During the last two decades of the eighteenth century the exiled Peruvian ex-Jesuit Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán designed an inchoate plan for Spanish American independence on the basis of a seemingly simple Creole rhetoric of justice. Posterity has come to know this early project through Viscardo's most famous pamphlet entitled Lettre aux espagnols-américains (ca. 1792), which amounted to one of the first formal cries for Spanish American independence.Footnote 1 A cursory reading of the Lettre would drive many readers to conclude that Viscardo was inspired by a kind of disgruntled idealism. ‘Our cause is, in any case, so full of justice in every respect’, he wrote, apparently hoping that his countrymen would share his enthusiasm for independence.Footnote 2 If it were not for the fact that Viscardo was advocating for complete independence from Spain, his words would seem indistinguishable from the many calls for home-rule among Creoles that appeared throughout the colonial period. The goal of this article is to push against this initial inclination to see mere traditional discourse in Viscardo's writings. By closely examining the manuscripts that he left behind, the article will demonstrate that Viscardo's ideas had implications that few could ignore in the eighteenth century.
More specifically, Viscardo suggested that independence was ‘favourable to humankind’, and if nations ignored the implications of his argument they would be acting ‘against their own interests’ (en contradiction avec ses propres intérêts).Footnote 3 Independence, hence, had global implications; it particularly promised to bring about global prosperity, even while fulfilling the national self-interests of competitive and market-hungry European powers. By the advent of commercial reciprocity, the liberation of Spanish America's vast and fertile territories would exponentially expand the wealth of America and Europe. Moreover, in liberating American commodities from the shackles of Spanish monopoly, the Atlantic would witness an expansion in commercial transactions and, consequently, the exponential ascent of global wealth. Therefore, that independence was ‘just’ did not simply enjoin Spanish Americans to defend their rights. In fact, the Lettre was written in French and first intended to circulate among British men of politics and letters. Rather, Viscardo incited Europe, Britain specifically, to liberate a part of the world which, enslaved under the mantle of a monopolistic Spanish regime, was hurting the self-interests of European nations and humankind more generally.
The notion that Viscardo's project was global in scope does not sit well with the extant nationalist historiography, which essentially sees Viscardo as a ‘precursor’ of Peruvian nationalism and Latin American anticolonial thought. A brief discussion of this nationalist historiography is incumbent. Surprisingly, Viscardo's writings were not always essential components of the historias patrias (national histories). In fact, after enjoying much fame in the two decades after his death in 1798, Viscardo's writings fell into oblivion in the nineteenth century. However, by the middle of the twentieth century, Viscardo had become a Peruvian national hero, a man who purportedly dared to expose the tyranny and inadequacy of Spanish rule well before the collapse of Spain's colossal and unholy imperial edifice. Not only did these national narratives insist on Viscardo's supposed commitment to anticolonial liberalism, but also on his nationalist fervour and audacity, a legacy which he allegedly transmitted to future Latin American liberators. Determined to underscore Peru's revolutionary contributions, this nationalist historiography uncritically assumed that Viscardo's commitment to independence was evidence for the rise of Spanish American national identities against Spanish imperial rule.Footnote 4
This is not the place to rehearse the many critiques that Latin American nationalist historiographies have undergone in the last three decades. However, it suffices to say that revisionist scholars of the Spanish American Revolutions have questioned the idea that the rise of anticolonial national identities caused the Spanish American wars for independence. Scholars like François Xavier-Guerra, Jaime Rodríguez, Jeremy Adelman, and José M. Portillo Valdés have long established that independence was a consequence of the crisis of legitimacy that followed Napoleon's invasion of the peninsula.Footnote 5 As Adelman convincingly argued, ‘American secession was a reaction to the metropolitan effects of Atlantic warfare, and not the expression of accumulated colonial grievances that spawned a separate political identity’.Footnote 6 Despite Benedict Anderson's attempt to locate the origins of modern nationalism, the so-called ‘imagined communities’, in the Spanish American Revolutions,Footnote 7 many scholars have demonstrated that modern national identities did not exist in this period.Footnote 8 Through a sustained reconstruction of the political languages that revolutionaries had at their disposal, these scholars have questioned both the nationalist historiography and Anderson's account of modern nationalism.Footnote 9 As a result, scholars like Rafael Rojas have suggested instead that the revolutions that began to take place in 1810 were above all utopian republican projects, whose territorial limits were not established on the basis of cultural or ethnic associations, as were future romantic nationalisms.Footnote 10
This article attempts to address a question that the revisionist historiography has left unanswered: if independence from Spain was not a premeditated plan, nor a function of national identities, what exactly did thinkers like Viscardo mean by the independence of Peru and America? How do we reconstitute the intellectual origins of this early project for Spanish American independence? Until historians successfully answer these questions, the national identity and accretion of discontent thesis remains at least partly plausible. My aim is not to question the revisionist historiography. Rather, I seek to reconstitute the intellectual conditions of possibility for independence on the basis of the revisionist admonition against using national identities as causal explanations. In other words, if the rise of Spanish American national identities cannot explain the desire for independence, what can explain it in early thinkers like Viscardo? To answer this question this article examines: (1) what an independent America would have looked like for Viscardo, (2) how exactly this was to be accomplished, and (3) what intellectual conventions Viscardo utilised to propound his notion of American independence.
