Prisoners of War in Enlightenment Spain: Some Considerations on their Treatment

Abstract

The treatment of prisoners of war was yet another aspect of the European attempt to regulate war since the Middle Ages. From the sixteenth century on, the emergence of large, standing armies and the attempt by early modern states to monopolize violence further accelerated this regulatory process. But it was not until the eighteenth century that the defence of human rights became progressively more intense and secularized, thanks to French philosophers and the publication of seminal works such as Institutions politiques (1762) by Jakob von Bielfeld, and Dei Delitti e delle pene (1764) by Cesare Beccaria, among others. The following pages are thus intended to take this eventful eighteenth century as a chronological reference in order to pose a question: To what extent did the writings of European jurists and philosophers, together with Spanish translations and own productions, influence a new conception of the prisoner of war and their material conditions in Spain? To this end, the Introduction is aimed to contextualize the issue of prisoners of war, about which almost everything, despite the evolution of war studies in recent years, remains to be explored. In the first part, Humanity and barbarism: the European way of war, a correlation between the vision of war in Western Europe and the treatment of prisoners will be established; in the second part, The practice of reason, the concrete application of these European ideas by Bourbon officers in Spain will be examined. In order to do so, the two Anglo-Spanish conflicts of 1762 and 1779-1783, in relation to which there is still plenty of unpublished documentation about prisoners of war held in the General Archive of Simancas (AGS), have been selected. Preliminary conclusions suggest that Spanish officers shared the same theoretical vision on the treatment of prisoners of war as their European colleagues. However, certain particularities may be observed: In Spain, for instance, the religious identity of the prisoners of war conditioned their treatment. British ‘Catholic prisoners’ were considered an opportunity for the national army and industry, both of them in permanent need of human resources at the time.