This article explores how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideas of the Spanish American consumer took shape. It argues that the idea of the New World consumer came into being in a constantly evolving and changing world that, in spite of its asymmetrical relations of power, allowed for the polycentric construction of the idea of the Spanish American consumer.Footnote 1 The article claims that Atlantic debates on consumption, on the one hand, and on racial difference, on the other, provided a common ground for foreign visitors, diplomats and commentators, as well as Colombian elite intellectuals, to ponder the Spanish American consumer's potential. This article will also show that those who had either political or economic interest in the region thought it was possible for Spanish American Indians, Blacks and those of ‘mixed race’ to gradually overcome their ‘backwardness’ by adopting new practices of consumption. The consumption of new necessities by the Spanish American popular sectors became, for many of these commentators, an irrefutably civilising force.
This article is a case study of the history of political economy of the early republican period. It focuses on foreign and local expectations regarding the consumers of New Granada and, later, the Republic of Colombia – modern Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela.Footnote 2 A study of the territories of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, which did not compare in size or wealth to the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain, has been chosen to highlight that the concerns of the commercial and political elites about the region's economic potential, even in isolated territories, was still intense. This study has also been undertaken to illustrate that notions of ‘backwardness’ and ‘civilisation’ were being negotiated from both sides of the Atlantic and, even more so, at the fringes of the crumbling empire. Consequently, foreign and local expectations about South American consumers are approached here from an Atlantic perspective, a perspective that will reveal the scale of the debates and, more importantly, their nuances and contradictions.
The article hopes to add to the history of political economy in the early republican era.Footnote 3 It follows historian Sophus Reinert's understanding of political economy as a field of knowledge that emerged at a time when it became evident to thinkers and statesmen that political tools would no longer suffice to secure power. As such, the study of power, in Reinert's words, ‘came to embrace knowledge on how to become and remain rich in competitive contexts’.Footnote 4 Consequently, the present study espouses an understanding of eighteenth-century political economy as knowledge that arose from the minds of a great range of thinkers and diplomats, as well as from the everyday writings of officials and merchants, in the context of European competition for new marketsFootnote 5 – including the Spanish American.
The article also contributes to the historiography of consumption in Latin America. While it is only recently that historical studies of consumption in the region have taken hold, research has produced general surveys of Latin American material culture – such as Arnold Bauer's work – and studies on the most populated countries.Footnote 6 Research that focuses on consumption in smaller Latin American countries and, more importantly, on the nineteenth century, has been the exception rather than the rule.Footnote 7 This article covers both the latter subjects, and furthermore approaches nineteenth-century Spanish Americans not only as producers – as most economic historians of the region have done to date – but also as consumers.Footnote 8 My focus on the consumer follows Jan de Vries’ call to recognise and study in greater depth the insertion in the long eighteenth century of a greater share of the Western population into the global market as active consumers (not just producers); by so doing, I set aside the passive consumer perspective of conventional consumer theory.Footnote 9 The article also encourages scholars to pay close attention to the connection between race, liberal economic doctrine and consumption in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The article consists of three parts and a conclusion. The first part discusses contemporary writers’ debates over political economy and consumption before independence, so as to recognise the intellectual context in which positive appraisals of the Spanish American market and its potential consumers came about. These appraisals are the object of study of the second section. Particular attention will be placed in this section on who participated in the construction of the idea of Spanish America as a consumer space and what their motives were. The third part attempts to examine the extent to which such positive depictions of the Spanish American consumer were potentially at odds with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century racial discourses in order to understand why the consumption of new necessities by the Spanish American mixed population was seen, not infrequently and not uncontestedly, by foreign and local writers as benefitting their ongoing process of ‘civilisation’.
Political Economy and Consumption in the Age of Revolutions
Study of the debates over luxury and consumption engaged in by mid-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century commercial writers, novelists and political economists is beyond the scope of this article. Nonetheless, a brief summary of the key arguments of these debates is needed for an understanding of the intellectual context in which ideas concerning the Spanish American consumer were developed. One of the starting points for most studies of the modern history of luxury and consumption is Mandeville's controversial yet foundational text The Fable of the Bees (1714).Footnote 10 Mandeville – familiar with the moral reasoning of seventeenth-century Dutch Republican theory – dared defend luxury as essential to national wealth and argued that it went hand in hand with commercial growth, politeness – and vanity.Footnote 11 In so doing, the Anglo-Dutch philosopher rekindled discussions about the moral implications of the consumption of luxury goods and, therefore, of their ability to corrupt society and bring about the political decadence of states.Footnote 12 Mandeville emphasised that private vices, such as individual desires for luxuries, resulted in public benefits like industry and economic prosperity. He also stressed that since the satisfaction of human desires had no limit, the consumption of new commodities ended up contributing to the expansion of commerce and the wider employment of the poor.Footnote 13
What was guiding the debates of eighteenth-century statesmen and intellectuals across Europe was the shifting divide between necessities and luxuries, and between virtue and vice. This divide was challenged by many, including David Hume, Adam Smith, Jean-François Melon and the Baron de Montesquieu, and took place at a time when Europe was gaining greater access to the exotic foods and raw materials of Asia and the New World. Gradually moving the discussion of consumption from moral discourse to political economy, these thinkers were leaving aside the former association of luxury with corruption and were starting to identify the consumption of novel necessities – or what some termed new luxuriesFootnote 14 – with commerce and convenience. Still, as historians Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger have rightly stated, there was no simple progression from the disapprobation to the endorsement of luxury, but rather a ‘dialectical debate’ which centred on questions of individual and national virtue, national wealth and economic expansion.Footnote 15
David Hume was one among several writers keen to establish a new definition of luxury as a progressive social force. Unlike Mandeville, he no longer viewed luxury consumption as a vice and was willing to separate philosophical from economic questions. For Hume, the inevitable human drive for consumption of new ‘conveniences’ was an incentive to the expansion of commerce;Footnote 16 the latter was an argument shared also by Adam Smith. Although Smith was more sceptical about the real merits of luxury consumption than was Hume, he did acknowledge that demand by the middle groups for new commodities benefitted national economic growth.Footnote 17 Contemporary rejection of moralistic judgments about luxury would also have resonance in the works of Antonio Genovesi in Italy and Juan Sempere y Guarinos in Spain. Indeed, the latter's Historia del luxo (1788) was a harsh criticism of the sumptuary laws still in place in Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, as well as an exhortation to stimulate consumption as a means to promote industry and commerce.Footnote 18
Surprisingly Sempere y Guarinos proclaimed that ‘it is not necessary to turn to Montesquieu, Hume, Melon or any other foreign writers, whose ideas are suspicious for not having been careful to unite the demands of religion with those of politics’.Footnote 19 In spite of the fact that he was critical of foreign thinkers, like many of his contemporaries, Sempere y Guarinos knew them well. Unlike him, however, many of them – Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes being one of the most representative – engaged positively with the works of British political economists and extolled the utility of understanding the economic practices of other European states, especially their administration of their overseas possessions and their conduct of colonial commerce.