To be sure, this article is certainly not the first to investigate the meaning that Viscardo attached to the concept of ‘independence’, nor the first to reconstruct the intellectual context in which he designed his early projects. David Brading's magisterial The First America long ago conducted such scholarly enterprise. Brading's account was particularly successful at disentangling nationalism from Viscardo's call for independence, suggesting instead that it should be understood as an instantiation of Creole patriotism.Footnote 11 For Brading, since the sixteenth century, Creoles had begun to express resentment against peninsulares, who not only controlled metropolitan politics, but also local American administration.Footnote 12 This was especially the case during the Bourbon reforms, when Charles III and his infamous minister José de GálvezFootnote 13 made a deliberate effort to remove Creole presence from colonial governance.Footnote 14 As a response to this imperial hegemony and efforts to centralise the empire, Creoles developed an identity in opposition to Spain: Creole patriotism. Hence, Brading concluded that Viscardo was a case in point, and that when he first demanded independence it was on the basis of Creole patriotism that he did so.Footnote 15
While Brading's account is unquestionably rich and refreshing, it placed too much emphasis on Creole patriotism and underplayed other elements of Viscardo's thought. This article shows that though Viscardo certainly identified as a Creole and though he mobilised many Creole themes, by the time he wrote the Lettre, his cry for independence had taken a global turn, a move which must be understood in the context of Enlightenment political economy.Footnote 16 For him, independence did not simply mean the assertion of a Creole identity, but rather an event that would bring good government and prosperity to Spanish Americans, who would then share their wealth with the world. To put it differently, Viscardo's argument was not simply that America needed to be independent because Creoles had the right to govern themselves. Rather, he suggested that America needed to be independent because the world as a whole would benefit from it. His goal was to create a new global order predicated on free trade, commercial reciprocity and a new law of nations that guaranteed perpetual peace.
To be fair, the latest work of David Brading, like that of Nicolas De Ribas, has taken stock of this Enlightenment context, helpfully suggesting that by the time Viscardo wrote his last paper, La paix et le bonheur du siècle prochain, he had become a philosophe and nearly abandoned his previous patriotic concerns.Footnote 17 This article goes further down this route, but it makes a more specific claim. The argument is not simply that Viscardo learnt from and interacted with high Enlightenment works, but that he used concepts of Enlightenment political economy to suggest that Spanish American independence was necessary if the globe were to ever enjoy peace and prosperity. Viscardo borrowed from David Hume, Montesquieu and Adam Smith the notion that commercial interactions were almost always reciprocal, and that just like the gain of one nation was beneficial for all, the loss of any nation was harmful for the rest. This was a vision of commerce that stood in stark contrast with what David Hume called the ‘jealousy of trade’, that is the application of the doctrine of reason of state, of fierce and war-like international competition, to commerce.Footnote 18 Commercial reciprocity, in contrast, was a vision of global commerce in which the prosperity of any nation depended on the prosperity of its neighbours.Footnote 19 Although Viscardo's first set of writings to the British was articulated in the language of commercial reason of state, his later writings, especially the Lettre and La Paix, had made the transition towards commercial reciprocity and had begun to link global prosperity and peace to Spanish American independence. Here was the crux of Viscardo's project.
Conceiving Independence
Let us begin by imagining an important moment in the life of the supposed ‘precursor’ of Spanish American independence. In 1767, the year of the expulsion of the Jesuits by the Spanish monarchy, Viscardo was banished from the viceroyalty of Peru and sent to papal territory in the Italian peninsula. The experience must have been traumatic for the 19-year-old Viscardo, a pious man who had only taken his first vows as a Jesuit. This would become the most defining moment of his life. Expelled from his homeland, Viscardo would live the rest of his life in dire poverty and exile. An account of Viscardo's cry for independence must begin with his protracted efforts to return to Peru to redeem his inheritance. Towards the latter part of his life, when he wrote most of his revolutionary pamphlets, Viscardo looked back at this early moment of exile as the embodiment of Spain's tyranny and injustice.
But, let us avoid teleology. Nothing in Viscardo's trajectory between 1767 and 1780 indicated that he would design a project for Spanish American independence. Disgruntled though he was by the Crown's decision to expel the Jesuits, Viscardo, like his fellow American Jesuits, continued to have faith in Charles III's compassion.Footnote 20 Through much of his time in Massa-Carrara, where he spent his years in exile, Viscardo remained hopeful that he would return to Peru. His one consolation was that he had inherited some property from his deceased father. Perhaps this was the one link that would allow his brother and him to return to Peru. From 1773 until 1789 Viscardo repeatedly wrote to Spanish ministers to get permission to return to Peru and redeem his ‘patrimonio’.Footnote 21 Indeed, he relinquished his vows and became an abbé to avoid confrontation with the Spanish monarchy. Viscardo continuously, though unsuccessfully, demanded his property rights through Spanish legal means.Footnote 22
However, by the 1780s Viscardo had begun to suffer the burden of poverty, exile and Spanish bureaucratic formalities. Moreover, his brother Anselmo died in 1785. It was in this context of intense agony and powerlessness that Viscardo penned his major pamphlets calling for Spanish American independence. Viscardo conceived of his independence project only as he started to notice that his efforts were futile and as he acquired the conceptual arsenal to critique Spain's actions as tyrannical. If agony gave him energy, Enlightenment thought gave him ammunition. Viscardo's call for independence was cast as a move against Spain's ‘injustice’ in violating the most sacred of all natural rights: property. The crown's denial both of his return to his land and his right to claim what belonged to him was the very embodiment of tyranny. If there was anything a king had to do to sustain the contract with the governed, it was surely to protect his subjects and offer them security. As we shall see, Viscardo deployed his project for independence in the language of Enlightenment political economy.
There is no question that Viscardo was one of the first Creoles, if not the first one, to call for Spanish American independence. It is ironic, however, that none of his major writings expressing such sentiments was directed at Americans themselves. It was the attention of the British and the ‘civilised’ world that Viscardo hoped to capture. Independence, hence, had to come from without rather than from Americans themselves. His reason for this line of thought is simple. If Americans deeply resented Spanish tyranny, they were also deeply inculcated with a slave-like mentality, which was a product of centuries of tyranny. With this conviction in mind, Viscardo drafted his first plan for Spanish American independence in a letter to the British consul in Livorno, John Udny on 30 September 1781.
In this letter, Viscardo expressed interest in leading a revolution that would benefit the British as much as it would Americans. In a context in which Britain was at war with France and Spain, Viscardo claimed that ‘England, thus, has sought the greatest benefits while taking them away from her enemies. The revolution of Peru will compensate her [England] for the disasters of this war with unforeseen advantages’.Footnote 23 Though Viscardo would later come to justify revolution in Spanish America through the ensuing advent of global prosperity and commercial reciprocity, here he suggested instead that Britain could take advantage of the uprising in Peru to win war booty and gain advantage in competitive international trade. Viscardo's goal, hence, was to make British commercial interests compatible with Spanish American independence. He argued that given his status as an exiled Creole Jesuit ‘no one would be less suspicious or more united to the interests of the new government than me’.Footnote 24 By legitimating his detachment from Spain, and his faithfulness to British interests, Viscardo hoped to convince the British of the benefits that would result from his project, which essentially turned Peru into a prize of commercial warfare.
