Evelyn Powell Jennings

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Evelyn Powell Jennings | War as the "Forcing House of Change": State Slavery in Late-Eighteenth-Century Cuba | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3 | The History Cooperative

War as the "Forcing House of Change": State Slavery in Late-Eighteenth-Century Cuba

AS war with Britain loomed in 1761, the Spanish crown sent out two French engineers to survey the defenses of Havana. One of them, Francisco Ricaud de Tirgale, expressed alarm at the state of Havana's security. "Tears will be shed much too late if this tragedy is not remedied ... if Havana is not secured, the American colonies will fall of their own weight ... with the loss of this precious key." Though Ricaud's most dire predictions about the consequences of Havana's vulnerability did not come to pass, his fears about the weaknesses of Havana's defenses were well founded. By the summer of 1762, British naval and land forces had laid siege to and occupied Havana, the hub of imperial commerce, the key to the Spanish Empire. When Havana was returned to Spanish control with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the Spanish crown was forced to reform colonial defense and economic policy to save its American empire.¹	1
That Spanish officials clearly understood the interdependence of military and economic reform is well illustrated by the orders given to Field Marshall Alejandro O'Reilly in 1764. As part of his charge to increase revenue for defense, he identified the following obstacles to Cuba's economic growth: "scarcity and high prices of goods, and the lack of Negros ... because of the contracts and formalities that are observed for their introduction; the total lack of commerce to vent its extra goods, and the legitimate provision of commodities and foodstuffs at reasonable prices."² For O'Reilly the relaxation of commercial strictures would increase trade, reduce smuggling, lower prices, and augment the labor supply. The stimulation of greater economic activity and prosperity was the means to raise revenue for the state's most urgent need: better defense. Throughout the colonial period, Cuba had never generated sufficient human or fiscal resources for the entire burden of its defense, so a scarcity of money and workers was not a new problem. Yet the state's failure to marshal imperial resources to defend the island had proven too costly by the 1760s. As O'Reilly's comments suggest, crown officials would look to the labor of enslaved Africans as a fundamental component of their reform plans in the public and private sectors.	2
Spanish Cuba in the late 1700s supplies a particularly striking case study of the transformative power of warfare and defense spending in an Atlantic colonial economy. This focus may seem odd, since so much of the scholarship on the evolution of the Atlantic economy has been concerned with the development of agriculture, the labor systems that supported it, and the trade networks that distributed its products. Studies of the role of the transatlantic slave trade and of enslavement itself on the economies of all the regions of the Atlantic basin have generated a lively debate and a growing body of literature. Warfare is most often discussed as a disruption of these processes. Additionally, the roles of imperial warfare and enslavement in Atlantic economic development are generally treated as two separate phenomena.³	3
It may also seem unusual to look for the origins of Cuba's nineteenth- century economic transformation in the consequences of a humiliating military defeat. As economic historian Patrick Karl O'Brien has noted, the long-term economic effects of war can be difficult to conceptualize and to quantify. Yet his assertion that historians often exaggerate the negative effects of war on development raises some intriguing questions about possible connections between imperial defense and economic growth. For instance, he argues that some military expenditure can be productive and that the effects of war on labor as a factor of production can, in some cases, be positive for overall economic development and growth (though not necessarily for the laborers involved). In colonial Cuba the massive infusions of state revenues after 1763 for Havana's defense projects and for the purchase of royal slaves to work on these projects are directly related to the well-documented boom in sugar production on the island after 1790. Indeed, the state played a central role in the transformation of the Cuban economy from one based on imperial service and trade through Havana to a slave plantation colony.⁴	. . .

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