Many of these discussions were taken up by late eighteenth-century officials in Spanish America.Footnote 20 Although these writings were not philosophical in nature, they did illustrate that a positive perception of trade, luxury and consumption was being embraced in the New World, including New Granada. Take, for instance, Pedro Fermín de Vargas’ Pensamientos políticos y memoria sobre la población del Nuevo Reino de Granada (1791?), a detailed analysis of the economic situation of the viceroyalty and of the state of the three main sources of the kingdom's wealth: agriculture, commerce and mining. In his extensive report, Vargas – a Neogranadino and corregidor of Zipaquirá in 1789 – claimed that the ‘discovery’ of the New World and the East Indies had ‘given rise to innumerable fictitious needs which their inhabitants could not lay aside’. ‘Coffee, tea and chocolate’, he continued, ‘are luxuries necessary for all bodies; here are a multitude of branches of agriculture and commerce with which we can advantageously occupy ourselves’.Footnote 21 Like his European counterparts, Vargas vehemently believed that individuals’ desire for new consumer goods created a stimulus in the Atlantic economies that resulted in higher labour productivity – a process that paved the way to what historians have come to term ‘industrious revolutions’.Footnote 22
Vargas was not the only one to proclaim the benefits that the consumption of new necessities would provide to New Granada. In 1791, the same year his Pensamientos was published, New Granada's first periodical publication, the Papel Periódico de la Ciudad de Santafé de Bogotá, praised luxury consumption in a way that Mandeville would have been proud of. In its twelfth issue, the journal argued that a republic's happiness, and its commerce, agriculture and arts, benefitted from such consumption. Luxury, in its eyes, was no longer the enemy of virtue. Its commentary is worth citing at length:
A Republic, where there are a considerable number of wealthy neighbours, is never unhappy although of the fifty parts that comprise its population, the individuals who make up forty-nine are poor […]. These are occupied in [the single rich man's] haciendas, in his factories, in a million things that precisely he who has money owns. Those poor people create the happiness of the wealthy man, and the wealthy man contributes in the same way to make them happy. They help him with their arms, but he is the one who moves them and gives them strength. This then is when all the Arts triumph, when Commerce advances, Agriculture flourishes and Industry is prodigiously encouraged.Footnote 23
For the author of this piece the result of such ‘civil’ collaboration was nothing less than a happy population, ‘a respectable Republic [and] a flourishing Kingdom’.Footnote 24
While for the Papel Periódico the consumption of luxuries by the rich created work, and, as such, benefitted the poor, for others the consumption of new consumer goods by a wider population was also desirable. José Ignacio de Pombo, a public official and leading member of the Consulado de Comercio (merchant guild) of the city of Cartagena, was one of these. Pombo, one of the kingdom's most perceptive writers on economics, as well as an Adam Smith sympathiser, believed that both ‘the luminous principles of economic science’ and experience had demonstrated the usefulness of liberalising trade in order to promote national wealth. Going beyond his contemporaries’ opinions, which declared that New Granada's wealth was based on agriculture and even on mining, Pombo contended that it lay, rather, in productive work. This assertion allowed him to argue in favour of the development of consumer-oriented industries and, more importantly, to maintain that demand for ‘artefactos aunque comunes y groseros’ (common, ordinary commodities) would, in the long run, guarantee prosperity. In his words: ‘for although each of them [ordinary factories] seems to employ few men, consumption multiplies them […] and thus their usefulness is more real and effective, than those factories that produce fine goods or luxuries’.Footnote 25 Although several of Pombo's contemporaries would distance themselves from his faith in industry over agriculture, they did agree with him on the importance of encouraging consumption beyond subsistence. Such was the case of the scientist and geographer Francisco José de Caldas, who, in his Estado de la geografía del Virreinato de Santafé de Bogotá (1807), criticised the simple satisfaction of needs and any form of production that did not exceed existing levels of consumption.Footnote 26
Appraisals of the Spanish American consumer, to which we will turn in the next section, must be understood therefore in light of this intellectual milieu. It was an intellectual environment that, although not without its critics, saw the expansion of trade as a ‘civilising agent’Footnote 27 and the desire for new things as an incentive for labour, on the one hand, and for the encouragement of the arts and sciences and refined behaviour, on the other. To a certain degree, it is not surprising that those who were eager to promote greater commerce between the Old World and the New, whether they were Neogranadinos, US citizens or Europeans, found their best allies in the eighteenth-century political economists studied above. Their views would resonate in the writings of those who proclaimed the potential of the Spanish American market in the first decades of the nineteenth century and of those who shaped the idea of the Spanish American consumer, to whom we now turn.
Positive Appraisals of the Spanish American Market and Consumers
Positive appraisals of Spanish America's wealth and its capacity for expanded commerce were not uncommon in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writings. Generally, they went hand in hand with negative depictions of Spanish imperial policies, inherited from hostile narratives of Catholic Iberia inaugurated by Protestantism and, later, by the liberal economic ideas fostered by the Enlightenment.Footnote 28 In the last few decades, scholars have studied how the ‘pessimistic colonial diagnosis of the eighteenth century’Footnote 29 came to be and to what extent economic and political commentators participated in its construction. By so doing, this scholarship has critically stressed the historian's need to recognise that such colonial legacies were rooted in a triangular relationship between Europe, Africa and the Americas; that colonialism was ‘as multipolar as it was multifaceted’.Footnote 30 By taking up these proposals, this section examines European and Spanish American writings together to show that the idea of the Spanish American consumer was the result of a polycentric effort.
