The siege of Pensacola in the spring of 1781 was Francisco de Miranda's baptism of fire as a participant in Atlantic revolutions. The victory of the Spanish army, in which he served as an officer, ended British control of West Florida and reversed one of the losses that Spain had sustained in the Seven Years' War. This siege was more than yet another Anglo-Spanish military encounter. It was also a chapter in the American Revolution, as historians have only recently begun to stress. This collection of predominantly interesting essays explores Spain's role in that revolution.While some of the chapters are too short (not counting notes, two are of nine pages, one of eight pages) to make more than a tangential contribution, the ensemble of remaining essays offers a mosaic that adds several new insights. The editors, Gabriel Paquette and Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia, start off the collection with a very useful historical and historiographical introduction, in which they stress that the Revolutionary War was part of a global war that pitted Britain against France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic. Nor were Spanish hostilities confined to the Americas. The Mediterranean was another important theater, in which Spain employed one-third of its peninsular army in an ill-fated campaign to dislodge the British from Gibraltar.Spain entered the war not only to recover Gibraltar but also to retake Minorca, invade Great Britain, and remove the British from Florida. Besides, Minister José de Gálvez feared that the American Revolution would induce Britain to increase its military presence in the Americas, as María Bárbara Zepeda Cortés tells us in her chapter. And, as Emily Berquist Soule shows in her surprising contribution, even the Atlantic slave trade shaped Spain's resolve to take up arms against Britain. Desirous to shed its dependence on British supplies of enslaved Africans, Spain entered the slave trade by way of two small islands in the Bight of Biafra (recently ceded by Portugal), close to where British slavers bought many Africans each year. Consequently, Africa became yet another theater in the war as British traders responded to Spain's entry into the war by targeting Spanish ships that sailed to the Bight of Biafra.Initially, Spain maintained its neutrality during the Revolutionary War, while at the same time supporting the rebels with cash and supplies. Even when France allied with the United States in 1778, the Spanish government chose to remain on the sidelines. Gálvez opposed Spain's involvement in the war not only because of the insurgents' weak military position, but also because, Larrie D. Ferreiro notes in his chapter, a Spanish treasure fleet was still at sea carrying the equivalent of $50 billion in today's money. Once the silver had safely arrived, Spain signed the Treaty of Defense and Offensive Alliance against England with France and thus entered the war against Britain.Spanish forces in North America immediately sprang into action, attacking British settlements along the Mississippi River and capturing territory that the crown regarded as crucial for the protection of New Spain. Paquette and Quintero Saravia contend that Spanish operations dispersed British forces, relieved British pressure on Georgia and South Carolina, and prevented the British armies fighting in the North and South from linking up. Another notable campaign was the invasion of the Bahamas in 1782 by a joint Spanish-US force, the subject of Ross Michael Nedervelt's chapter. The campaign targeted the Loyalist privateers who had chosen the archipelago as their base of operations for attacking US ships. Spain expected no immediate rewards but hoped that the removal of the privateers would help expel Britain from Florida altogether. Although the invasion was successful, Loyalists from South Carolina would reconquer the Bahamas within a year.By then, the costly war was over. How costly it was for Spain is discussed by Paquette and Quintero Saravia, who arrive at the estimate of 431 million reales de vellón, “a significant sum,” they add, “since it is equivalent to the total annual revenue of the Spanish Royal Treasury during this period” (p. 13). A more accurate way, perhaps, of conveying the Spanish war costs would be to say—based on a calculation using the editors' own table 1.1—that in the years 1780–83 surplus defense spending (compared to peace years) amounted on average to a quarter of the treasury's annual revenue. These expenditures helped Spain move on from its embarrassing performance in the Seven Years' War. The 1780s seemed to herald a new era. They constituted, as Paquette and Quintero Saravia put it, the zenith of Spain's empire, “a revival and efflorescence often obscured by its vertiginous fall, sparked by war in Europe, in the early nineteenth century” (p. 30).
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Jan 17, 2024
Ajinkya Gaikwad + 1
Open Access
