, National History

Balaguers imagining of a renovated colonialism in the Philippines pulls together the two strands of the argument presented here. First, Balaguer was an active defender of Spanish and Catalan interests in the colonial economy. Cuba was the major target of Spanish economic reconstruction after the SpanishAmerican revolutions, while Puerto Rico also developed a plantation economy of unprecedented scale after three centuries of Spanish rule. Moreover, in the final third of the nineteenth century, Spanish interests (especially in Catalonia) turned towards

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the Pacific, led by Antonio Lpezs Compaa Trasatlntica, whose origins lay in the exploitation of the Antilles.57 For merchants and manufacturers in Catalonia, the remaining colonies were part of their national market: a Spanish market that attracted and appeased leading economic sectors throughout the Peninsula between the two moments of decolonization (the SpanishAmerican revolutions and the Spanish-Cuban-American war). As the pro-slavery mobilizations of the September revolution adumbrations of events in 1898 indicated, defense of the colonial economy in the name of national integrity was a rallying point that attracted loyalty from every corner of Spain as well as both sides of the Atlantic. Second, Balaguer considered reformed colonial rule not only from the vantage point of economic exploitation but also from a historical perspective on Spanish colonization. Implicit in his argument about racial identity between colony and metropolis was the belief that Spain recreated itself in its colonies through the implantation of Spanish institutions and customs and through miscegenation: forms of assimilation that historians believed distinguished a humane Spanish colonialism from the barbarous conduct of the British. Thus colonial history was a re-enactment of the Peninsulas own venerable history. In conceptualizing the connection between colony and metropolis in national terms, Balaguer, Castelar, Fabi and myriad other representatives of Spains intellectual and political class drew upon structures of knowledge that had been forged over the centuries of conquest and colonization. The thicket of historical literature bequeathed by the early generations of Spanish colonizers such as Las Casas and Oviedo was crucial. But perhaps even more important were the endeavors of eighteenth-century ilustrados such as Muoz who sought to defend Spanish deeds and knowledge of those deeds by writing patriotic histories, bringing to light unpublished manuscripts, and by creating archives and collections to define and preserve those histories. Thus the crisis in the patriotic imagination wrought by the Disaster of 1898 should not be underestimated: not only had Spains national integrity been violated by military defeat, but a glorious and densely-written chapter of Spains national history had come to a traumatic and definitive close.

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Notes
1. Santos Juli, El 98: los ltimos patriotas, Babelia (literary supplement of El Pas) 4 October 1997, 14. 2. For an innovative argument and overview, see Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, Between Colony and Metropole: Rethinking a Research Agenda, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA 1997), 156. See also Peter Hulme, Subversive Archipelagos: Colonial Discourse and the Break-up of Continental Theory, Dispositio, Vol. 14 (1989), 123; Stuart Hall, When Was the Postcolonial? Thinking at the Limit, in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds, The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London 1996), 24260; Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham, NC 2003). Although historians of modern Spain have not pursued this line of inquiry, scholars of early-modern Spain were among the innovators. See John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New 14921650 (Cambridge 1970). 3. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 1983); Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge 1990); Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mmoire, Representations, no. 26 (1989): 725; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. ed., London 1991). 4. Carolyn Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History, and National Identity in Spain, 18751975 (Berkeley, CA 1997); E. Inman Fox, La invencin de Espaa (Madrid 1997); Carlos Serrano, El nacimiento de Carmen: Smbolos, mitos y nacin (Madrid 1999); Jos Alvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa: La idea de Espaa en el siglo XIX (Madrid 2001). It is not being suggested here that there is no work on colonialism; on the contrary, this field is now flourishing. Instead, it is questioned why the recent studies on nationalism have remained mute on the subject. For a sampling of scholarship on the nineteenth-century colonial regime see, in addition to the works cited in this article, Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, Miguel Puig-Samper and Luis Miguel Garca Mora, eds, La nacin soada: Cuba, Puerto Rico y Filipinas ante el 98 (Madrid 1996). 5. Jos Alvarez Junco, La nacin en duda, in Juan Pan-Montojo, ed., Ms se perdi en Cuba: Espaa, 1898 y el fin de siglo (Madrid 1998), 411. 6. On Spanish migration to Cuba in the twentieth century, see Maluquer de Motes, Nacin e imigracin: los espaoles en Cuba (ss. XIX y XX) (Oviedo 1992). This massive wave was already underway in the late nineteenth century following slave emancipation in Cuba (1886). On the Spanish economy after 1898, see Leandro Prados de la Escosura, De imperio a nacin. Crecimiento y atraso econmico en Espaa (17801930) (Madrid 1988); Jordi Maluquer de Motes, Espaa en la crisis de 1898: De la Gran Depresin a la modernizacin econmica del siglo XX (Barcelona 1999). 7. Martin Blinkhorn, Spain, the Spanish Problem and the Imperial Myth, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 15 (1980), 56; Alvarez Junco, La nacin en duda, 41112. 8. Michael Costeloe, Response to Revolution: Imperial Spain and the Spanish American Revolutions, 18101840 (Cambridge 1986), ch. 3.