Although a comprehensive analysis of books, pamphlets and writings of politicians and enthusiasts is not the purpose of this article, a study of at least some representative works relevant to the case study is needed. Such works include Manuel Torres’ Philadelphia publication of 1816Footnote 31 – the first inter-American handbook ever published – followed by William Duane's narrative of his visit to Colombia in 1822 and 1823,Footnote 32 in addition to James Henderson's pamphlets from the 1820s in support of the political recognition of Colombia,Footnote 33 and Alexander Walker's extended account of Colombia written in 1822.Footnote 34 Since our goal is to study how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideas of the Spanish American consumer took shape from an Atlantic perspective, we have given priority to texts that were designed for an international audience and written in Europe, the United States and New Granada.
Manuel Torres’ handbook was the first to be published. Torres – born Manuel de Trujillo y Torres – emigrated to New Granada from Spain in 1778 with his uncle, the archbishop and later viceroy Antonio Caballero y Góngora.Footnote 35 Torres took part in a 1794 conspiracy to overthrow the Spanish colonial rule of New Granada. Forced to flee the territory, he sought asylum in the United States in 1797 and became Colombia's first official representative in that country in 1819.Footnote 36 In Philadelphia, he made contact with journalists who later aided him in disseminating information about the situation in Colombia.Footnote 37 Amongst them was the editor of The Aurora, William Duane, who dubbed Torres the ‘Franklin of the Southern World’.Footnote 38 Manuel Torres also acted as the primary liaison between Spanish American revolutionaries and US bankers, merchants, volunteers and, last but not least, the city's political leaders, including James Monroe and John Adams.Footnote 39 Before the publication in 1816 of An Exposition of the Commerce of Spanish America Torres had published several pamphletsFootnote 40 opposing Spain's determination to restrict commerce in Spanish America and promoting an increase in the quantity of manufactured goods sent from the United States to this region.
An Exposition was meant to guide merchants in their commercial operations and to assist ‘every one who buys, sells, or exchanges in any way: to the farmer and to the insurer, to the banker and to the statesman’.Footnote 41 According to Torres, there was ‘such an intimate connection between political economy and commerce, that no one can become acquainted with the former, without the latter’.Footnote 42 Consequently, his was a practical guide containing information on the measures, weights and currency needed to facilitate US trade with Spanish America. Torres’ detailed work also gave information about the duties imposed on imported foreign goods and precise lists of the articles annually exported from the different administrative units of Spanish America,Footnote 43 which he referred to as ‘the country’, a ‘country’ that for him seemed ‘to have been destined by the Author of Nature, to become the common centre of the commerce of the whole world’.Footnote 44
To convince US businessmen to trade with South America, Manuel Torres emphasised the extraordinary progress of its revolution. Regarding this point, he stated:
[W]e cannot doubt of the complete emancipation of that extensive and fruitful country, nor of the establishment of a new, powerful, and independent empire, (probably) under the form of a representative and central government; which, uniting and disposing of its great resources, according to circumstances, can, by a wise policy, prevent or stifle intestine divisions, and effectually maintain independence: a government, at the same time, suitable, and prudently calculated for the degree of knowledge, habits, and manners of its inhabitants, will procure happiness to nineteen millions of people already civilized, and prepare the same advantage for a vast number of aborigines, who are yet in their primitive state of independence.Footnote 45
Torres’ appraisals are valuable in two ways. First, they let us catch a glimpse of his contemporaries’ uncertainty – which included his own doubts – concerning the future governments’ stability; second, they show how the promoters of Spanish American commerce depicted the inhabitants’ ability to adapt to new representative systems of government and – as he will later note – new lines of commercial merchandise. Regarding the first point, Torres proclaimed that, under a government of its own, South America would surely ‘imitate his brother of the north’.Footnote 46 As regards the second, Torres assured his readers about the virtues of Spanish America's population; its degree of civilisation; and, not least, its capacity to consume foreign goods.
According to Torres, the ‘Author of nature’ had blessed the region ‘with a variety of climates and temperatures’, perpetual vegetation, rich mines of gold and silver, and a grand animal kingdom. But he had also been ‘equally generous towards man's moral and physical organization’. Torres, aware of the audience he was addressing, continued: ‘The American possesses intellectual capacity, and is capable of planning and executing great undertakings. […] Mr. Jefferson has justly remarked, that “naturally eloquent, sublime ideas, precision, and accurate similitudes are familiar to him, even in his state of ignorance”.’ Hence, Spanish Americans were ‘[h]ospitable, generous, humane, mild, patient, fond of peace, possessing, in short, every natural aptitude to virtue’. Torres’ assurance of the capacity of Spanish Americans to organise and serve the cause of mankind was followed by his report of their consumption, even at that time, of ‘the value of one hundred millions of dollars in articles of foreign manufacturing industry’ in exchange for precious metals necessary for trade throughout the world.Footnote 47 For Torres, these generous, patient and humane consumers – both those civilised and those in the process of becoming civilised – were ready to receive commodities from the United States.
