Revolutions - 9.01- New Spain

Episode Date: August 12, 2018

Just by way of refresher, since I know everyone took such good notes during episode 5.1 and 5.2  sponsor: Harrys.com/revolutions

Hello and Bienvenu a Revolution. Episode 9.1, New Spain. Okay, so I'll never do that again, but the big move to Paris is complete. The Duncan family is mostly settled and I have finally gone back to work full-time. Now, if you're interested, it appears that I will be splitting most of my time between the Bibliotech Historic de la Vie de Paris and the Bibliotech Public of Information. The former resides in a converted palace. from the 1500s, the latter resides in the Saint-Tre-Pompadou, a building so modern that it makes your head hurt. So it's wonderful, contrasting work environments. It's all been great so far,

hard, but great. And let me tell you, it feels really good to be back to work. So from here on out, I will be working on Citizen Lafayette half the time and the other half of the time producing this here weekly podcast. The only noticeable difference on your end should be that maybe the ambient audio sounds a little bit different now, which is because I'm in an apartment in Paris, basement in Wisconsin. So if there is a difference, well, this is what the show sounds like now. So without further jibber-jabber, we embark now on our ninth series together. This one will be about the Mexican Revolution, which lasted roughly from 1910 to 1920. Today, we are going to go back in time to roughly the same place I began our fifth series, the one on Spanish-American independence,

to reacquaint ourselves with the backstory of New Spain, the vice royalty that covered North America, and which would eventually, mostly, transform into the country we call Mexico. Next week, we will cover Mexican independence, which I intentionally did not cover during Series 5, but which unfolded from 1810 to 1821, alongside the many adventures and misadventures of Belivar and San Martin and the rest of the guys down in South America. Then the week after that, we will cover the first 50 years of independent Mexico, their economic developments, the struggles between liberals and conservatives, the struggles with States through about 1876. And then episode 9.4 will be an in-depth look at the Porfuriato,

which is the regime, the Ancian regime, if you will, against which our Mexican revolution will be staged. After that, it gets a little nuts, and we'll just see how long it takes us to wade through it all. And before we get going, as usual, I would like to apologize for any mispronunciations I make along the way. I cannot wait to see what trying to affect a French accent all the time is going to do to my pronunciation of Spanish. One thing that never changes here on the Revolution's podcast is my ability to find new and interesting ways to mispronounce things. Okay, so climbing into the Wayback Machine.

In episode 5.1, we talked about how the Treaty of Tortoise in 1494 between the Crown of Castile and Portugal gave the Spanish control of everything on the other side of a line drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, which turned out to be all of the Americas, except for Brazil. Spanish explorers and conquistadors then moved into the Caribbean, and then Cortez led an expedition to the mainland that saw him make contact with and conquer the Aztec Empire of the Central Mexican Plateau. These first decades after the arrival of the Spanish were, as you will recall, a humanitarian disaster for the indigenous population and resulted in their near-complete. by the 1540s, as a combination of disease, war, famine, forced labor, and everything else

took the pre-Columbian population of New Spain of 25 million down to a post-Columbian population of just over one million. While this mass death was unfolding, the first run of conquistadors and their heirs were setting themselves up as the new top of the political, economic, and social pyramid, replacing the power structures that had been built by the Aztecs and the Maya, often literally and directly. Most, though not all, of the principal cities of New Spain, were built up and out of the urban centers of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. So Mexico City, for example, the capital of New Spain,

was just the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan by another name. You will also remember from episode 5.1 that the early economic structure of Spanish America was built around the Encomienda system, which was awarding the tribute and labor of particular indigenous people, so not their land per se, to members of these conquistador expeditions. So, for example, in the central plateau of Mexico, whatever those people had owed the Aztecs, they now owed to some random Spaniard.

These incommienda became the basis of most of the wealth that was claimed by the heirs of the conquistadors, far more than the transient spoils from the conquest. But after a few decades' experience with conquistadors on the far side of the Atlantic, setting up these vast quasi-empirus for themselves and claiming de facto personal sovereignty over huge populations, the Habsburg monarchy back in Spain became worried that these guys might go rogue. So they created a new political structure to cement the Spanish crown, not the conquistadors, as the basis of power and sovereignty in the Americas. In 1535, they created the vice royalty of New Spain to cover roughly all of North and Central

America, and then followed this up in 1542 by establishing the vice royalty of Peru, which would administer all of South America. Now, just by way of refresher, because I know you all took copious notes during Series 5, the vice regal power structure looked like this. At the top, there was a viceroy, appointed by the king. He would come and serve as the representative of royal sovereignty. These guys were always trusted agents of the royal family, and during the Habsburg era, at least, they were often also high-ranking officials in the Catholic Church. Just below and adjacent to the viceroy were the Audiencius. You remember those?