That the project was viable, he argued, was evident in the fact that ‘there is no doubt about the revolution that took place in Peru’.Footnote 25 Seventeen eighty-one was a moment of opportunity; even Amerindians had begun to express disdain for tyranny during the Túpac Amaru rebellion, Viscardo suggested. To be sure, Viscardo never trusted that Americans, much less Amerindians, could carry out an independence project on their own. But the fact that in 1781 many territories in Spanish America had revolted, suggested that independence had become a possibility in the foreseeable future. He assured that the Indian revolts arose from deep-seated discontent with Spain's tyrannical government. Viscardo specifically blamed ‘inexperienced Europeans, who unjustly substituted Creoles and stripped them of their positions’.Footnote 26 At first glance, it might seem that there is a notion of Creole patriotism here. Notice, however, that he blamed not only Europeans, but rather ‘inexperienced Europeans’. It was bad governance that Viscardo most despised, especially as embodied in those despotic ministers who unjustly deprived him of his property.
The British, moreover, had no need to worry about internal racial war, for Creoles ‘far from being abhorred, were respected, even loved, by many’.Footnote 27 If Indians hated people of Spanish descent, it was necessary ‘to observe that their hate was primarily directed at the European Spaniards, who had the power to oppress them’.Footnote 28 In fact, Indians ‘have always reserved such a profound love and respect for Creoles that they would have sacrificed themselves for Creoles in any occasion with a single signal’. Indians followed Creoles because they were ‘more enlightened, more robust, more intrepid and less oppressed’. As more enlightened leaders, Creoles would naturally lead the way to independence. In fact, ‘Túpac Amaru would have never risen without the support of a powerful faction among Creoles’.Footnote 29 In sum, by deploying the languages of tyranny, Creole leadership and racial unity, Viscardo enjoined the British to consummate a revolution in which the British would obtain ‘greater gains than in any other commerce’.Footnote 30
Although the British initially took this project somewhat seriously, enough to invite him to London to present the project, the 1783 Versailles Peace Treaty soon destroyed the possibility of such an enterprise. If the British were no longer at war with Spain, Viscardo's plans were of little utility. He soon realised this and, once again, began to try to obtain his New World inheritance, especially since in 1783 the king also issued a decree establishing that former Jesuits would be able to retrieve their belongings. Although the Concejo de Indias acknowledged the legitimacy of Viscardo's plea for his New World patrimonio, it ultimately failed to deliver what Viscardo demanded. It was not until 1789 that the concejo finally decided to dismiss the case because of a lack of evidence.Footnote 31 It was then also that Viscardo began to write his most revolutionary essays, including his Lettre aux espagnols-américains. It is not entirely clear when he wrote this famous letter (Batllori speculates 1792), but when Francisco de Miranda published it in 1799 it became Spanish America's revolutionary pamphlet par excellence.
Before we examine the Lettre, however, let us first briefly consider his Projet pour rendre l'Amérique espagnole indépendante (1790), a manuscript essay written before the Lettre. Like the letter to Udny, Viscardo's Projet was an exercise in commercial realpolitik, or what David Hume called the jealousy of trade.Footnote 32 He presented the contents of the Projet to British officials in 1791, during his second journey to London. Viscardo also wrote an extension of the Projet in 1792, which he called Suite du précédent projet. The essay began, like his previous letter to Udny, expressing the benefits that awaited Great Britain if it were to help consummate his project for independence. But, where in the 1781 letter to Udny he defended independence exclusively in the language of the jealousy of trade, in the Projet Viscardo began by coating the argument in more universal and humanistic terms. ‘If politics and humanity have finally understood that there would be great advantages to be gained from liberating the New World of slavery and dependence to Spain, it is very fortunate that this is occurring under circumstances in which everything announces that well-directed efforts will not fail to have the best success’, Viscardo began.Footnote 33 It is not surprising that he would couch his project in humanistic terms this time, for the political culture of Britain was dominated by the notion that Britain was the most humanistic and sensible of imperial powers. In fact, as scholars have argued, even British abolitionism was born from this sense of moral self-righteousness, which served to culturally reconstitute the British Empire after its loss of territory in North America.Footnote 34 ‘The high paths of England seem to assign it the glory and utility of such a noble enterprise’, Viscardo continued.Footnote 35 It was this notion of a self-righteous nation that Viscardo mobilised to incite Britain to support his project.
The rest of the Projet consists of an actual plan for independence, outlining everything from which ports to enter to what rhetoric to use. The first step that Viscardo outlined is idiosyncratic indeed; it stipulated that ‘nothing would have more effectiveness than to take on the protection of the Spanish colonies, and, demonstrating the most generous disinterestedness, declare them independent’.Footnote 36 Britain had to declare the independence of America unilaterally for the project to be viable, particularly because it would remove the fear of Spanish repression. If Britain were to declare the independence of Spanish America and as a consequence instil ‘l'amour de la liberté’ in the colonies, the enterprise for free commerce would succeed as long as ‘this first flame’ of liberty was not ‘muffled by fear’.Footnote 37 But, most interestingly, removing fear would also deeply rattle (ébranler) ‘the imagination of American Spaniards’.Footnote 38 ‘It is the imagination that should have the most significant role in this great affair, and everything could depend on first impressions’, he continued.Footnote 39 Viscardo, hence, had come to believe that manipulating and channelling the Spanish American imagination was the most powerful tool that Britain had at its disposal to secure his project for independence.