Irish-born journalist William Duane agreed with Torres and followed his lead. Duane was probably one of the most influential of the ‘transatlantic radicals’; he immigrated to the United States in the 1790s and was an ardent advocate of the South American independence struggle.Footnote 48 In Philadelphia, he turned to Torres for advice on Spanish American issues and helped him to publish articles advocating the independence of South America. There is no doubt that Torres influenced Duane's perceptions of Colombia, as the two men had worked closely together on The Aurora, with Torres translating Spanish news and pamphlets for Duane and occasionally translating the latter's editorials into Spanish for the use of patriot gazettes.Footnote 49 In 1822, William Duane sold The Aurora and travelled to Colombia in the company of his daughter Elizabeth and his stepson Richard Bache.Footnote 50 According to Duane, the work that resulted from his visit – the 600-page volume entitled A Visit to Colombia: In the Years 1822 & 1823 – was a ‘mere conversational narrative’ about his 1,300-mile journey destined for a circle of private friends.Footnote 51
Duane's embellished depictions of Colombia's population illustrate his desire to gain the United States’ support for the nascent republic. While visiting Caracas’ market, he praised the variety of its local products, which, in some cases, ‘present as much as there is demand for, and equal to the Philadelphia market in quantity’.Footnote 52Another good example is his somewhat inflated account of Bogotá’s market, held in the Plaza Mayor every Friday:
Here are seen the manufactured products of all parts of the globe, Japan and China, India, Persia, France, England, Germany, Italy, and Holland; and, though last, not least, the United States, or their favourite America del Norte. On different platforms, apportioned out by proper officers, or clerks of the market, or deputies of the alcaldes, are seen piles of every kind of cotton, woollen, silk, and linen manufactures; calicoes of India and England, the silks of Asia, Italy, and France; the coarse linen fabrics of Russia, Saxony, Silesia, Swabia, and Holland; the finer linens of England, Ireland, France, and Holland; the broad coarse stripes and checks of Germany, and their English successful imitations.Footnote 53
According to his descriptions, Colombians could lay their hands on ‘every merchantable thing’. Every sort of commodity could be bought in the city's main market, in the shops which occupied the north face of the plaza, and, more importantly, in the Calle Real. There, he continued, the finest ‘jewellery, cutlery, millinery, and clothing for both sexes, are collected, and from thence dispersed over all the countries, west, south, and east, for some hundreds of miles’.Footnote 54 As Duane stated, the Calle Real offered for sale ‘native crystals, the topaz of various hues from Brazil, the emeralds of the country in deeper or paler tints, wrought and rude; the diamonds, and rubies, and amethysts of Asia, [which] glitter alongside the artificial gems of Paris; and the fine wrought gold filagree [sic] of the native workmen which rivals that of the eastern Archipelago’.Footnote 55 For Duane the variety of foreign products available to Bogotá’s consumers vividly illustrated Colombia's market versatility. If the products were there, so were their consumers.
Whilst the books of Torres and Duane were being published in Philadelphia, James Henderson was in London discussing Britain's chances of earning commercial privileges in South America. Henderson embarked in 1819 from London en route to Rio de Janeiro, hoping to be appointed to a consular position. Unsuccessful in his quest, he returned to England in 1821 but was soon to re-embark, now as British Consul-General at Bogotá, accompanied by his family and the commissioners who were charged with the compilation of a report for Foreign Secretary George Canning on Colombia's chances of satisfying Canning's conditions for recognition as an independent state.Footnote 56 During his short stay in England before leaving for Colombia, Henderson published two pamphlets in London on the possibility of Britain acquiring commercial rights in the region. One of these was entitled A Series of Observations Submitted to the Right Honourable Thomas Wallace, M.P., Vice President of the Board of Trade, which was intended to express the urgency of signing a commercial treaty with the new South American states. By making known the commercial advantages that South America could represent for British traders and investors, Henderson was hoping to influence the British government to use ‘its immediate influence on the mother country to induce her to acknowledge the independence of her once transatlantic colonies’.Footnote 57 A similar urgency was also highlighted to George Canning in 1824 by the British Consul in Cartagena, who stated that the recognition of Colombia as an independent republic by his country ‘[could] not fail to open for Great Britain a very extensive and advantageous mart for her various manufactures throughout this wide spreading country, expanding progressively as population, agriculture, industry and enterprize advance and unfold their inexhaustible resources of wealth in this rich and fertile portion of the New World’.Footnote 58
To increase the pressure on his government to recognise Colombia, Henderson also warned his fellow countrymen of the possibility of losing a good share of the South American market, which they already possessed, to the United States. ‘It cannot, therefore, be denied that Americans would thus be enable[d] to introduce their native manufactures into South America’, Henderson firmly proclaimed, ‘yet it cannot be determined to what extent […] the diffusion of a taste amongst a new people for American manufactures, may diminish the consumption and abate the prevailing predilection for our own’.Footnote 59 Indeed, Britain had adapted its production to meet the wants of local consumers.Footnote 60 In Henderson's view, every businessman had to work hard to avoid losing the commercial advantages they already enjoyed. To his satisfaction the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation between His Majesty and the State of Colombia was finally signed on 18 April 1825, setting favourable conditions for the importation of British manufactured goods into the new republic and making the country the second former Spanish colony to be recognised by England, preceded only by Argentina.Footnote 61
While Henderson was urging Members of Parliament to support the South American republics, the British journalist Alexander Walker, at the request of the Colombian government and with the aid of the country's representative in Great Britain – the scientist and politician Francisco Antonio ZeaFootnote 62 – was compiling the publication Colombia: Being a Geographical, Statistical, Agricultural, Commercial, and Political Account of that Country. Zea had been appointed in 1819 by Simón Bolívar to seek Colombia's diplomatic recognition by Great Britain and the production of this work was definitely part of this undertaking.Footnote 63 Walker's book – ‘adapted for the general reader, the merchant, and the colonist’ and written, as noted above, with the assistance of Zea – not only comprised a general description of Colombia, but also included a portrayal of each of its provinces and a report on its population and agricultural products. Colombia had the clear intention of showing that foreign commodities had already circulated in the region during the time of Spanish domination and were accepted by Spanish Americans. Before independence, the text notes, not more than a third of the ships’ cargoes had been made up of Spanish merchandise, the rest consisting of foreign manufactured goods, which the Cádiz merchants, who controlled the trade with Spanish America, drew from different parts of Europe: France supplied nearly half of this stock; England, nearly a quarter; and towns of the Hanseatic League, the rest.Footnote 64 Since foreign goods had been consumed before independence, this meant that Colombians were already somewhat familiar with European textiles, and their tastes had adapted to the commodities that had reached their market for decades. The act of noting the Colombians’ familiarity with foreign commodities (one that was also due to smuggling) put forward the idea of a consumer who was not isolated from Western commerce and would therefore be interested in new commodities coming from abroad.