Those were committees of rich and powerful men who acted as the Supreme Judicial Body, but also who had some legislative and advisory functions to complement the powers of the viceroy. And while there was only ever one viceroy, the number of Audiences proliferated to help deal with the vast size of New Spain. The main Audiencia was, of course, in Mexico City, but there were also Audiences in Santo Domingo, in Panama, Guatemala, Guadalajara, and far off in Manila in the Philippines, which was technically a part of New Spain. Below the Audiences were an even larger number of regional governors, and below the governors were about 200 recognized municipalities who would be governed by appointed mayors aided by town councils, composed of the local elite families. But despite this top-down political structure that traced its authority directly to the king himself back in Spain, in the early days of Habsburg, New Spain, it was really a pretty decentralized ruling structure almost by default. Given the state of the transportation and communication lines in the 15 and 1600s, local leaders exercised a lot of autonomy and were given a great deal of latitude to make their own decisions.

Now, arriving alongside these early secular conquistadors and fortune hunters and then later vice-regal administrators was the Catholic Church. During the vice regal era, the church was effectively a branch of government. And especially during the Habsburg era, a lot of church officials were just employed as vice-regal officials. But though the church often worked in tandem with the government, the church naturally had its own independent agenda. Catholic missionaries went forth to convert the indigenous population, lay down new spiritual roots, and along the way, build up their own set of vast holdings to enrich the Catholic Church, both in terms of souls and pesos. Over the centuries, nearly all of New Spain was converted to Catholicism, though it was never

a strictly European Catholicism, and it always blended in with ancient beliefs and customs, no matter how hard some in the clergy tried to stamp all that out. Along the way, the church quickly became the largest and richest single entity in the Americas outside of the crown itself. But that said, with their priests and missionaries often living in and among the indigenous tribes of New Spain, learning their customs and their languages along the way, these priests and missionaries became something of advocates for the tribes against the encroachment of more cynical landowners and rapacious government officials. Now, there's always tension between the church and the indigenous populations, but the centrality of the church to daily life became established enough that Catholic images like the Virgin of Guadalupe would become powerful unifying national symbols in the years of revolutionary tumult to come.

The creation of the vice royalty of New Spain and North America in 1535 neatly coincided with a shift in the source of economic wealth and power in the Americas, because this is when the Spanish discovered all those massive veins of silver. And we discussed in episode 5.1 how the discovery of silver massively transformed, not just the economy of Spanish America, but the economy of the whole world as silver started getting pumped out of major veins in Peru and New Spain. And in New Spain, those mines were discovered in Zacatecas, Guanjato, and then later in San Luis Potosi, which was named after the San Luis Potosi mine down in Peru. The entire orientation of Spanish civilization in the Americas now focused on extract American silver. The vice regal administrators tightly controlled every aspect of extraction, minting, transportation, and trade. The silver from New Spain would be boxed up and either

shipped directly back to Spain via the one port allowed to engage in quote unquote international trade in the Atlantic, that was Veracruz, or it would be boxed up and shipped west to Asia, via the one port allowed to engage in quote unquote international trade in the Pacific, Acapulco. The twice-yearly Manila galleons that would go in and out of Acapulco would move American silver to Asia and Asian commodities back to America, where they would eventually be moved overland to Veracruz and forwarded on to Europe, creating a trade belt that wrapped around the entire world. And all of this silver did indeed massively enrich Spain for a little while, until they went and spent it all on candy and video games. Aside from the silver, the Spanish took

very little interest in any other economic development in New Spain. Extracting other natural resources just didn't seem to make much sense, because even internal trade was restricted by geography. There isn't much in the way of navigable rivers in central Mexico, so all trade had to be done overland, which automatically makes everything ten times slower and ten times more expensive to ship. But even on top of that, the terrain of Mexico is full of peaks and valleys, mountains, and swamps. The trip from Mexico City to Veracruz is only about 250 miles, but it covers an 8,000 foot drop in elevation. The roads of New Spain were always garbage, everything had to be moved by mule train, and the Habsburgs, at least, never thought those roads worth investing in.