Nonetheless, Viscardo recognised very well the dangers that accompanied activating the imagination of millions of people.Footnote 40 This is why he recommended proceeding with caution. Most importantly, Viscardo suggested that Britain had to activate the imagination in a way that was compatible with the mores of the people of the New World. ‘Only Princes can truly play the role of heroic liberators in the midst of so many objects of seduction’, Viscardo wrote.Footnote 41 It had to be a revolution commanded by a prince because this would prevent it from running amok in a context propitious for ignominious seductions. Moreover, the liberators had to be monarchists because of ‘the veneration that exists in America for everything that carries the imprint of royalty’.Footnote 42 If the programme for independence strayed too far from the mores of the people of Spanish America, the possibilities for estrangement were great. In contrast to what scholars have suggested, for Viscardo, it was not the accretion of tyranny and the assertion of a Creole identity that could bring about independence; in fact, tyrannised people had no ability to start a revolution. Rather, liberation had to come from without and it had to activate the imagination in a mediated manner.
Viscardo's battle against bad government becomes most clear in the third section of the Projet, an historical essay entitled Essai historique des troubles de l'Amérique méridionale, dans l'an 1780 (1792). While Viscardo mobilised the same themes of oppression, bad government and lack of commercial freedom, in the Essai, he went so far as to denounce the infamous minister of the Indies, José de Gálvez, largely responsible for carrying out what historians now call the Bourbon Reforms, as ‘l'inhumain Gálvez’.Footnote 43 When Gálvez died, ‘humanity was liberated from a monster whose ferocity can only be compared to that of the infamous Carvalho of Portugal’, he continued.Footnote 44 The death of Gálvez, hence, had the potential to free Spanish Americans from the shackles of bad government.
Unexpectedly, Viscardo also argued that with the death of Gálvez, so died Spanish tyranny. As soon as he died ‘orders were diligently expedited to the different ports of America to revoke Gálvez's policies’.Footnote 45 Gálvez was then replaced by Don Antonio Porlier, a man ‘gifted with a character radically different from that of his predecessor, a man of great spirit and of great practical knowledge of Peru’.Footnote 46 Porlier made the Creole Count of Revillagigedo viceroy of Mexico, which initiated a just regime that everyone welcomed. But, here is the most striking passage of the Essai: ‘If Don Antonio Porlier continues in this fashion, if his views are not thwarted, he is the man who could bond the hearts of American Spaniards to the metropole, and then that power [Spain] would be unbreakable’.Footnote 47 Viscardo retreated from his criticisms of the empire, arguing that because good government had been restored in the New World, the Spanish Empire now had the potential to become an unbreakable power. Viscardo's point was that the new regime of men like Antonio Porlier promised to bring a renewed sense of legitimacy and stability to the Spanish monarchy.
To be fair, Viscardo never abandoned a dose of commercial reason of state in the Essai either. In fact, that the Spanish monarchy was in the midst of reconstituting itself would inevitably mean that Britain was going to lose the advantages that were to be gained from the independence of Spanish America. Not only was Spain slowly attempting to reconstitute its empire, but France might even take from Britain the privilege of bringing about a revolution in Spanish America.Footnote 48 If it was true that Great Britain was a generous nation that fomented liberty throughout the world, it was also true that France was taking over that task by the grand revolution for liberty that it was undergoing.Footnote 49 Thus, ‘for the happiness of Great Britain I pray that you seriously reflect upon what I just said, and that you do not let the New World escape from your hands a second time’, he concluded.Footnote 50 His appeal to commercial reason of state notwithstanding, what is important to keep in mind is the centrality of good government in Viscardo's thought. As we shall see in Viscardo's subsequent writings, it was good government that both secured property rights and allowed for global commerce and prosperity to take place.
If there is any one document that could be, and has been, read as demonstrative of the rise of nationalism or, alternatively, Creole patriotism, it surely is Viscardo's Lettre aux espagnols-américains. Seemingly directed at the American Spaniards, the letter presumably incited his fellow countrymen to fight Spanish tyranny. But, like his previous essays, the Lettre is written in French and perhaps not directed at Creoles. Historians have failed to take into consideration that most of Viscardo's manuscripts are written in the international language of the eighteenth century. Moreover, the international and global character of Viscardo's Lettre is apparent not only in its chosen language, but also in the message contained within. As Viscardo insisted, Spanish American independence would be a felicitous advent for the world, including the Spanish metropole. ‘Even wise Spanish sages who groan in silence the corporeal and spiritual oppression that prevails in their country will not fail to applaud our enterprise’, Viscardo wrote.Footnote 51 In fact, with a free America, wise Spaniards would have ‘an asylum where, in addition to the fraternal hospitality that they have always encountered here, they could breathe and act freely according to reason and justice’.Footnote 52 In sum, Viscardo argued that Spain had no reason to fear independence, for a free America would enlighten (éclairer) ‘all the surface of the earth’.Footnote 53
The question that arises, however, is why and how would American independence benefit the entire world? For Viscardo, the key rested in global commerce, perhaps the most beneficial advent for humanity, given that it promised to end poverty and war. ‘What a pleasant and touching spectacle wouldn't it be to witness the shores of America covered by men of all nations exchanging with good faith and fairness the productions of their country for those of ours!’Footnote 54 Viscardo's cry for liberation was not a matter of distinguishing Creoles from foreigners, but of distinguishing victims from oppressors. If the victims of the New World were to be granted their natural rights, the Americas would become a continent of free commerce and security, thus contributing to global prosperity. ‘How many of them [people from other nations], fleeing oppression or misery, will prefer to establish themselves among us, to enrich us with their industry, knowledge, and, most importantly, to increase our population, which is in extreme decay’, he wrote.Footnote 55 Viscardo's project did not simply aim to redress the condition of Creoles, but of the oppressed people of the world. Victims of oppression from other nations would, therefore, be unquestionably welcomed in Viscardo's America.