One of Colombia’s major contributions was its table entitled ‘Selection of a Cargo suited, on a general scale, for the Spanish Settlements in America, being the description of goods, proportions, &c. intended to assist the British Trader in his Assortments’.Footnote 65 It specified the quality, quantity, sizes and colours of the commodities the Spanish American market would require. A cargo should include 80 pieces of Yorkshire woollen cloth; ten pieces of second-quality green billiard cloths; six bales of cheap blankets; 250 pieces of checked linen and cotton; 1,000 pieces of printed calico, each 28 yards in length; 100 pieces of light silk for ladies’ dresses; and 200 pieces of Irish linen, amongst a great variety of other textiles. Besides this information, the author indicated the colours of the pieces and how each product should be packed. For instance, 100 pieces of superfine woollen broadcloth should be packed in ten bales, each bale with an assortment of four pieces in blue and the rest in green, black, brown, white, red and purple.
In addition to textiles, the volume also suggested the shipment of common accessories and household goods, such as hats, handkerchiefs, tablecloths, silk ribbons, white cotton stockings, gloves, clothes brushes, scissors, spyglasses, hand-whips, stationery, hammocks, silk umbrellas and parasols for ladies, toys and gunpowder. Also mentioned were crates of earthenware, cups and saucers, glassware, tin plates, candlesticks, iron saucepans and pewter tablespoons. Not all of these goods were meant for everyday consumption. Some were destined for mining and agricultural enterprises, such as nails, iron hoes, butchers’ knives, machetes, stills, tools, padlocks and oils. Colombia completed its list by including medicines, jewellery and a small selection of food and musical instruments – ten pianofortes, six large organs and a few flutes, fifes, violins, Spanish guitars and harps.
The compiler of Colombia may have based its inventory on his knowledge of the commodities that European nations had supplied Spain to re-export to her colonies, and with this inventory he achieved two results. First, he showed his readers that foreign commodities – that is, non-Spanish commodities – had been circulating in Colombia for a while, and, although not in great quantities, certainly in great variety. Although he did not stress this point, since the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) foreign contraband trade had increasingly become concentrated in the Caribbean, and illegal trade on the coast of New Granada had assumed the status of a permanent trade route. Caracas, La Guaira, Cartagena, Santa Marta and Río Hacha had become areas of intense smuggling activity, associated with the English South Sea Company and small foreign traders who sailed freely among the Spanish-controlled islands and along the coasts. The inhabitants of Quito and its vicinity, as well as those who lived close to the ports of Tumaco or Callao, also had access to foreign goods through Panama and were able to trade them in the interior of the kingdom of New Granada. Hence, a good share of the kingdom's inhabitants had had contact with foreign commodities for over a century. This was due to the fact that Spanish merchants had favoured the trade in expensive goods, leaving the bottom end of the market to smugglers who provided the lower classes of the population with access to foreign commodities.Footnote 66 This meant that thanks to Colombians’ familiarity with this range of foreign goods, British merchants would not face major obstacles to the expansion of their trade in Spanish America.
Second, Colombia also gave merchants clear guidelines about the type of commodities Colombians preferred, inviting them to participate in a new line of direct commerce. Not surprisingly, like James Henderson, Alexander Walker, with the aid of Zea's supporters in London, had also called for Colombia's independence to be recognised by publishing a pamphlet entitled The Recognition, the Loan, and the Colonization of Colombia in London.Footnote 67 In it Walker expands on Colombia's economic potential and assures his readers that ‘every thing combines to convince us of the great advantages which individuals, possessing capital, liberal ideas, and commercial activity, would reap in [the] course of time’ from a stronger relationship between Great Britain and the Republic of Colombia.Footnote 68 And by so doing, Walker echoed the political economists’ call, as seen above, to open new markets and remain active in a competitive environment.
What the works studied above reveal is that positive ideas about Colombia's market and consumers were the result of a joint agenda. And perhaps even more striking, it was an agenda that was created by virtue of the interaction of British officials and US journalists with Colombian politicians and diplomats. Certainly, Alexander von Humboldt's romantic descriptions of the continent had a broad impact on the public imaginations of Europe and Spanish America and on his contemporaries’ perceptions of New Granada's nature and its resources.Footnote 69 But this was also true of the descriptions of those who had political and economic interests in its resources, markets and consumers – such as those put forward by Walker and Henderson. Furthermore, commercial handbooks, like that of Torres, and first-hand accounts, like Duane's, went to great lengths to demonstrate that Spanish Americans were not only quite familiar with a wide variety of European commodities, but also that they were ready to embrace and purchase them. Such positive remarks were accompanied by discussions about their degree of civilisation and their racial characteristics. Most aimed to assess how long it would take for Spanish Americans to increase their consumption and decisively enter the market economy.
Race, Commerce and Consumption
So far we have explored the intellectual context in which ideas of the Spanish American consumer linked consumption to national progress. We have also seen how claims about the virtues of Spanish American inhabitants and their inclination towards commerce and consumption resonated strongly in the writings of foreign diplomats, politicians and travellers, all of whom benefitted from an intellectual environment in which consumption was linked to national progress. But it remains to be studied to what extent late eighteenth-century ideas about race had an impact on the way contemporary intellectuals conceived the region's mixed population's ability to consume and on its capacity to become civilised through consumption. Consequently, this section will briefly explore whether or not Atlantic discourses about race, in which the tension between ‘barbarous’ and ‘civilised’ behaviour was ubiquitous, contradicted positive early nineteenth-century appraisals of Spanish American consumers.
