Abstract
Espacio Tiempo y Forma, the house journal of Spain’s version of the Open University, the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia), recently published a monographic issue of its section on the modern era devoted to some important aspects of the experience of Spain’s navy in the ‘long’ eighteenth century (1665–1808). A useful introductory essay by three of the contributors (Maria Baudot Monroy, Manuel Diaz Ordonez, Ivan Valdez-Bubnov) locates the subject within the changing context of research on the subject, from the ‘Military Revolution’ to the ‘Fiscal-Military State’ and links it more specifically to the work of the so-called Contractor State research group to which they belong, and which emphasises the extent to which early Bourbon Spain depended for important aspects of its operation on the private sector. (In this sense, of course, it was not so very different from Habsburg Spain, as revealed by the work of I.A.A. Thompson.) The editors identify four framing concepts: (a) the notion of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, one which ends with the Spanish ancien regime in the 1830s; (b) an imperial or global rather than narrowly Spanish lens; (c) the technical dimension of seapower; and (d) the interaction between regional elites and the administrative infrastructure of the state. These concepts or themes shape most of the contributions which follow.
Agustin Gonzalez Enciso, in ‘Estado y empresa en la provision de armas de fuego en el Siglo XVIII/ State and Enterprises in the Supply of Firearms in the Eighteenth Century’, a work of synthesis rather than of ground-breaking research, makes the telling point that the fleet was the largest single consumer of cannon; a single ship of the line might carry more guns than many fortresses. In exploring the production and supply of this and other weaponry, Gonzalez Enciso sees a great deal of continuity, at least initially, between Habsburg and Bourbon Spain and emphasises that this was a contractor state, dependent on the private sector. But while it has been argued that the century saw state and market advance together in Spain, Gonzalez Enciso notes that in this particular sector, the state advanced at the expense of the latter. Most important perhaps, from 1760 onwards there was ever greater intervention by the state in the provision of naval artillery, a matter in part of mentality in part of the preoccupation with the quantity and quality of what was supplied. Even so, occasionally, the domestic supply was insufficient, requiring import of foreign cannons, including some from Scotland’s Carron Company although these too were sometimes found wanting. But broadly the direction of travel was in favour of ever greater state activity/control (and the concentration of production in the hands of more powerful individual contractors).
Manuel Diaz-Ordonez, in ‘El abastecimiminto miniltar de canamo para el imperio espanol (1665–1808)/ Providing Hemp for Military Purpose for the Spanish Empire (1665-1808)’ also takes the long view in considering the supply of this crucial material, and draws on his earlier book on this subject. While the essay does refer to the reign of the last Spanish Habsburg, Carlos II (1665–1700), the emphasis is overwhelmingly on the later C18. Like Gonzalez Enciso, Diaz-Ordonez sees a growing intervention by the state (transiting from contractor to producer state as the century progresses.
The issue of supply from outside Spain is also the subject of Rafal Reichert’s ‘Como Espana trato de recuperar su poderio naval? Un acercamiento a las estrategias de la marina real sobre sus suministros de materias primas forestales provenientes del Baltico y Nueva Espana (1754–1795)/ How did Spain Tried [sic] to Recover His Naval Power? An Approach to the Strategies of the Royal Navy on the Supply of Forest Raw Materials from Baltic Sea and New Spain (1754–1795)’. Reichert locates his contribution within the context of globalisation, drawing on both Spanish and non-Spanish archives. New Spain was of little importance between 1701 and 1739, but saw sustained growth thereafter, with supply thence peaking between 1779 and 1795. As for imports from the Baltic Reicher is able to draw on digitalised registers of tolls paid by vessels passing through the Sound to show once again that there was a marked increase in the second half of the century, although it began slightly later. Despite the emergence of a more dispersed Spanish naval establishment (which included arsenals at Ferrol and Cartagena), but not entirely surprisingly, Cadiz remained Spain’s pre-eminent naval port (as measured by these imports) on the eve of the battles of Cape St Vincent (1797) and Trafalgar (1805).
Jose Manuel Vazquez Lijo, who has published important work on the ‘matricula de mar’, the system – modelled on that of France – whereby the Spanish Bourbon state registered seamen in an attempt to ensure crews for the royal navy discusses a rather different naval establishment in ‘Servir en la Marina de Aranjuez en el Siglo XVIII/ Serving in the Navy in Aranjuez in the 18th Century’. His focus is the smaller scale pleasure ships in which the royal Court cruised on the Tagus during its regular excursions to the palace of Aranjuez, near Toledo. These ships were supplied from the naval arsenal at Cartagena; for the men concerned this was far preferable in all sorts of ways – not least in being well and promptly reimbursed as well as leading to speedier promotion – to the generally more arduous and poorly remunerated service at sea. Not surprisingly there was some competition to be sent to Aranjuez.