For Viscardo, such a vision of global commerce could not be realised under the tyranny to which Spain had subjected the inhabitants of the Americas. With its monopolistic policies, Spain had prevented the global exchange of goods. Spain ‘has shut all the ways through which we could obtain from our brothers of other nations the cure for our needs at reasonable prices and by fair exchange’.Footnote 56 A particularly injurious example of Spain's monopolistic commercial system was the repartimiento, a system which allegedly benefited corregidores and alcaldes mayores (local aldermen) but which also caused ‘desolation and ruin, particularly for the unfortunate Indians and Métis [mixed-race]’.Footnote 57 Only free exchange between equal parties could maximise the benefits of commerce for all. In this respect, Spain had particularly failed, for even the welcomed comercio libre policy of the Bourbons failed to extend free trade among the colonies and other nations. In doing so, Spain had become consumed by its own ambition, and as a consequence destroyed the wellbeing of its American subjects. So deprived were the inhabitants of Spanish America that even with all the benefits that nature bestowed on them, all things ‘fall in pure loss’, preventing Americans from enjoying the fruits of nature and ‘sharing them with other people’.Footnote 58 Rather than isolate itself, as Spain had, America had to open itself to exchange freely with the nations of the world. ‘In this manner, the farthest bounds of the earth would approach America, and its inhabitants would meet in the common interest of a great family of brothers’, the Lettre concluded.Footnote 59
But, for Viscardo, Spain was responsible for more atrocities than simply prohibiting free commerce. In fact, Spain's despotic manoeuvrings had also violated man's sacred right of property. Viscardo argued that the Spanish regime in the Americas could be summarised in four words: ‘Ingratitude, Injustice, Slavery and Desolation’.Footnote 60 To understand why Viscardo came to characterise Spanish tyranny in this fashion we must first understand his theory concerning the origins of New World property. ‘Our parents’, by which he meant his Spanish ancestors, had travelled ‘a vast distance from their homeland’, when they arrived in the Americas.Footnote 61 His ancestors, hence, were brave explorers who dared to discover the unknown. More important, however, was the fact that in the New World his ancestors initially lived in ‘a state of natural independence’, which required finding ‘new ways of subsistence at the price of enormous hardships, dangers and their own expense’.Footnote 62 By virtue of their strenuous endeavours and their contribution to the crown, Americans had earned their right to New World property. In fact, ‘the great success that rewarded the efforts of the conquerors of America, consequently gave them a more legitimate right than those of the Goths of Spain, to fully take ownership of the fruit of their courage and happiness’.Footnote 63
For scholars like Anthony Pagden, this appeal to an earlier moment when conquerors arrived in the Americas was in fact characteristic of a Creole theory of an ancient constitution.Footnote 64 Viscardo, hence, appealed to an ancient contract that established that men of great valour would be allowed to take possession of encomiendas as a reward for their contribution to the crown. But, notice that Viscardo's injunction also established that the New World was in the state of nature. Hence, his argument was also inserted in Enlightenment debates concerning the origin and function of private property. By taming nature, and by surviving the vicissitudes that such enterprise entailed, men acquired the right to own property.Footnote 65 It is no surprise that Viscardo believed that his ancestors had more right to American territory than the Goths had to Iberian territory, for the ancestors of Americans, unlike the Goths, had to face the challenge of taming nature.Footnote 66 Although the recognition of private property was conventional and, thus, based on tradition, nature had to be tamed first. Hence, taming unoccupied land was a natural right that merited recognition. If he appealed to an ancient constitution, it was surely not his main line of argument.
The idea of natural rights was at the core of Viscardo's intellectual arsenal. His words speak for themselves: ‘the conservation of natural rights, and especially the freedom and security of persons and property is unquestionably the cornerstone of all human society, in whatever form it is combined’.Footnote 67 It was precisely this right that Spain had violated in preventing Americans from enjoying what belonged to them by the rights of nature. Americans had invested time, money and sweat on their land, only to be enslaved and deprived of the fruits of their labour. For Viscardo, moreover, it was this natural right to property and to the free use of the fruits of one's labour that ultimately constituted the pillars of liberty.Footnote 68 The free use of the fruits of one's labour not only entailed being able to receive remuneration, but, most importantly, having the freedom to decide who to exchange with. Thus, between commerce, property and liberty there was an intimate link in Viscardo's thought, and good government was the only measure that could successfully bring these together. That Spanish American independence promised to bring about good government in a large portion of the world, was the fundamental premise of his project.
An Enlightened Banquet
Sometime in between his previous writings and his last two, which we will consider in this section, Viscardo became enlightened. Although it is clear that since at least 1780 Viscardo had read many Enlightenment works, he now explicitly and abundantly cited Enlightenment thinkers, including William Robertson, the Abbé Raynal, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, Bernardo Ward and Antonio de Ulloa. Viscardo now took it upon himself to tackle some of the major intellectual problems that Enlightenment thinkers confronted at the time. That Viscardo wished to engage in larger Atlantic debates is evident in the fact that he now argued about the nature of New World peoples and the prospects of world peace. This section will consider how Viscardo dealt with the latter two issues and how he marshalled these Enlightenment debates to substantiate his plea for independence.
The science of man and commercial society
Written in June 1792, the Esquisse politique sur l’état actuel de l'Amérique espagnole, et sur les moyens d'addresse pour faciliter son indépendance, like the Projet, concludes by describing the best means by which to conduct the independence of Spanish America. In this regard, its content is not very different from his previous writings. But, what is different and interesting is that before he got to these recommendations, he went through great pains to demonstrate Americans' capacity to participate in a commercial and free society. Based on his readings of Raynal, Robertson and Ulloa, Viscardo determined that he had to combat the prejudices of European thinkers regarding the peoples of the New World.
‘With what face do I, an obscure man, dare to contradict the most resolute assertions of Raynal, Robertson, Ulloa, etc., if I do not have evidence at hand?’ Viscardo asked.Footnote 69 To combat the pens of these great figures of the Enlightenment it was necessary to deploy ‘good proves to establish falseness’.Footnote 70 Viscardo, then, intended to describe the people of the New World ‘just as they are’.Footnote 71 In this sense, Viscardo apparently utilised the ‘patriotic epistemology’, as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra calls it, of historical methods and criticism that Creole Jesuits devised to disavow the purported degeneration of the people of the Americas.Footnote 72 But, different from what Cañizares-Esguerra has argued, this so-called patriotic epistemology was not equivalent to nor a function of a Creole identity, at least not for Viscardo.Footnote 73 Rather, as we shall see, Viscardo hoped to prove that the mores of New World peoples were compatible with a free and global commercial society. Viscardo argued that an independent America could, in fact, become part of the civilised world and significantly contribute to global prosperity.
