Spain 1714 appeared to retain its American empire through the forbearance of the rest of Europe. At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession many outside observers thought that the Indies, or part of them, could easily be detached from Spain. Whether this opinion was right or wrong, however, the attempt was not made. Spain was supported politically by France, and the enemies of Spain wanted an extension of their trade rather than an extension of their colonial possessions. Spanish America remained Spanish; but the reputation of Spain, political, military and economic, had sunk very low, and throughout the first half of the eighteenth century a stream of books and pamphlets appeared, both in Spain and abroad, condemning Spanish policy and the feebleness and incompetence of Spanish administration in the Indies.

Most foreign writers on the subject were divided between their envy of the wealth, actual or potential, of the American kingdoms, and their contempt for Spanish mismanagement. This distinction appears very clearly, for example, in the Spanish Empire in America, by ‘an English Merchant’, [John Campbell], published in London in 1747. The author writes ‘The weakness of the Spaniards is, properly speaking, the weakness of their Government. There wants not people, there wants not a capacity of defence, if the Governors and other Royal Officers were not so wanting in their duty, and did not thereby set so ill an example as corrupts and effeminates all who are subject to them.’ The ‘English merchant’ proceeds to give a list of foreign attacks on Spanish colonial possessions, of which some succeeded, but more were beaten off by a spirited local defence; and he concludes: ‘So it seems to be a thing out of dispute, that it is not so much the weakness of the Spaniards, as the weakness of their Councils, which have occasioned their losses in these parts.’