As many historians have shown, the origin, scope and significance of racial difference had been questions of considerable transatlantic debate since the early eighteenth century. Drawing upon scripture, moral philosophy and natural history, scholars debated whether physical and moral traits were fixed or affected by the environment, whether the body provided the best means to trace descent and whether different races shared a common ancestry.Footnote 70 Racial distinctions were understood, therefore, by taking into account physical, intellectual and moral characteristics.Footnote 71 This explains why many of those who had economic interests in Spanish America proclaimed the possibility of ‘civilising’ the population through education and trade. As an example, take James Henderson's Observations on the Great Commercial Benefits that Will Result from the Warehousing-Bill, published in 1823. Henderson, in assessing what the Colombian market and population would be like after independence, proclaimed that South Americans, now breathing an ‘atmosphere of freedom’, would be ‘accessible to all the impressions of civilisation, instruction, and progressive improvement’, and therefore, ‘their demands on our commerce now, from the force of circumstances, not much exceeding two millions annually, will, at no very distant period, attain the important amount of twelve to fifteen millions a year’.Footnote 72 Henderson believed that the Spanish American consumption of British goods would largely exceed that of any other country or empire in the world, estimating the size of this market at 14 million inhabitants, to which he added 1 million Indians. The latter, as Henderson had noted in his earlier Series of Observations, would ‘at no distant time, become equally available in a commercial estimate’.Footnote 73 According to his calculations, on average,
… this mixed species of population will consume one pound sterling each of British imports annually, and this argument is supported by an incontrovertible fact, which is, that a similarly mixed total population of three millions and a half comprised in the Brazilian territory, half a million which may be considered as unchristianised Aborigines, and creating no demand upon trade, actually consume about three millions sterling of British manufactures and imports.Footnote 74
Henderson's observations demonstrate that for him race was not necessarily seen as an obstacle to consumption. For this author, even those who were not yet ‘civilised’ were demanding foreign manufactured goods – something that was also argued by Torres and Duane, as stated above. But most of all, his observations allow us to recognise that, at least for the British diplomat, greater freedoms, ‘civilisation, instruction, and progressive improvement’ meant a greater propensity to consumption and, hence, to progress, thus situating consumption not only in the economic but also in the moral and racial realms.
Henderson's stance is largely explained by the ‘civilising character’ that political economists had assigned to consumption, long before his own claims in this regard. Indeed, the association between commerce and the spread of modern manners and civility had been debated enthusiastically by a representative share of eighteenth-century thinkers across the Atlantic – including Montesquieu, Hume and Smith discussed above – who viewed the expansion of trade as a ‘civilising agent’ as well as a driving force behind the development of commercial societies. This was an argument that students of the European Enlightenment have termed the ‘doux-commerce thesis’ or ‘commercial humanism’, in J. G. A Pocock's words.Footnote 75 Commerce and consumption of ‘New Luxuries’Footnote 76 were seen by many as capable of stimulating the arts, the development of good taste and, last but not least, virtuous citizens.Footnote 77 Indeed, economic historian Jan de Vries has skilfully explained that, for early eighteenth-century thinkers, the desire for new consumer goods, far from being the enemy of virtue, was capable of establishing the very foundation of virtue in society.Footnote 78 For the pursuit of wealth and consumption offered the ‘best environment in which to direct [human] passions away from war, violence, and wretched excess by harnessing them via competition […] and material desire’, and, more importantly, shaped future output through refinement in production techniques and designs, which, in turn, stimulated the arts and sciences.Footnote 79
The civilising character of commerce was also embraced in Spain and was clearly reflected in Spanish Minister José Campillo y Cossío's plan for an ‘economic government of America’, which inspired the eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms.Footnote 80 Campillo y Cossío's plan understood such government as ‘good policy, the restoration of trade, ways to imbue men with civility, sowing the land, improving its agricultural products and, finally, everything which extracts the utmost benefit and utility from a country’.Footnote 81 Indeed, one of this Spanish reformer's most noteworthy suggestions was the incorporation into society of ‘independent Indians’ by increasing their consumption of Spanish commodities.Footnote 82 It comes as no surprise then that, since at least the 1770s, Spanish officials and Creoles alike had seen commerce and exchange as suitable means of civilising the non-white population and, therefore, increasingly advocated the economic integration of Indians into mainstream society.Footnote 83 In 1805, for instance, the former governor of Santa Marta, Antonio de Narváez y de la Torre, advised the colonial government to authorise commerce on the Atlantic Coast with neutral countries like Britain, so as to maintain relations with the infidel Indians of the Province of Río de Hacha and ‘by the gentle and effective means of commerce domesticate them, pacify them, incorporate them into social life and civilise them’.Footnote 84
This positive relationship between race, consumption and civilisation did not disappear during the Spanish American revolutions but was, instead, transformed. It came to light, for instance, in the discussions about the racial composition of the Spanish American population, which included a criticism of the colonial Spanish American system of social stratification or castas. In describing the population, foreigners often complained about the odious distinctions that during the time of Spanish rule separated European Spaniards from Creoles, Indians, Blacks and those of mixed races, not only with respect to their limited rights, but also because of the restrictions imposed on their consumption choices. For instance, the explorer Colonel Francis Hall, who visited Colombia in 1822, denounced the fact that ‘besides being rigidly excluded from every employment of honour or consideration in the state’, Indians and Blacks were ‘subjected to personal distinctions, the more painful, because they could have no other object than that of gratifying the vanity of the privileged class at the expense of their unfortunate brethren’.Footnote 85 Hall also claimed that women of colour were prohibited from wearing ‘the manto, or black-dress used at church, or from wearing any ornament of gold or silver’.Footnote 86 Custom forbade them the use of a carpet while at their devotions, or umbrellas in the streets. He believed that the newly established republican government was going to erase these unpleasant distinctions, for there would be no laws passed condemning the use of any commodities by the lower classes. The republic, Hall declared, would see ‘only citizens in every class of inhabitants, whatever may be their origin or the tinge of their complexions’. If any lingering prejudices still remained, he claimed, ‘they are happily confined to female coteries, or an occasional explosion in a ballroom: even these last embers of irritated and childish pride, it is the interest of the republic to see extinguished’.Footnote 87
It is important to emphasise that even those, like Hall, who saw the Spanish American population as promising also talked about its precariousness, poverty, ignorance and want of comforts. Although many took great pains to point out the types of stimuli needed to improve the Spanish Americans’ material conditions and guarantee economic progress, this should not be taken to mean that they were acknowledging them their equals – either culturally or racially. Hall, for instance, did not eliminate categories denoting racial differentiation when describing the population; he just considered the Spanish categories ‘infinitely more odious’ than the Spanish Americans’ numerous ‘physical varieties of features and complexions’. This was so much so that Hall argued that one of the main obstacles to the development of the country's commerce was the ‘feeble and inert disposition of the people’. In this regard, he stated:
Idleness is, in fact, the predominant propensity of all classes: in the rich it is caused by the want of moral stimulus, in the poor it is cherished by the facility of subsistence. The love of labour is not natural to man: he must have a motive, and a powerful one, to overcome the tendency to inaction, to which all animals are subject, when excited neither by appetite nor passion. In countries where the social system has made considerable progress, stimuli are never wanting: artificial necessities, as well as artificial enjoyments, are so multiplied, as to include every individual in a vortex of restless activity.Footnote 88
Inevitably, Hall's words remind us of Hume's and Smith's claims that the desire for artificial necessities contributed to augmenting ‘the love of labour’ and, hence, the expansion of trade. What calls our attention here is that for Hall race per se was not an obstacle to progress; if the country wanted to achieve progress, it was just a matter of stimulating the passion of all classes for what he called ‘social luxury’.Footnote 89 Following this line of thought, he believed that now that the republican project was in progress, the natural result would be the multiplication of new wants and new pleasures among the Colombian population.