A common trope that traversed the works of Raynal, Robertson and Ulloa, and which Viscardo sought to disprove, was the idea that the New World was a desolate place with an insignificant population. It is ‘very true that the New World was initially ravaged by Spaniards until they nearly exterminated the natives of the country in some places’, Viscardo acknowledged.Footnote 74 But, and here he discredited the views of European thinkers, ‘it is also very true that in other parts [of Spanish America] there still remain a greater number of people than is commonly believed in Europe’.Footnote 75 Enlightenment historians had arrived at incorrect conclusions from incomplete knowledge. Adding up the figures that Francisco Clavijero had provided in his Storia antica del Messico (1780) Footnote 76 with other figures for Amérique méridionale (South America) that he established from various unspecified sources, he concluded that Spanish America had at the very least 14 million and possibly 16 million people. The severity with which these Enlightenment thinkers had judged the territories of Spanish America was irrational, particularly if one compared its cities to those of the United States. According to Viscardo, while in 1761 Philadelphia had about 20,000 inhabitants and New York 12,000, there were at least 25 cities in Spanish America with more than 18,000.Footnote 77 The average population for major Spanish American cities was much greater than their North American counterparts. Why, then, had these historians judged Spanish America more severely?
Still, even if Viscardo successfully proved that Spanish America had a robust population, Enlightenment historians had also argued that New World peoples were degenerate, effeminate, indulgent, lazy and immoral. The genealogy of this notion of American degeneracy, something Antonello Gerbi has studied so well, has a long history in Western thought.Footnote 78 But, it was Cornelius De Pauw, who definitively and without ambivalence argued that the peoples of America were degenerate because of the climate and youth of the new continent.Footnote 79 By virtue of its youth, nature in the Americas had yet to develop to its full potential, as it had in the Old World. Robertson accepted this trope when he wrote that ‘by the enervating influence of a sultry climate … the vigour of their minds is so entirely broken, that a great part of them waste life in luxurious indulgences, mingled with an illiberal superstition still more debasing’. This trope had significant implications for the inhabitants of the Americas because it implied that their problems were irremediable, inherent to the land and climate of the continent. In fact, Robertson argued that ‘languid and unenterprising, the operations of an active extended commerce would be to them [Creoles] so cumbersome and oppressive, that in almost every part of America they decline engaging in it’. That it was a problem particular to Creoles was evident in the fact that ‘the interior traffic of every colony, as well as its trade with the neighbouring provinces, and with Spain itself, are carried on chiefly by the Chapetones [peninsular Spaniards], who, as the recompense of their industry, amass immense wealth, while the Creoles, sunk in sloth, are satisfied with the revenues of their paternal estates'.Footnote 80
There was a paradox in Robertson's argument that Viscardo exploited very well. If, in fact, it was ‘the sultry climate’ that degenerated people in the Americas, how could he also hold that the Spanish, French and British living in the Americas were not affected by this climate?Footnote 81 For Viscardo, the inconsistency in Robertson's argument rested on the fact that he had confused political (civil) with natural causes. Viscardo accepted, to some extent, that Creoles and Indians did not engage in commerce as much as they should. But, what had prevented Americans from participating in commerce was not something in their nature or in the climate of the Americas, but rather the injurious monopolistic policies of the Spanish monarchy. ‘It seems to me that a people who are burdened by the most tyrannical monopoly in terms of international trade, and even deprived of exchanging with their own co-citizens, ought not to receive the accusation of indolence from those who have studied the chains imposed on their industry’, Viscardo retorted.Footnote 82 How could Robertson and Raynal accuse of indolence the people who they themselves admitted were tyrannised by Spanish monopolistic policies? If Creoles had failed to engage in commerce, it was because Spain had failed to secure the necessary laws and rights that made commerce possible.
Viscardo proceeded to argue that the peoples of the Americas had qualities that made them compatible with and desirable for a modern commercial society. It is ironic, however, that Viscardo would not escape the essentialisms that the enlightened historians had used against Creoles. Instead, he sought to overturn them. Creoles, of course, were the most enlightened and vigorous of all the people in the New World, Viscardo argued. Drawing on the Felippo Salvatore Gilii's Saggio di storia americana (1780),Footnote 83 Viscardo wrote that ‘they are extremely sweet, helpful, informed, prudent, and possessed a politesse which one does not expect in America’.Footnote 84 As for mestizos, their character depends both on the extent of their ‘mélange’ and the extent of their education. But, generally speaking, ‘by virtue of their vigorous constitution, and the robust exercises in which they find comfort, especially in the countryside, they are brave’.Footnote 85
The constitution of Indians was indeed the most controversial and complicated of all. But it was incontestable, Viscardo believed, that the Indians of Peru and Mexico were civilised before the conquest. One the most troubling aspects of Indians for the enlightened historians was the idea that Amerindians had no notion of property or commerce. Viscardo disagreed. His characterisations of Amerindian property are worth quoting at length:
Each town, each Indian village has its inalienable territory, of which a portion is used to satisfy the public needs of the community. The other portion is distributed to each family for its sustenance, and is regularly located within the reach of each home. The cultivation of these lands, public like private, is not left at random, but is regulated with great precision; it is this felicitous aspect that Raynal explains and interprets poorly.Footnote 86
That Indians had communal property did not mean that they had no notion of property rights, he posited. In fact, their land was ‘inalienable’. Their lands, moreover, were not left uncultivated, as Raynal believed. In effect, Viscardo, like Clavijero before him, sought to make Indian forms of property and labour compatible with modern commercial society.
It is worth emphasising that Viscardo's goal was not simply to defend Americans against European attacks, but to argue that Spanish America was capable of participating in a global and civilised commercial society. Together, Creoles, mestizos and Indians had everything that a commercial, civilised and free society needed to thrive, Viscardo argued. Creoles were enlightened and apt for the world of science, arts and letters. Mestizos were vigorous and good at working the land, while Indians were malleable enough to take various positions in society, although they purportedly thrived as servants and wet nurses.Footnote 87 There was no need to worry about disunity among these three groups either, for they were bound by filial ties, relations of generosity, compassion and love, Viscardo concluded.