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9. Prados de la Escosura, op. cit.; Josep Maria Fradera, Indstria i mercat: les bases commercials de la industria catalana moderna (18141845) (Barcelona 1987); Jordi Maluquer de Motes, El mercado colonial antillano en el siglo XIX, in Jordi Nadal and Gabriel Tortella, eds, Agricultura, comercio y crecimiento econmico en la Espaa contempornea (Barcelona 1974), 32257. 10. Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: a Census (Madison, WI 1969), 25. 11. See Dale Tomich, The Wealth of Empire: Francisco Arango y Parreo, Political Economy, and the Second Slavery in Cuba, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 45 (2003), 428. For a recent synthesis that emphasizes the novelty of colonial exploitation in the nineteenth-century Caribbean, see Francisco Scarano, Liberal Pacts and Hierarchies of Rule: Approaching the Imperial Transition in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 78 (1998), 583601. 12. See Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 14921800: From the Baroque to the Modern (London 1997), for an overview of slave regimes in the New World. On the making of Cuban slavery, see Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio (3 vols, Havana 1978); Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: the Transition to Free Labor, 18651899 (Princeton, NJ 1985); Laird Bergad, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: the Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton, NJ 1990). See also Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD 2000) on the political economy of Spanish rule in Mexico and Peru. 13. Bergad, op. cit.; Angel Bahamonde and Jos Cayuela, Hacer las Amricas: las elites colonials en el siglo XIX (Madrid 1992), chs 4 and 6; and Martin Rodrigo y Alharilla, Los Marqueses de Comillas, 18171925: Antonio y Claudio Lpez (Barcelona 2000). 14. For an overview of the period, see Miguel Artola, La burguesa revolucionaria (18081874) (9th edn, Madrid 1983). 15. Raymond Carr, Spain, 18081975 (2nd edn, Oxford 1982), 155209. 16. See Ramn Garrabou, Jess Sanz and Angel Garca Sanz, eds, Historia agraria de la Espaa contempornea (2 vols, Barcelona 1985); Richard Herr, Rural Change and Royal Finances in Spain at the End of the Old Regime (Berkeley, CA 1989); Josep Maria Fradera, Jess Millan and Ramon Garrabou, eds, Carlisme i moviments absolutistes (Vic, Catalonia 1990); and Jess Milln Garca-Varela, El poder de la tierra: la sociedad agrarian del bajo Segura en la poca del liberalismo: 18301890 (Alicante 1999). 17. Havana, 4 April 1837, Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Asuntos Polticos, legajo 132, nmero 17. 18. Ramn de la Sagra, Apuntes destinados a ilustrar la discusin del artculo adicional al proyecto de Constitucin que dice Las provincias de ultramar sern gobernadas por leyes especiales (Paris 1837), 31. 19. Flix Varela, Memoria que demuestra la neccesidad de extinguir la esclavitud de los negros en la Isla de Cuba, atendiendo a los intereses de sus propietarios, por el presbtero don Flix Varela [1822], in Jos Antonio Saco, Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el nuevo mundo y en especial en los pases Americo-hispanos, Vol. 4 (Havana 1938), 16. 20. Jos Antonio Saco, Examen analtico del Informe de la Comisin especial nombrada por las Cortes, sobre la exclusin de los actuales y futuros diputados de

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Ultramar, y sobre la necesidad de regir aquellos pases por leyes especiales (Madrid 1837). 21. Jess Ral Navarro Garca, Entre esclavos y constitucines (Seville 1991); Josep Maria Fradera, Why Were Spains Special Overseas Laws Never Enacted?, in Richard Kagan and Geoffrey Parker, eds, Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott (Cambridge 1995), 33549. 22. On the September revolution and the Ten Years War, see C.A.M. Hennessey, The Federal Republic in Spain (Oxford 1962); Ral Guerra y Snchez, La Guerra de los Diez Aos (18681878) (2nd edn, 2 vols, Havana 1986). 23. See Scott, op. cit. Puerto Rican slavery was abolished in 1873 by Spains First Republic. While opposition to abolition was also fierce there, the much smaller scale of Puerto Rican slavery (in 1868 there were approximately 40,000 slaves in Puerto Rico and more than 350,000 in Cuba) facilitated more dramatic action by the Spanish Abolitionist Society, founded by Puerto Ricans in Madrid, and the colonial state. See Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Anti-slavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 18331874 (Pittsburgh, PA 1999), chs 2 and 57. 24. On pro-slavery mobilization, see Jordi Maluquer de Motes, El problema de la esclavitud y la revolucin de 1868, Hispania, Vol. 31 (1971), 5676; Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, National Economy and Atlantic Slavery: Protectionism and Resistance to Abolitionism in Spain and the Antilles, 18541874, Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 78 (1998), 60329. 25. See, for example, Juan Gell y Ferrer, Rebelin cubana [1871] in his Escritos econmicos (Barcelona 1880). 26. On tensions between Madrid and Barcelona in the nineteenth century regarding codification, see Stephen Jacobson, Law and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: the Case of Catalonia in Comparative Perspective, Law and History Review, Vol. 20 (2002), 30747. On colonialism and protectionism in Catalonia, see Miquel Izard, Manufactureros, industriales y revolucionarios (Barcelona 1979). 27. La Junta Directiva del Fomento de la Produccin Nacional, Barcelona, 12 December 1872, Archivo Histrico Nacional (Madrid), Seccin de Ultramar (hereafter AHN/U), legajo 3554. 28. Pedro Bosch y Labrs, Conveniencia de un concierto econmico entre las distintas nacines de raza espaola [1889], in Manuel Fugs, ed., Discursos y escritos (Barcelona 1929), 897. 29. Mujeres nacidas en las Antillas, Barcelona, 8 January 1873, AHN/U, legajo 3555. 30. Hulme, op. cit.; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York 1978); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ 2000). 31. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucaults History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC 1995). 32. Elliott, op. cit.; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: the American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (2nd edn, Cambridge 1986). Important exceptions for the modern period include Josep Maria Fradera, Gobernar colonias (Barcelona 1999); and Javier Morillo-Alicea, Imperial Paper Trails, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, (forthcoming). 33. For example, see the speeches by the abolitionists Rafael Mara de Labra

