Madrid’s tightened control and immigration fueled creole resentment

Evidence

It is undoubtedly true that the policies pursued by the capable ‘enlightened despot’ Carlos III (r. 1759–1788) increasingly frustrated, angered, and alarmed the upper creole classes. In what has sometimes sardonically been called the second conquest of the Americas, Madrid imposed new taxes, made their collection more efficient, enforced metropolitan commercial monopolies, restricted intra-hemispheric trade to its own advantage, centralized administrative hierarchies, and promoted a heavy immigration of peninsulares. Mexico, for example, in the early eighteenth century provided the Crown with an annual revenue of about 3,000,000 pesos. By the century’s end, however, the sum had almost quintupled to 14,000,000, of which only 4,000,000 were used to defray the costs of local administration. Parallel to this, the level of peninsular migration by the decade 1780–1790 was five times as high as it had been between 1710–1730. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 219

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Fear of lower-class uprisings drove creole bids for independence — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 216; The creole nationalism that opposed Spain nonetheless embraced racism toward non-whites — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 276

Related

• Fear of lower-class uprisings drove creole bids for independence (similarity 0.84)
• The creole nationalism that opposed Spain nonetheless embraced racism toward non-whites (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• The creole nationalism that opposed Spain nonetheless embraced racism toward non-whites #expands (0.78) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 276