Peace, commerce and liberty
By 1797, it seems, Viscardo had given up trying to convince the British that the independence of Spanish America was in their best commercial interest. In what was his most cosmopolitan essay, Viscardo pitched the independence of Spanish America as an event closely related to the end of war, and the possibility of a future brotherly world governed by ties of politesse and reciprocal commerce. ‘This sketch of Spanish America, which is supposed to achieve independence and liberty, is the sweet perspective of a happy future’, he wrote.Footnote 88 In this last and most unwieldy manuscript, La paix et le bonheur du siècle prochain: remonstrance addressée à tous les peuples libres ou qui veulent l’être (1797), the sources of Viscardo's political economy become clearly evident. Like Montesquieu and Adam Smith, Viscardo held commerce to be a panacea for the world's ills. Commerce not only promised to bring about peace, but also promised to secure the most perfect form of liberty, where men, like nations, were able to freely exchange commodities and ideas.Footnote 89
But, La paix was also an historical essay on the commercial progress, or lack thereof, of the Spanish colonies, reason for which Francisco de Miranda and his partner Louis Stanislas D'arcy De La Rochette chose to add a new subtitle: ‘Essai sur le commerce actuel des colonies hispano-américains’. To demonstrate the general decay of New World commerce, Viscardo relied on numerical figures from the Mercurio Peruano, the Gaceta de Madrid and the works of Campomanes. It is ironic, however, that, for the judgments and general trends about New World commerce since the sixteenth century, he drew on Raynal and Robertson. Viscardo presented the history of the New World after the conquest as one of decay. While in the sixteenth century Spain was one of the most industrious nations of Europe, the discovery of the mines of Potosí in 1545 ‘deranged all the ideas of economics’.Footnote 90 Like his Enlightenment counterparts, Viscardo believed that the discovery of the mines provoked ‘unrestrained greed’, which led to the most injurious economic policy, preventing foreigners, and even Spaniards of Navarre and Aragón, from participating in Spain's commercial enterprise.Footnote 91 As a result of its extreme monopolistic policies after the discovery of the mines, Spain planted the seeds of its own destruction.Footnote 92 In fact, Spain's bullion always ended up in the hands of Great Britain. ‘The true story of Spain's lethargy since the discovery of the New World's treasures is that of its slavery’, Viscardo suggested.Footnote 93
Although Viscardo was clearly mistaken in suggesting that Spanish administrators had always been consumed with extracting bullion from the New World, he was following a well-established Enlightenment trope against Spain, which had become part and parcel of what contemporaries called the ‘science of commerce’ or ‘political economy’.Footnote 94 According to this trope, Spain, unlike Britain and France, was consumed with the spirit of conquest, as opposed to the spirit of commerce, at a time when commerce had become ‘the soul of the body politic’, to quote the entry on ‘commerce’ in the Encyclopédie.Footnote 95 Spanish ministers were not entirely foreign to this debate. At least since 1743, José del Campillo y Cosío had begun to critique Spain's commercial system on precisely the same grounds.Footnote 96 But, like Montesquieu and Adam Smith, Viscardo held that Spain's spirit of conquest had not only weakened the power of the metropole, but also kept Americans under an alarmingly severe despotism and commercial monopoly. Hence, Americans' only hope for escaping this heavy-handed spirit of conquest was independence.
Most importantly, however, Viscardo insisted on independence because such an event would have salutary global repercussions. Linking Spanish America to global commerce was all the more significant given America's vast resources. As Montesquieu remarked, ‘the Indies and Spain are two powers under the same master, but the Indies are the principal one and Spain is only secondary’.Footnote 97 Whatever wealth Spain had managed to attain, it had the Indies to thank because the latter part of the world engaged ‘in a commerce worth fifty million, and Spain in one worth two and half million’.Footnote 98 As Viscardo remarked, ‘the magnitude, the fertility and the variety of regions owned by Spain in the New World, therefore, offer humankind the vastest field to multiply useful productions’.Footnote 99 Opening New World markets would unleash from the chains of monopolistic despotism an unprecedented potential for wealth.
The appeal to opening New World markets was, therefore, the most important rhetorical move in Viscardo's project. From this perspective, despotism was but a barrier to global prosperity; it precluded Americans from exchanging the fruits of their labour. The spirit of conquest and monopoly that characterised Spanish rule had thrown to waste the vast potential for wealth that American territories possessed. What was particularly deleterious about Spain's monopoly was that it relied almost exclusively on a single port in Cádiz. While the New World produced vast quantities of bullion, Americans could not exchange it directly for European manufactured goods. Rather, Americans had to buy from the licensed merchants of Cádiz who had the exclusive right to trade with the American colonies. Foreign merchants who desired to trade with the New World technically had to sell their goods to the merchants of Cádiz as opposed to Americans themselves. In Cádiz, the crown then charged port dues before transporting the merchandise to the New World. For Viscardo, the result of this monopolistic system was that it exponentially increased the prices of commodities heading to Spanish America. Consequently, this reduced the quantity of commodities that Americans could buy with their silver.Footnote 100 If Peruvians were to buy commodities at their actual market price before Spain's panoply of taxes and port dues, they would be able both to live abundantly and to buy more from foreign nations. Monopolies, taxes, customs dues, and transportation costs all limited the total amount of commercial transactions that could take place if American markets were opened to foreign nations.
