The Spanish Resurgence, 1713–1748

Abstract

Chris Storrs's book is a welcome counterpoint to the dominant thrust of the scholarship on eighteenth-century Spain and its empire, which tends to focus on the Atlantic and to neglect Spain's long-standing possessions and strategic interests in the Mediterranean. In this rich and erudite political, diplomatic, and military history, Storrs examines the first half of the eighteenth century, which corresponds to the reign of Philip V. The narrative begins with the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession, which resulted in the replacement of the Hapsburg by the Bourbon dynasty, and concludes with the War of the Austrian Succession. In particular, Storrs wishes to recover Spain as an expanding power on the offensive and not the defensive, above all in North Africa and Italy.This effort is by no means an innocent recasting of Spain's place in Europe but rather a polemical one. Building on his earlier study The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy, 1665–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2006), Storrs seeks to counter the still prevailing view that Spain was a power in terminal decline, experiencing a brief revival during the reign of Charles III (1759–1788) before the final collapse of its global empire in the early nineteenth century. In Storrs's account, military defeats in northern and central Europe in the previous centuries came to be accepted, and Spain reimagined its sphere of influence and pursued a consciously Mediterranean-oriented policy in these years.The interest in North Africa owed something undoubtedly, as Storrs explains, to a vestigial religious, even crusading, mentality, but it was also driven by strategic considerations, as a potential source of grain and timber. Success in North Africa was equivocal, with the gains outweighed by the loss of troops and treasure, but it formed part of a comprehensive western Mediterranean strategy that found greater, lasting gains in Italy, where Naples and Sicily came under Bourbon control and where Milan, the Duchy of Savoy, and Piedmont were occupied in the mid-1740s. In 1746, 56,000 troops under Spanish command were on Italian soil. Moreover, while historians tend to treat Anglo-Spanish rivalry in the Americas and Caribbean—disputes over the asiento, contraband, piracy, the Darien colony, and Oliver Cromwell's Western Design, among others—the Mediterranean itself was the site of equally belligerent disputes, over Minorca and Gibraltar.There is, then, some validity to Storrs's claim that “until the Spanish resurgence in the western Mediterranean is restored to its true place in the history of international affairs in Europe, relations between the European powers in that generation will not be properly understood” (p. 12). His book is a valiant and largely successful effort to redress the woeful imbalance of existing Atlantic-focused historiography. It might be said that focusing on the latter eighteenth century would further bolster Storrs's contention for the importance of the Mediterranean. After all, Charles III ruled at Naples for a quarter century before his accession to the Spanish throne, and his preoccupation with the geopolitics of Italy was at least as sustained as his commitment to the Americas.Though Storrs's case for the importance of the Mediterranean is persuasive, his decision to set America aside, ostensibly because it has been the object of study for most other historians of the period, is less so. If not quite a case of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, it comes dangerously close to embodying this quip. Given that fully a quarter of the Spanish state's revenues derived from the Americas, to say nothing of profits gained by merchants through reexports of Spanish American products to northern Europe, Storrs's decision to ignore the Atlantic sphere requires more justification than he offers in the book. The book would have been improved by integrating the Atlantic and the Mediterranean into a single narrative, thus offering a more capacious, even global interpretation of the Spanish state's strategies than one finds in Storrs's book or, indeed, in Atlantic-centered histories.This criticism aside, The Spanish Resurgence should be of interest to historians of colonial Spanish America, as it provides a very fine portrait of the Spanish state during the first stirrings of the vaunted Bourbon reforms. It is an entreaty to historians of Spanish America who aim to contextualize Spanish governance and aspirations in a truly transatlantic framework. This richly textured and well-researched account deserves attention from Latin Americanists, even though Storrs largely ignores Latin America.