So that meant that all the land and estates and agricultural produce of New Spain was there to service the cities and mining centers of New Spain, and that was it. Hapsburg, New Spain was a very grow local and bi-local economy. And the Spanish weren't really interested in international trade anyway. I mean, you could only go in and out through Veracruz on the Atlantic or Acapulco on the Pacific. And remember, prior to the reforms of the late Bourbon era, the ports and regions of Spanish America couldn't even trade with each other. Caracas could not trade with Veracruz directly. They both had to send everything back to Spain first.

But though silver was the source of wealth in New Spain, that did not mean that the rich elites in Mexico City did not get rich owning and operating vast agricultural estates. Owning land was still the standard by which a family measured its wealth. The incommienda system of the first generation of Spaniards, which was based on tribute and labor, gave way to the creation of vast haciendas built on the outright ownership of huge tracts of land. These haciendas would be owned by absentee landlords in Mexico City, run by on-site managers, who would then attract or coerce, members of the local indigenous population to either live permanently on the hacienda or be available as on-call seasonal wage workers. As these haciendas grew, though, they also developed systems of debt peonage, which was basically a system of indentured servitude, where the landlord would loan a worker a bunch of stuff up front and then, keep that worker bound and in debt for the rest of their lives.

Wherever Spanish civilization extended, the haciendas followed, bringing with them claims to private ownership of land and resources, particularly water, that had never been made before, or which local tribes held claim to dating back to the original conquest, claims that were not being ignored. Tension, conflict, and bloodshed between the free villages and the encroaching haciendas became a permanent feature of life in New Spain and would remain a permanent feature of life in independent Mexico. So the establishment of major new mining communities

and vast haciendas that grew up to support them obviously had a major social impact to go along with their economic impact, particularly in the areas of north central Mexico where the silver was discovered because those areas were not very densely populated. So unlike Peru, where the Spaniards' more, or less enslaved the local population to work in the mines, the administrators in New Spain had to figure out how to get workers to the mines and workers to the haciendas that were supporting those mines.

They lacked the men or resources necessary to just coerce the mass migration of an unwilling population. So instead they offered wages to indigenous workers who would come and be miners or field hands. Attracted by these wages, indigenous migrants would move up to the mining centers. They would settle, interact, and intermarry both with each other and immigrant Spaniards. And this wound up forming the core of what would become the official mestizo-Mexican ethnic identity, which we're going to talk about more here in a second. But expansion North did lead to conflict with the indigenous populations that did live in the regions and who were not thrilled about Spanish encroachment.

So there was a continuous run of wars and revolts for the whole rest of the 1500s and well into the 1600s. But by about 1600, the Spanish vice royalty of New Spain was well established in central Mexico, though, despite their grandiose claims, they had very little effective control over anything north of about Zacatecas, in what is now the northern states of Mexico and the southwestern United States. After 1600, those areas would be dotted by occasional Catholic missions and army forts, but not much else. It really wasn't until the advent of railroads that those areas were, were even remotely integrated into the central administration run out of Mexico City.

So moving on from the economic side of things, as we discussed at length in our series on the Haitian Revolution and on Spanish-American independence, as Europeans from the old world migrated to the new world, there started to be a mingling of the gene pool. And over the course of the whole vice regal era in New Spain, about 700,000 Spaniards permanently settled, almost all of them men. So over the decades and then over the centuries, new ethnic combinations emerged that would then be codified in what was called the Casta, the absurdly detailed ethnic classification system that doled out privileges and responsibilities based on a convoluted analysis of your ancestry. With the rule of thumb always being, you guessed it, the wider, the better. So just by way of refresher, at the top of the Casta hierarchy in New Spain were peninsulars.

That is, those actually born in Spain who only later migrated across the Atlantic. They were the elite of the elite. Below them were the Crioia. Crioia were the elite Spanish families who settled permanently in New Spain and mostly in Mexico City. These elite families did their best only to marry with each other to keep all their ancestry traceable directly to Spain. Now, in reality, this was impossible, and so a little indigenous blood was always allowed, into these families, though they did their best to pretend like those impure parts of the family tree did not exist. In New Spain, as in the rest of Spanish America, Peninsulars and Crioyo

owned all the largest haciendas, all the best land, and controlled all government and church offices. These peninsular immigrants then ran into the indigenous Amerindian tribes. Central Mexico was one of the most densely populated areas of the Western Hemisphere when the Spaniards arrived. The population I said was annihilated, though, by the 1540s, but by the 1630s, it had stabilized and then started to regrow. So myriad tribes and languages and cultures proliferated throughout New Spain, from Yucatan to California. The place and role of the indigenous tribes in the Castas system, though, goes back to the