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and Gabriel Rodrguez published in Una sesin de la Tertulia Radical de Madrid (Madrid 1873). 34. Alvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa, 1967; Hobsbawm and Ranger, op. cit.; Anderson, op. cit. 35. Ibid., ch. 4. 36. On foreign histories and representations of Spain, see also Richard Kagan, Prescotts Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain, American Historical Review, Vol. 101 (1996), 42346. 37. Jorge Caizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA 2001). 38. On the eighteenth century, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: the History of a Polemic (trans. Jeremy Moyle, Pittsburgh, PA 1973), chs 5 and 6; and Caizares-Esguerra, op. cit., esp. ch. 3. 39. Caizares-Esguerra, op. cit., 190201. 40. Ibid., 155. 41. Iriarte, quoted in Caizares-Esguerra, op. cit., 156. 42. Alvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa, 201. 43. On Irvings work, see Stanley T. Williams, The Spanish Background of American Literature, Vol. 2 (New Haven, CT 1955), 39. 44. Letter from William Hickling Prescott to Francisco de Paula Martnez de la Rosa, 1 January 1841, in Roger Wolcott, ed., The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 18331847 (trans. Roger Wolcott, Boston, MA 1925), 1923. 45. Caizares-Esguerra, op. cit., 559. As Caizares-Esguerra argues, Humboldt vindicated these sources against several decades of intense criticism by European philosophes, such as Cornelius De Pauw, who dismissed the early Spanish chroniclers and historians as reliable sources. 46. Marcelino Menndez Pelayo, Historia de la poesa hispano-americana (2 vols, Madrid 191113); Miguel Rodrguez-Ferrer, Naturaleza y civilizacin de la grandiosa isla de Cuba (Madrid 1876). 47. Agustn Stahl, Los indios borinqueos (Puerto Rico 1889); Jos Rizal, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas por Doctor Antonio de Morga (Paris 1890). 48. Joshua Goode, The Racial Alloy: the Science, Politics, and Culture of Race in Spain, 18751923, unpublished PhD thesis, University of California (1999). 49. Emilio Castelar, Historia del descubrimiento de Amrica (Madrid 1892), 24. 50. Ibid., 13. 51. Ibid., 592. 52. Emilio Castelar, Prlogo. Fray Bartolom de las Casas, in Carlos Gutirrez, Fray Bartolom de las Casas. Sus tiempos y su apostolado (Madrid 1878), xxxvi. On Las Casas and nineteenth-century historiography, see Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, The Specter of Las Casas: Jos Antonio Saco and the Persistence of Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, Itinerario, Vol. 25 (2001), 93109. 53. Wenceslao Retana, Contra un documento . . . dos, La Poltica de Espaa en Filipinas (Madrid 28 April 1891), 656. 54. Antonio Mara Fabe in, Congreso Internacional de Americanistas. Actas de la cuarta reunin. Madrid 1881, Vol. 1 (Madrid 1882), 121. 55. Vctor Balaguer, Islas Filipinas (Madrid 1895), 78. 56. Ibid., 8.

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57. For a cogent summary of the changing political economy of Spanish rule in the Caribbean and Pacific, see Josep Maria Fradera, Filipinas, la colonia ms peculiar: la hacienda pblica en la definicin de la poltica colonial, 17621868 (Madrid 1999), 1769.

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
has taught at Fordham University since 1998. He is the author of Imperio y crisis colonial, in Juan Pan-Montojo, ed., Ms se perdi en Cuba: Espaa, 1898 y el fin de siglo (Madrid 1998), and Empire and Anti-slavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico 18331874 (Pittsburgh, PA 1999). His book, The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century is forthcoming. He is on the editorial board of Illes i Imperis and Social History.

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