Ivan Valdez-Bubnov, ‘Navios para un imperio global: la construccion naval y la matricula de mar en Espana, America y Filipinas durante el largo Siglo XVIII (1670–1834)/ Warships for a Global Empire: Shipbuilding and the Maritime Registry in Spain, America and the Philippines during the Long Eighteenth Century (1670–1834)’. Despite the title, as with Diaz Ordonez, there is little of substance on the period before 1700, with the emphasis firmly on the period after 1763. More important, Valdez-Bubnov’s distinctive contribution takes two forms. On the one hand Valdez-Bubnov argues that the Spanish Crown or state ‘militarised’ the process of building warships in the eighteenth century. by channelling contracts to those in the register or matricula de mar (which was finally established in Spanish America from 1776), a registration scheme which is usually seen primarily as a source of seamen, i.e. crews), and subjecting building work to royal officials, i.e. the engineers. At the same time, Valdez-Bubnov pays particular attention to shipbuilding and the use of the matricula outside Spain, not only in Spanish America but perhaps more important in terms of breaking new ground, in Asia, or rather the Phillipines, one of the most neglected regions of the Spanish empire, and where the matricula was introduced in 1796. By the end of the reign of Ferdinand VII, when Spanish naval power more or less collapsed in a way it had not done in the seventeenth century, shipyards in the Philippines were following the same rules as those in Spain and Spanish America in building warships.
Maria Baudot Monroy, ‘La Construccion de la Real Marna en Filipinas. Marinos espanoles en Manila en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII/Constructing the Spanish Royal Navy in the Philippines during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, also deals with this often forgotten part of the global Bourbon Spanish empire, and in doing so throws some interesting light on the Spanish Philippines long before the advent of the Bourbons. As everywhere else, royal authority in the Bourbon Philippines was far easier to assert or describe than to make effective at the start of the period than it was later. More important in the present context was the importance of militarisation, or should that be ‘navalisation’, an ugly term but one which conveys the necessary nuance to the term militarisation, since the crucial role was played by the navy and naval officers rather than by the military in making effective both royal authority, the greater integration of the Philippines into the Spanish polity and ensuring that there would be no repeat in the war of 1779 (or later) of the English capture of Manila in 1762.
From the above it will be seen that while not all of the contributions fit in so well with the framework sketched in the Introduction, there is a general coherence and that while the real focus in the second half of the eighteenth century, there is some useful reference to developments and practice before about 1750 and even before 1700. Each essay is accompanied by an invaluable – not least because very up to date – bibliography.
Finally, the review section includes an invaluable assessment by Pablo Ortega del Cerro, author of important recent work on the naval officer class as a part of the ruling elite, of Juan Marchena Fernandez and Justo Cuno Bonito’s important recent remarkable 3 volume collection on the Spanish navy in the last decades of the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth century, Vientos de Guerra. Apogeo y crisis de la Real Armada, 1750-1823 (Madrid, 2019), to which some of the authors discussed above have made substantial contributions: Maria Baudot Monroy writes about naval policy under the secretary of state for the navy, Julian Arriaga (1754–59), reprising her recent book on this subject, while Vazquez Lijo contributes an essay of more than 100 pages on the arsenal of Ferrol between 1750 and 1820 to the third volume with its focus on the naval arsenals. The Marchena collection is also to be valued for an essay by Rafael Torres Sanchez, doyen of recent studies of the Spanish fiscal-military state in the eighteenth century, ‘El estado fiscal-naval de Carlos III’. Volume two, which totals almost 1,000 pages, comprises a single essay on Spanish warships 1700–1825 and the navy more broadly by one of the editors, Juan Marchena,
This monographic issue (and the review just mentioned) highlights the extent to which there has been a recent upsurge of interest in Spain’s eighteenth century navy in the eighteenth century, an upsurge which might be dated to the Trafalgar bicentenary in 2005 and to which most of the contributors to the issue under review have contributed substantially. Their work demonstrates the riches of a number of important archival collections – the Secretaria de Marina at Simancas, the Museo Naval (Madrid) and the naval Mueseo del Viso (Ciudad Real) – and makes clear, if it was not already so, that Spain had to be, and was, an important naval power in the eighteenth century, with some hopes of determining the balance of power at sea, as Jonathan Dull and others have pointed out in respect of the American War of Independence. Older works such as Jose Patricio Merino Navarro’s La Armada Espanola (1980, recently reissued in a new edition) and Rolf Muhlmann’s Die Reorganisation der Spanischen Kriegsmarine im 18 Jahrhundert (1975), the latter missing from all of the bibliographies of the contributors to the Espacio, Tiempo y Forma collection except that of Valdez-Bubnov, remain invaluable, but are by no means the last word on the subject.
So what about the future? Much of the work discussed here, like that which precedes it, focuses primarily on operations (battles, descents and campaigns), structures (of finance and provision), and on the place of the fleet and its command structure within the ancient regime state. It draws on sources which permit quantification: of expenditure (on ships, salaries and so on). These are important topics, but there are other aspects of the subject which have attracted less attention, including the relationship between the new navy and Spanish society and opinion. In his study of the navy of Philip IV of Spain (1995), David Goodman argued that one of the factors which hobbled the late Habsburg Spanish fleet was the poor standing of the sea service. The remarkable expansion of the fleet and of the ever more distinctive and professional officer corps in the eighteenth century may have been accompanied by a transformation of the larger society’s estimation of that ensemble and its identification with it. Under Charles III, not only were a fixed portion of crosses of the Order of Charles III established by that monarch to reward public service reserved for naval officers, but it became the rule that after eight years continuous service a naval officer could apply for (and expect to receive) an habito of one of the three Military Orders (Alcantara, Calatrava, Santiago) – four if we include that of Montesa – dating from the medieval Reconquista. Ortega del Cerro touches on related issues but there is more to be done, perhaps drawing on the work of historians of the British fleet and its broader social and political standing.
But while more work certainly needs to be done on this remarkable creation of the Spanish ancien regime in the eighteenth century, this collection demonstrates the excellent work that is already being done on it by Spanish and other scholars and the rich materials which will enable others to continue in this exciting, important and rewarding field.