initial reforms that the crown made to its new vice royalty back in the first decades after the conquest. Priests, like Bartolome de las Casas, went back to Spain and complained. about the way the incommendos were treating the indigenous people. So the crown declared all the indigenous peoples to be legally minors and under the direct supervision and protection of the crown. Now, on the one hand, this is obviously incredibly degrading, but it did have the effect of establishing legal claims to land and rights by Indian villages that could be enforced against the encroachment of, for example, large Criohoiños, that is, the owners of the haciendas. The indigenous tribes

lived in their own villages and towns under their own hierarchies and often were exempt from various vice-regal taxes. Their principal point of contact with and integration into the Spanish system was through the Catholic Church who sent out floods of priests to convert everyone. Now at first, these priests tried to convert the indigenous tribes without messing too much with local custom, but when that didn't work, they focused on erasing indigenous religion and replacing it. But they only ever succeeded in creating a blend of the two. with Catholic iconography and ritual, mixing with ancient iconography and ritual. And while there was friction and conflict that existed between the priests and the indigenous tribes,

those priests often turned around and defended the tribes from encroachment. The Jesuits, in particular, developed their own working relationships with the indigenous peoples that was completely independent of Crown authority. It's one of the reasons the Crown eventually expelled the Jesuits and why the indigenous populations went into revolt when the Jesuits were expelled. But though all the indigenous tribes faced the same initial devastation and were now ruled by a minority of Spaniards, there was never any pan-Indigenous solidarity or resistance, as old local rivalries tended to preempt any large-scale continental unification to expel the invaders.

Now, the other way the indigenous peoples were integrated into the Spanish system was by turning them from free villagers into wage workers, either in mines or on hacian. And as I said earlier, this transformation led to an intermixing of separate tribes that broke down old tribal identities, and it also led to a mixing with Spaniards, almost always a Spanish man and an indigenous woman, to create a new mestizo population, which filled out the middle ranks of the Casta system. These couplings would lead to later combinations of their descendants who combined to create a wider mestizo population that could look, phenotypically speaking, either more indigenous or more European, depending on the specifics of your family tree.

So by the early 1600s, there was a large and stable mestizo population who filled out the ranks of the artisan classes, the unskilled laborers, rural laborers, minors and peasants, and then eventually more prosperous merchants and small-time bourgeois types in the towns. Now, the last part of the Kasta system in New Spain was by far the smallest, and that was Africans. Because though the southern United States and the Caribbean and coastal South America were sites of heavy slavery, New Spain, the parts that are today Mexico, mostly were not. It's estimated that through the whole vice regal period only about 200,000 enslaved Africans arrived, and most of those came during one particular stretch between 1580 and 1640,

when the indigenous population had been leveled and the Spanish and Portuguese crowns were temporarily united. which facilitated Spanish use of Portuguese slave traders. Now, just to skip ahead in time a bit, a 1793 census of New Spain says that Europeans, that is, peninsular or Crioia, were about 18 to 22 percent of the population. Indigenous Amerindians were about 51 to 61 percent, and Mastizo about 21 to 25 percent. Africans were estimated at between 6 and 10,000, not 6 and 10 percent, but 6 and 10 percent. thousand. There are a couple of reasons for the relative lack of slavery in New Spain. And the most important, I think, is the practical and physical difficulties of transportation.

When slave ships arrived in Caracas, Venezuela, or confrances Saint-Doming, or Charleston and South Carolina, they deposited enslaved people who were within easy reach of the areas they were destined to live and work. But in New Spain, the populated areas were all inland and on the central plateau up and away, a long ways away from Veracruz, where they had come in. It was a thousand miles over terrible roads to get from Veracruz to Zacatecas. So though enslaved Africans did make it to the mines, their numbers were dwarfed by the indigenous Amerindians and mestizo wage workers. On the large agricultural estates, owners had developed a pretty good system of debt peonage as their version of forced labor. And then after

1640, the divorce of Spain and Portugal led to Spain losing easy access to the Portuguese slavers. So, when enslaved Africans did arrive in New Spain, they were usually confined to the coastal areas, particularly around Veracruz, where they were used on some sugar plantations and producing textiles. So the enslaved population in New Spain was small, it was confined to the coast, and then it was usually, demographically, worked out of the casta system within a generation or two because the slaves who did arrive were predominantly male. And if they had a child with an indigenous woman, that child took the child. the free status of the mother. And then the future recognition of Afro-Mexicans, who were a part of the Casta system, was then and is still today a very contestable and controversial issue,

because the descendants of Africans usually pass themselves off as mestizo for social and economic reasons. And then after the Mexican Revolution, there was a concerted effort to embrace the combined Spanish indigenous ethnicity as the official ethnic identity of Mexico and just sort of leave the African part of the story out completely. Now, the last thing I'll say about the casta system before we move on is though it was rigidly codified on paper, there were all these like famous posters that would be commissioned to show each potential combination of white, indigenous, and black, and then tell you what privileges, responsibilities, and stereotypical behavior were expected of each.