It is important to note that Viscardo's La paix (1797) was written just a few years after Bentham's A Plan for a Universal and Perpetual Peace (1786–1789), and almost concurrently with Kant's Project for Perpetual Peace (1795). For these thinkers, peace would arise only as European empires freed their dependencies and allowed the colonies to pursue their own interests. What European powers failed to realise was that free and prosperous neighbours, rather than colonies, would be able to buy more of the metropole's manufactures. The possession of colonies, hence, both destroyed the interests of the colony and deluded the mother-country into thinking that colonies were profitable.Footnote 101 Although it is unlikely that Viscardo read Bentham or Kant, he also came to believe that colonies generated no benefits for the metropole, especially because dependent colonies were poor and, thus, unable to buy manufactures. Independence in Spanish America would expand global trade by giving Americans the possibility to become wealthy and to buy more from foreign commercial powers. By the same token, this very expansion of markets promised to end European warfare, not simply by making people more sociable and polite, but by making everyone wealthy through reciprocal trade with Spanish America. For Viscardo, the New World had enough wealth to banish the martial spirit of European commercial rivalry.Footnote 102 This was all the more important given that the age of commerce, as Smith, Hume, Kant and Benjamin Constant came to argue, was incompatible with war.Footnote 103
Viscardo, then, attempted to disassociate European powers' national interests from war, monopoly and conquest. European monarchs failed to realise that in attempting to keep everything for themselves through monopolies, and excessive tribute, they were in fact acting against their own interests. Enlightened nations like Britain had proven that ‘it is no longer terror and carnage that determine the power and superiority of an empire’.Footnote 104 Rather, ‘in the present, the real measure of power is the prosperity of commerce, which is the father of industry, which alone enriches people and populates states’.Footnote 105 In effect, by pursuing policies of commercial war and monopoly, European empires, Spain particularly, were actually losing money and power. For Viscardo, like some Enlightenment political economists, national power was a matter of increased industriousness and free commerce, as opposed to territorial expansion or military capability.
Borrowing from Emer de Vattel's efforts to build a science of the law of nations,Footnote 106 Viscardo argued that to ensure the burgeoning of global commerce, it was necessary to design a new law of nations predicated on reciprocity rather than the rights of war.Footnote 107 It was not enough to simply reform a couple of states; the transformation had to be universal. Viscardo's insights on this point are worth considering at length:
Regardless of the degree of perfection that any society could boast in sustaining the great system of the guarantee of reciprocal rights and duties among the individuals that comprise it, it is unfortunately very certain that their lives, their liberty and their property will always be in the most precarious state, as long as war could expose them in a manner infinitely more dangerous and gruesome than in the simple isolated state of nature.Footnote 108
Thus, each state had to make an effort to ensure that its constitution was conducive to commercial reciprocity, security (protection of property rights) and liberty (freedom to trade).Footnote 109 In linking Spanish American independence with a new law of nations and with a regime of international commercial reciprocity, Viscardo envisioned the creation of a new global order where states would be linked by the reciprocal bonds of interdependence.Footnote 110
Conclusion
In 1801, as Francisco de Miranda prepared to launch his first insurgent campaign to the New World, he designed a series of legislative texts that would guide the government of an independent Spanish America. In this series of documents, he denounced Spain's ‘spirit of conquest, dominance or monopoly’.Footnote 111 Spain had ostensibly reduced the New World to an orphan colony, to the status of an abandoned child devoid of rights. In fact, ‘Spain only remembers us to impose tribute, to send us a swarm of tyrants, to insult us and deprive us of our possessions, to stifle our industry, to prohibit our commerce, to diminish our instruction and to drive all the talent out of the country’. With the flair typical of Miranda's vitriolic language, this so-called precursor of independence construed the Spanish spirit of conquest as a regime squarely antithetical to an enlightened government (gobierno ilustrado), that is, one that ensured ‘personal security, liberty, property, which are essential to men who live in society’.Footnote 112 I take it that the resonances between Miranda's critique towards Spain and Viscardo's earlier projects for Spanish American independence are not a matter of mere coincidence.
Nor is it a coincidence that more than a decade later Simón Bolívar would come to analogous conclusions in his Jamaica Letter (1815). ‘And civilized Europe, merchant, lover of liberty, will she allow a decrepit serpent to devour the most beautiful part of the globe out of pure venomous rage?’ he asked.Footnote 113 ‘Europe herself, with an eye to rational foreign relations, should have prepared and carried out the project of American independence, not only because world equilibrium demands it, but because this is the legitimate and sure way to acquire overseas markets’, he continued. Independence and the banishment of Spanish tyranny, moreover, was an advent ‘whose advantages are mutual to both hemispheres’.Footnote 114 Spanish American independence, hence, would bring to fruition a reciprocal world, where people, Europeans particularly, would freely exchange their goods with a territory rich in both necessary commodities and expansive markets. Viscardo's legacy is indeed significant, and to understand why some Spanish American liberators unflinchingly held to independence we must understand his conceptual world.
Hence, Viscardo was not a mere isolated case of radicalism, and we must take his project seriously. While most of Viscardo's manuscripts remained unknown until Merle Simmons discovered them at the New York Historical Society, his Lettre became exceptionally influential shortly after his death in 1798.Footnote 115 Miranda, who first published Viscardo's Lettre in French in 1799 and then in Spanish in 1801, also couched his arguments for independence in terms of world prosperity and a new global order of commercial reciprocity. Viscardo's influence, in fact, also spread all throughout the revolutionary period. Miranda himself made sure to circulate copies of Viscardo's Lettre in English, French and Spanish. In 1809 the Edinburgh Review featured a long discussion of Viscardo's proposals. The South American revolutionary Mariano Moreno copied Viscardo's Lettre in his own hand. A partial English translation was reproduced in William Burke's Additional Reasons for our immediately Emancipating Spanish America (1808).Footnote 116 Therefore, understanding Viscardo's intellectual development is a matter of reconsidering the intellectual origins of Spanish American independence.
This article has attempted to sustain that it is insufficient to suggest that Viscardo's projects were simply part of a Creole discourse that looked for an ancient American constitution to legitimate independence.Footnote 117 In calling for independence, Viscardo made little use of any notion of ancient liberties. This is of course not to say that the idea of an ancient Spanish American constitution did not thrive among some Creoles. Portillo Valdés has amply demonstrated that indeed this appeal to autonomous American ‘perfect communities’ thrived well into the Hispanic Atlantic crisis.Footnote 118 But, there was an alternative intellectual route towards independence, and Viscardo was its creator. Viscardo's projects furnished some revolutionary leaders with a powerful and unrelenting justification for independence that had global appeal and implications. Viscardo's goal, like that of Miranda and Bolívar, was to link Spanish American independence to the rise of a new global order predicated on free trade and commercial reciprocity. We might quibble over the different ways in which this global discourse manifested itself among subsequent liberators and declarations of independence, but it is clear that the genealogy of this globalised concept of independence was not predicated on the assertion of a Creole or national identity.Footnote 119