Unlike those of Henderson and Hall, early nineteenth-century Neogranadinos’ publications and official reports were not looking for international recognition or promoting foreign investment. Notwithstanding their different audiences and motivations, their descriptions also rested on the belief that, once freed from ‘colonial obstacles’, Spanish Americans would be willing to consume more and improve their living conditions. Like many European writers and travellers, they had also criticised – some more than others – Spanish monopolistic policies for discouraging economic enterprise in the region, while either praising the different Spanish American races or placing little emphasis on race as a factor in economic stagnation. A good case in point is José Ignacio de Pombo's resolute criticism in 1807 of Spanish policies and his description of the Indian population:
… for three centuries, the insatiable greed of its [i.e. America's] rulers and of some private individuals has sacrificed the Indian population – the best and most interesting part of its people – to work in the mines, on the pretext of an iniquitous tribute imposed upon them; […] in spite of the fertility, of the abundance, of the wealth of the products of its territory and of the constant action of nature, which, in the tropics, never sleeps or dies, and in spite of the character of its inhabitants, so well adapted for all kinds of cultivation, a destructive system has been adopted which has posed major obstacles and encumbrances in the way of their progress, reducing it to basic consumption. […] And so, the product of our mines […] has travelled to the other side of the Ocean, leaving us nothing but the memory of its opulence, and the sad spectacle of the misery of those who work it.Footnote 90
For Creole intellectuals like Pombo, the Indians’ precarious productivity and poverty were the result of the disastrous policies of the colonial authorities and not the consequence of the nature of their race. Following Thomas Jefferson's lead, Pombo also claimed that the ‘resourceful American […] is the most suited to civil life, for cultivating the arts and sciences, and for being the most useful to the great society of the human race’.Footnote 91 His reference to Jefferson – like Manuel Torres’ cited above – is not a minor matter. Thomas Jefferson was among the intellectuals who sought to refute the contention of Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, that all of the species found in America were weak and feeble, laying out what came to be called the theory of degeneracy.Footnote 92 While refuting Buffon's arguments, Jefferson not only pointed out the errors and contradictions of the European literature on the degenerate nature of Americans but also proclaimed the virtues of Spanish American inhabitants and their inclination to intellectual and economic progress. It is therefore no accident to find in the works of the Neogranadinos references to Jefferson's depiction of American inhabitants as being the most useful to the great society of the human race.
Furthermore, for Pombo a society that consumed only to satisfy its basic needs was not heading for progress. And he was not alone in this claim. His brother, Miguel de Pombo, also praised the Indians’ inclination toward economic improvement. In his address to the Junta Suprema de Santafé in September 1810, this politician proclaimed that ‘although endowed with most excellent qualities that made them so suitable for agriculture and craft’, Indians had been ‘condemned by the absurd principles’ of the Spanish crown.Footnote 93 Miguel de Pombo then assured his audience that this sector of society had been ‘deprived of the stimulus of self-interest and the attraction of profit’, that is, kept away from the two key elements necessary for economic progress: the possibility of becoming independent landowners and of striving towards material betterment.Footnote 94
What differentiated the Neogranadino debates from European and US ones was that the local vision of the consumer was directly linked to the increase in national production and not necessarily to its commerce. This explains why New Granada's Spanish and Creole intellectuals did not engage in detailed discussions about the population's inclination for certain needs and comforts, and much less about their desire and willingness to consume foreign goods. Still, the connection between foreign discourses and national debates was clear. Both saw consumption as a sign of progress, not only in economic but also in political and social terms. As has been argued above, many, like Francisco José de Caldas and José Ignacio de Pombo, claimed that a desire for new goods was a sign of the population's progress since it encouraged labour and commerce, an idea they undoubtedly shared with contemporaries such as Manuel Torres and James Henderson. Like them, Creoles also believed that what had halted progress in New Granada – and hence consumption – was Spain's ruinous policies, rather than the population's race. Paradoxically, foreigners and Creoles alike still resorted to racial classifications of differences to portray the Spanish American population as inferior, while offering a positive appraisal of the Spanish American consumer. And although their contemporaries might have been sceptical about the capacity for total change of the uneducated Indians and peasants of mixed race, many, such as José Ignacio de Pombo and Francis Hall, certainly hoped that education in the arts and sciences would allow them to ‘love justice and labour’ and become ‘good citizens’.Footnote 95
For foreigners and locals, this positive appraisal of the country's population and of the benefits of consumption, both seen as contributing to the nation's progress, would not last long. Indeed, it took no more than a decade for the perceptions of early nineteenth-century diplomats, politicians and travel writers regarding Spanish American consumers to be questioned. Once the enthusiasm of independence had passed, reality began to do away with the early descriptions from the 1820s of a market ready to receive great quantities of European and US goods. By the 1830s, foreign businessmen and local elites realised that previous accounts regarding Colombia had been more romantic and optimistic than realistic. Colombia's political elites were forced to face the economic cost of independence and find ways for its economy to recover from years of war and turmoil.Footnote 96 Foreigners, for their part, returned to their countries after becoming aware of the enormous risks of initiating businesses in Colombia; others attempted to set the record straight by expressing the causes of their disappointment.