Around the edges, the casta was very fluid and 100% a socially constructed reality, not a biologically constructed reality. So a very white mestizo could pass as creoleo. Those with African blood, as I just said, routinely presented themselves as mestizo. A mestizo who lived with and spoke the language of an indigenous tribe was considered a part of that indigenous tribe. So the language you spoke, the clothes you wore, the job you have, the education you displayed, all of that said much more about where you fit in the caste system as whatever some later DNA tests might say, which they didn't have anyway. But the general rule of thumb, as I said at the beginning of this, was pretty much everywhere. The whiter you were, the higher you were. So as you will further remember from series five,

the Habsburg era in Spain skidded to an ignominious halt at the end of the 1600s, and they were replaced by the arrival of the Bourbon dynasty, who took up permanent residence in Madrid at the close of the war of the Spanish succession in 1715. From the perspective of the vice-royalty of New Spain, The principal impact of this was all those reforms that the next few bourbon monarchs, especially Charles III in the second half of the century, pushed onto their American holdings to increase economic productivity and tax revenue. The bourbon economic reforms had two principal goals. First, increase the amount of silver coming out of the vice royalty. And second, diversify the economy so that it produced more profitable goods, both for internal trade and external trade. The wealthy peninsula and Criojo landowners were given every encouragement to plow their wealth back into the vice royalty and make large capital investments, cultivate more land with more cash crops, and improve mining extraction and efficiency.

And the elites responded. With the church acting as a mortgage bank and with the government providing financial incentives, the annual silver output of New Spain increased from about 1.5 million pesos in 1700 to 25 million pesos by 1800. The increase in the size and scope of mining operations also increase the size and scope of adjacent economic activities that supported those mines, so manufacturing and agricultural produce on the large haciendas. And unlike during the Hapsburg era, where the titles to land held by indigenous tribes were often upheld in court, bourbon policy, whether on purpose or just because that's the way it went, almost always sided with the private landowner who was encroaching on the communal claims of a village. So in some places, haciendas grew to absurd size. There was one down between Mexico City and Acapulco that grew to fully 500,000 acres. These sprawling haciendas were encouraged to grow more profitable produce. And soon, instead of just basic food stuff, they were producing coffee, sugar, hemp, cotton, and cacao, especially down in the tropical south. Up in the north, you started seeing

these large-scale ranching and timber operations. To give all of this new produce, new milk, markets, the bourbon administrators also did their best to actually start investing in roads and infrastructure. But more importantly, in 1778, they introduced the Commercio Libre, which we actually talked about in episode 5.2. This is what gave the principal ports of the Spanish Empire the right to trade not just with Spain, as had been the case for 300 years, but to trade directly with each other. Now, this wasn't free trade in the sense that the British or the Dutch or the French could get in on the action, but these ports could now at least trade with each other. And in the main, I think the Bourbon Economic Reforms worked. At least they did what they were supposed to do. The economy expanded,

the value of land increased, more goods and services were being produced. There was more profit, more silver. But there would be a price to pay. Now, on the political side, the thrust of the bourbon reforms was to increase the power of the central authorities over local elites. Hapsburg-era, New Spain had given a lot of autonomy to leading Crioyo families out on the periphery of New Spain and a measure of preserved respect for the land claims of indigenous villages. The bourbons, fueled by new theories of enlightened absolutism, wanted stricter hierarchies of central command that would reduce inefficiency and corruption and graft and allow for swifter and more rational decision-making. And then especially after the successful revolt of

the British colonies further up north, they also wanted to ensure that all power remained in the hands of the Spaniards. So one of the most controversial of the political reforms was to give all government positions only to peninsular appointees. Local Creoyo, no matter how rich or well-educated, were barred from office. On top of that, by the end of the 1700s, the original vice regal political structure was slowly replaced by a new system of intendants, peninsular agents of the crown operating in newly defined geographic zones, who basically held supreme authority on matters political, economic, and judicial. They certainly superseded all the local elites. And these new intendancies were actually what became the basis of most of the Mexican states

