The crisis of 1794–1797 brought to the surface creole discontent with the Spanish regime and a more generalized anger at Spaniards; however, in placid times these feelings tended to recede as ties of family, friendship, and business or professional relations between creoles and Spaniards once more came to the fore. To what degree did there exist as of 1800–1808 a basis for a movement for independence, beyond temporary crisis-induced mutual dis- trust between Spanish officials and Spanish immigrants, on the one hand, and creole elites, on the other? Did there also exist a positive basis for na- tionalism, in the sense of some shared sense of identity with New Granada as a place and a people? Events of 1810, and afterward would make clear that local and provincial identities remained strong; nonetheless, among at
least some educated creoles there does appear to have emerged a nascent sense of a New Granadan identity before the end of the colonial era.
Benedict Anderson’s much-cited Imagined Communities argues that late colonial newspapers, published in New Granada from 1791 to 1810, helped to develop a sense of shared community among creole elites in the various regions of New Granada. Newspapers, however, were not the only basis of interconnection among the various regions. University studies in Santafé’s two colegios brought together students from various provinces and estab- lished relationships that were later maintained through private correspon- dence. As a medium of communication the newspapers had a limitation in that, as long as viceregal authority remained intact, they refrained from po- litical commentary that might be regarded as questioning the existing order. Such political conversation does appear to have occurred, principally in ter-
tulias, where European newspapers, in which political commentary was less
restricted, were read and discussed. Probably to some extent, although the evidence is not ample, the ideas exchanged in tertulias reached other locali- ties through private correspondence, including the mailing of foreign news- papers and books. However, New Granada’s late colonial newspapers did serve an important function in serving as media for expression of a grow- ing interest among the creole elite in their country as a land and as a land of economic potential.
One aspect of that sense of identification with the land was a glimmer- ing of interest in indigenous culture, manifested in various articles in the Pa-
pel Periódico in 1793. Much more important in providing content for a nascent
patriotism, however, was the role of the Botanical Expedition, which both recruited educated creoles from various provinces in a common project and stimulated their interest in the geography of New Granada, its resources and economic potential. This interest was already evident in articles in the Papel
Periódico, but it found its maximum expression in Francisco José de Caldas’s Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada (1808–1810), which featured geo-
graphical descriptions of various provinces, as well as articles on exploitable agricultural crops and forest products. Caldas himself emphasized New Granada’s commercial as well as agricultural potential, predicting that, with coasts on both the Atlantic and the Pacific, it was destined to make the coun- try an emporium of trade between Asia and Europe.
In response to the “free trade” policy of the 1770s and 1780s, as well as the initiatives of the Botanical Expedition, New Granada’s interior became more attuned to exporting, first shipping relatively small quantities of cin- chona bark beginning in the 1780s and then cotton and indigo from Socorro and the end of the 1790s and the first years of the nineteenth century. These exports from the interior reinforced an already existing trade in cattle hides and dyewood from the Caribbean coast and cacao from the lower Magdalena valley.
This period of modest growth in agricultural exports was accompanied by the emergence of a conscious economic liberalism. Pedro Fermín de Var-
gas, formerly the creole corregidor of Zipaquirá, around 1790 wrote essays promoting New Granadan economic development, in which he criticized colonial taxes and monopolies that constrained exports. Vargas’s friend, An- tonio Nariño, in 1797 also counseled Viceroy Pedro de Mendinueta that such taxes were inadvisable. Two of the late eighteenth-century viceroys were rel- atively liberal in economic policy—Ezpeleta (1789–1796) and his successor, Mendinueta (1797–1803). Both advised against government monopolies on exportable crops and supported tax remissions for them. Liberal economic tendencies, which in the 1790s were suggested by colonial self-interest, were reinforced during the first decade of the nineteenth century by the circula- tion of the ideas of Adam Smith among at least some in the elite. The most notable of those influenced by Smith in this decade was José Ignacio de Pombo, the leading intellectual force in the merchants’ guild of Cartagena. But Smith’s ideas were also penetrating into the provinces in New Granada’s interior.
Developing interest in exporting tropical products and the oxygen of lib- eral economic ideas ultimately proved an explosive mixture, particularly when New Granada’s hopes for commercial development were frustrated by chronic war between Great Britain and Spain (1796–1802, 1805–1807). Spain’s inability to protect Spanish American commerce was made particu- larly evident during the war with England in 1805–1807. The brief period of peace between Spain and Great Britain in 1802–1804 had permitted exports of cotton, cacao, cattle hides, and dyewood to triple over previous years. Merchants in the interior, as well as on the coast, apparently took part in this commercial expansion. Because of the hopes raised by this experience, the renewal of war in 1805 had a particularly devastating impact on New Granadan exporters. The consequences of the interruption of trade by the war of 1805–1807 were dramatized in a letter written by José Acevedo y Gómez, a Santafé merchant and city councillor, on July 19, 1810, the day be- fore he led the people of the capital in a decisive break with the Spanish regime. Acevedo recalled that during the war he had lost 120,000 pesos, the fruit of twenty years of work. The government, he said, had made him lose this money because he could not get his shipments to Spain and the viceroy would not permit trade with neutrals in the Caribbean. Acevedo lost his shipments of cinchona bark, his cacao spoiled, and the cotton, which the Spanish government required him to send to Cádiz, was captured by “an enemy powerful at sea.” Thus, Acevedo said, “this barbarous Government has let my family perish.” He concluded that he would consider his re- maining funds in Spain well lost if thereby “my country [could] cut the chain with which it finds itself bound to the Peninsula,” which by 1810 he con- sidered a “perennial fountain of its tyrants.”