John Steuart, who left New York in 1835 to establish a hat factory in Bogotá, included both these topics in his narrative of his time in Colombia.Footnote 97 Steuart made the principal object of his accounts a description of Colombia's ‘Men and Things’ as ‘the writer in reality found them to be then existing; and, if possible, to afford the man of business, […] some more correct information on many points of interest to them than myself had been able to glean from the pages of former works on the subject’.Footnote 98 His writings would not resemble, he claimed, the ‘sycophantic representation’ which was so often adopted by the ‘mere traveller of pleasure’, or those ‘wily diplomatic agents’ who had a purpose of their own to serve in offering up the ‘incense of flattery even at the feet of the basest and vilest of national delinquencies’.Footnote 99 Noting the promises made in the early 1820s and the transformation in the 1830s,Footnote 100 Steuart remarked:
Money is daily getting more and more scarce, and fortunes are not quite so easily made as in many other countries of much easier access. The great public loan from England, and the unlimited individual credit in the early days of the republic, when the impression abroad was strong concerning the great wealth and immense resources of the country, only to be exceeded by the pure patriotism and good faith of the people, gave a seeming tone and strength to commerce which it in reality never possessed. This has since passed away, leaving the republic to her own resources …Footnote 101
A few years earlier, the Secretary of Finance, José Ignacio de Márquez, had vehemently noted these and other difficulties. In his address to the National Convention in 1831,Footnote 102 Márquez lamented the ‘series of disturbances and disorders, of hardships and misfortunes, […] that have plunged Colombia into misery’ since 1826. The republic that ‘since its foundation, had walked with majestic steps […] had, in such a short time, extended its political and mercantile relations […] and planted the seeds of its greatness and prosperity’ was now hearing, in Márquez’ words, ‘the cry of discord’. For this statesman the outcome of the political crisis that had resulted in the dissolution of Gran Colombia was the fragmentation of the republic, the loss of the people's moral integrity and an acute economic crisis. His address was, therefore, an invitation to restore confidence in the nation's wealth and a frontal assault on what he called ‘unproductive consumption’. According to Márquez the principal reason for the near disappearance of local manufactured goods was the excessive demand for foreign textiles on the part of the Colombian population and the unlimited advantages given to foreign trade. Colombians had no money to spend, and the little capital they had was being exchanged for foreign manufactured and perishable goods.Footnote 103 This was confirmed the same year by the British consul in Guayaquil, who reported that ‘imports are so numerous, that to specify each would be to repeat almost every article that necessity requires, or luxury indulges in. […] England at present supplies a larger proportion of the goods consumed here than any other country. […] I think I may safely venture to assert that there is no probability of a decline in the import trade.’Footnote 104
By the 1830s, therefore, foreign merchants were forced to settle for a weak market and to accommodate the needs of a small and sometimes conservative consumer, at least when it came to the popular classes.Footnote 105 To be sure, it was not the consumer they had imagined, nor the market they had been promised by writers and politicians during the first two decades after independence. Still, while British goods, and, to a lesser extent, French commodities took over the Colombian marketplace, the Colombian market would remain for England and France no more than a minor market, but a market, nonetheless.
Conclusion: Spanish American Consumers from an Atlantic Perspective
For decades, the history of ideas has taught historians that ‘ideas are the most migratory things in the world’.Footnote 106 Atlantic historians, for their part, have shown scholars how to transcend national boundaries while engaged in historical analysis by focusing on the movement of people, objects and, of no less importance, ideas. Concerned with making connections rather than comparisons, these historians have been able to explore how ideas of race, for instance, were shaped by means of fluid interactions between diverse peoples on different continents.Footnote 107 Starting from a similar line of analysis, this article has argued that the idea of the Spanish American consumer took shape in a constantly evolving world that, in spite of its uneven relations of power, allowed for the polycentric construction of the New World consumer.
This article claims that the optimistic ideas about the consumer propagated in the 1820s were sketched in Philadelphia by Neogranadinos, promoted in London by British and Colombian diplomats and discussed in New Granada by the first commentators on the economy, who, in turn, debated with European critics of the late eighteenth-century Spanish commercial system. In spite of the different nuances of their arguments and their different political and economic motivations, these simultaneous descriptions rested on the belief that, once freed from ‘colonial obstacles’, Spanish Americans would be willing to increase their consumption and improve their living conditions. Consumption, for these writers, became an indisputable civilising force. This article has also pointed out the importance of recognising that the formation of ideas pertaining to political economy occurred by virtue of interaction with countries that traditionally have been considered ‘peripheral’. It hopes to have demonstrated that discussions about (and from) the so-called ‘periphery’ actively fuelled ideas, expectations and stereotypes about Spanish America in the first decades of the nineteenth century, while furthermore nourishing ideas about the relationship between race, commerce and consumption.
It should not be overlooked that the economic and political commentators studied above – mostly enthusiastic patriots, investors with interests in the region and British diplomatic agents – provided only one of the many visions that might have existed about the Spanish American consumer in the early nineteenth century. This should not be taken to mean that their ideas were insignificant or unimportant. On the contrary, they rather invite scholars to compare and contrast this article's findings with other attitudes about the Spanish American consumer that might have emerged in the early nineteenth century. Future studies, for instance, could benefit from exploring whether there were more practical and less enthusiastic ideas about the Spanish American consumer at the time; if perceptions about such a consumer in France and the Netherlands, to mention just two examples, were equally positive; and if there were other writers and thinkers, across the Atlantic, who evinced a positive version of the consumer by means other than commercial manuals and official publications.
Other questions, relevant not only to historians of Latin America but also to scholars of political economy in general, can also be drawn from this study. For instance, how different were depictions of early nineteenth-century US consumers from those of Spanish American consumers? It also remains to be studied what occurred once the optimistic descriptions of the Spanish American consumer waned, while national entities were taking shape in North and South America. Historians have yet to explore how different from each other were concepts of the Mexican, the Colombian and the Argentine consumer and in what ways and to what degree they differed. Such an analysis will undoubtedly add to the emerging historiography of consumption in the region and to a better understanding of commercial practices in Latin America throughout the nineteenth century.
Author ORCIDs:
Ana María Otero-Cleves, 0000-0003-1926-1836.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was carried out with the financial support of the Clarendon Fund Scholarship and the Fondo de Apoyo para Profesores Asistentes (Support Fund for Assistant Professors, FAPA) of the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). I thank Constanza Castro Benavides, Catalina Muñoz Rojas and María José Afanador-Llachand, the three anonymous JLAS referees, and the journal's editors for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to Malcolm Deas for his support and guidance.
