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In September 1708, the royal officials of Caracas submitted to the Spanish crown a zealous handwritten account of their nine-day festivities commemorating the birth of Don Luis, the prince of Asturias. Held a year earlier, the celebrations honouring the new-born heir to the throne included public acclamations of Philip V as true king of Spain, followed by illuminations, military and religious processions, and a banquet hosted by French slave traders. Despite the hardships endured throughout the Caribbean during the War of the Spanish Succession, the spectacles in Venezuela also facilitated the collection of ten thousand pesos in silver for the urgencies of the Bourbons’ European and North African campaigns. More importantly for local elites, however, the account served as an opportunity to discredit ‘idle voices’ circulating from Havana that the caraqueños had recently proclaimed Archduke Charles as their sovereign with the aide of Dutch forces in Curaçao—allies of the Habsburgs. Such an incident had notoriously occurred in Venezuela in 1702 and had required immediate counteraction. Six years later, the royal officials needed the account of their celebrations for the prince of Asturias to reassure Philip V of his ‘reacclamation’ by the populace as well as their full commitment to the Bourbon dynasty’s objectives in the war: victory over the enemy Dutch and English, the defence of a united Spanish monarchy, and the preservation of the Catholic faith.1 Spectacle accounts such as these have provided scholars with rich source material for understanding the experiences of the War of the Spanish Succession as a global conflict—above all, the uncertainty and disorder the war provoked in the Iberian Atlantic World. The crown’s particular demands for wartime spectacles and their execution by viceregal officials were supposed to emphasize the coherence of a single monarchy working together in a time of crisis to preserve Bourbon rule over the Spanish empire. Nonetheless, while Spanish colonial accounts do convey a sense of shared imperial struggle, they

11 Performance and Propaganda in Spanish America during the War of the Spanish Succession