today. These intendants were principally tasked with encouraging and stimulating economic growth. And it is undeniable that during the Bourbon era, economic productivity in New Spain did increase and expand and widen, but it also created new cycles of resentment, unrest, and ultimately revolt that would wind up helping to trigger not the triumph of Spanish crown authority, but its complete abolition. Now for most of the Habsburg era, and most of the early Bourbon period, through the middle 1700s at least, rebellions and revolt in New Spain usually took one of two forms, either indigenous tribes and villages resisting political encroachment by the Spaniards into some new territory, or resisting economic encroachment of

the Hacienda's. So cycles of revolt followed this dynamic for hundreds of years. But by the end of the bourbon period, you started to see for the first time revolts that brought together all classes and casts. So creoyo merchants and landowners, mestizo workers, indigenous villagers and their wage workers, peasants and townsmen joining forces. In episode 5.4, I briefly touched on one of the major revolts in Guantanahuato, which was triggered in part by new taxes and then exacerbated by the very unpopular expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. That is what pushed these regional riots into a full-blown revolt. Now, that revolt in 1766 and 1767 was successfully quelled. But in 1780, another cross-class revolt erupted down in Puebla, southeast of Mexico City. Down there, Creoleo, Mestizo,

and indigenous Amerindian forces joined together in a huge revolt that specifically referenced the recent Tupac Amaru revolt down in Peru. The rebels were openly speaking of creating a new independent quote Indian nation that would replace the vice royalty of New Spain. The different classes and Cass had their problems with each other, but their shared hatred of intrusive peninsular authorities, especially during this late Bourbon era, was driving them into each other's arms. And you started seeing rebellious networks that connected the most elite Creoleo families down to the poorest indigenous as peasants. Although, as we will see, they were not always aiming at the same thing. In the inner circles of the Kriojo in Mexico City, they whispered sediciously of

independence to have what the United States had, self-government and commercial riches. Meanwhile, out on the periphery, poorer peasants started responding to a form of revolutionary Catholicism that was spreading to spiritually and physically confront a continued economic exploitation. Radical priests were now spreading a form of Catholicism that infused the religion with ideals of a qualitative injustice, that men were equal before God, that private property was a sin. And so their goal became to restore communal land rights and expel the intruders. What intruders? All the intruders. Meanwhile, out in the big world, Spain's place in the concert of great European powers was steadily eroding. After its peak is the first empire upon which the

sun never set in the mid-1500s, the Spanish crown had had all of its European possessions either given away or chopped off by the beginning of the Bourbon era. Now, they still have their vast claims in the Americas, but the rise of British and French colonialism started putting practical limits on those vast theoretical claims to controlling like everything in the Western Hemisphere. So, for example, in the 1720s, a little skirmish in what is today Nebraska, between Spanish soldiers and a combined force of French and Pawnee Native Americans, effectively drew a line for how far the Spanish would be able to reach north. Then in the midst of the Seven Years' War,

the British captured both Manila and Havana, which was an embarrassing reminder that where once the British had been merely pesky pirates, they were now the dominant sea power in the world. Now, after that Seven Years' War, though, they did benefit from France's catastrophic losses, and they got legal possession of what became the Louisiana Territory. and then after joining with the French to help the American colonists, they got control of Florida. Now, on the other side of the continent, the Spanish tried to keep running up the Pacific coast,

but they bumped into British and Russians who were making their own claims and explorations in the region, and the Nukkosan crisis, for example, almost led to a full-blown war between Spain and Britain in 1789. But we all know what happened in 1789, the French Revolution. Now, as we have amply documented here on the Revolution's podcast, the French Revolution came along and upended everything in the Atlantic world. And it certainly threw Spain into a crisis period that would see them defeated by the French in 1795 and then stripped of the Louisiana territory in a forced treaty with First Consul Bonaparte in 1800. Then they were, of course, broken completely when Emperor Napoleon forced the abdications of Bayonne in 1808. And as we know from our series on the revolutions down in South America, it was the abdications of Bayonne that really triggered the massive wave of independence movements on the far side of the Atlantic. And next week, we will pick up that thread in New Spain, where, after a couple years of political uncertainty, there was a growing expectation among the Creoleo that independence in the Americas would be the logical result of all this.

An expectation that was finally given voice by Father Hidalgo when he issued his famous cry of Dolores in September of 1810, triggering the War of Mexican Independence.