This letter, written in the agitated days of July 1810, reflects the heated emotions of that time. But all was not frustration for creoles in the decades before 1810. In a number of respects it was a time of relative economic pros- perity. Gold mining was expanding during the last decades of the eighteenth
century. Economic growth in Antioquia, in particular, had a positive effect on the Guanentá region of the eastern highlands, which supplied Antioquia with cotton textiles. Population grew notably in the Guanentá, and tithe col- lections there more than tripled between 1780 and 1810. Somewhat more gradual, locally varied, economic expansion occurred in the other relatively settled and populated parts of New Granada’s eastern zone.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century the relative prosperity fu- eled by the growth of the domestic economy and the modest expansion of export activity had become noticeable, at least in some parts of the viceroy- alty. Viceroy Pedro de Mendinueta, on concluding his term in 1803, wrote that the somber picture of New Granada painted by Archbishop-Viceroy Ca- ballero y Góngora in 1789 was no longer true. Caballero y Góngora had de- scribed a country that was “absolutely depopulated, without agriculture or industry, without commerce or communications . . . and abounding in im- poverished people, idlers, and criminals.” Less than fifteen years later, Men- dinueta perceived a markedly different country. Mendinueta’s New Granada had many flourishing towns—most notably the Magdalena River ports of Mompox and Honda; Medellín, the commercial center for Antioquia’s flour- ishing gold mines; the weaving towns of San Gil and Socorro in the Gua- nentá; and San José and Rosario de Cúcuta, where cacao was grown for export as well as internal consumption. New Granada, Mendinueta reported, had not suffered any scarcities of basic foods for a long time. And because of its prosperity, revenues had increased.
Despite the frustrations brought by wartime interruptions of trade, cre- ole elites in the decade before 1810 do not appear to have been markedly discontented with Spanish rule. A sense of the temper of the more politically alert of New Granada’s creole elites in the decade preceding the outbreak of independence may be glimpsed in the letters of Miguel Tadeo Gómez of el Socorro, a cousin of the Santafé merchant, José Acevedo y Gómez. Miguel Tadeo Gómez in 1810 emerged as one of the most fiery leaders of the inde- pendence movement in the province of el Socorro, but the tone and content of his correspondence between 1801 and 1808 was far from revolutionary. Born in San Gil in 1770, the descendant of early colonizers of the Guanentá, Gómez had studied at the Colegio del Rosario in Santafé before moving on to appointments in revenue offices first in Popayán and then in el Socorro. In addition to his duties as a revenue administrator, Gómez pursued com- mercial speculations, including both the sale of cloth woven in el Socorro to markets within New Granada and the export of dyewoods and cinchona bark. Acutely aware of his isolation in provincial Socorro, he nonetheless participated in colonial intellectual life of the time. In 1803 he accompanied José Celestino Mútis on one of his botanical surveys, taking particular in- terest in the discovery of an alleged hybrid of a goat and a deer. (Could such a hybrid procreate, or was it like a mule?) From his friend José Joaquín Camacho, the creole corregidor of Pamplona, Gómez borrowed the works of such eighteenth-century French Enlightenment figures as Condorcet and
Condillac, as well as Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’s report on agrarian re- form, about which Gómez was so enthusiastic that he copied the whole thing. He evidently was also familiar with the ideas of Adam Smith, as in 1807 he spoke of having proposed to the viceregal government a reform plan based in part upon the doctrines of Jovellanos and Smith. Gómez’s brush with En- lightenment thought, however, left his religious faith unimpaired. Fearful of smallpox and other illnesses and having lost his sons to disease, he sought to ward off danger through the fulfillment of religious vows at the shrine of Chiquinquirá.
By 1807, however, some notes of frustration shadow begin to shadow Gómez’s aspirations. He now felt that “the royal officials [were] his oppo- nents,” preferring to “fill offices with their friends.” He also warned his friend José Joaquín Camacho (recently removed from his position as cor- regidor in Pamplona) that if, as he expected, the intendancy system were implanted in New Granada, creoles’ opportunities for government positions would become still more limited. As a private entrepreneur engaged in small- scale exporting of tropical products, Gómez by 1807 was anticipating the possibility of a regime of completely free trade—he asked Camacho to re- port to him on the commercial possibilities of Pamplona province, in par- ticular the growth that would occur if there were complete freedom to send New Granadan products from any port in exchange for foreign goods. Un- fortunately, like his cousin in Santafé, José Acevedo y Gómez, by July 1808 Miguel Tadeo Gómez had lost the fruits of ten years of effort in his export ventures.
In the first decade of the nineteenth century, hunger for unrestricted for- eign trade and the influences of economic liberalism were becoming more evident, as was creole irritation at the preferment in office of less qualified Spaniards. But dramatic change in the system had to await events in Spain. In 1808 Napoleon seized the Spanish king and much of Spain, thereby ulti- mately bringing into question the source of authority of the Spaniards who governed the colonies. With the crisis of the empire, colonial administrators once again became tense, and the acute distrust between Spaniards and cre- oles that had been evident in 1781 and 1794–1797 again emerged.