The Great Raid: Spain's 1749 plan to profit from genocide

The Great Raid of 1749: A genocide designed for profit

In 1749, the Spanish Crown launched an operation that was not limited to arresting and deporting the Romani population of the kingdom. It was also intended to make money from them. The plan, attributed to the marqués de la Ensenada (a high-ranking Spanish official) and backed by Fernando VI, envisioned that the forced labor of the detainees would offset the cost of the operation itself. The accounting of a genocide, in the literal sense.

What was the Great Raid of 1749?

The Great Raid was the operation that, at midnight on July 30, 1749, and by surprise, cordoned off the entrances to the Romani quarters in the kingdom's main cities. In the first few days, the Crown arrested and deported at least 12,000 people. The maneuver had been outlined a year earlier, in 1748, when Ensenada was already serving as prime minister.

Trinc the arrests, families were separated by age. Women, girls, and children up to eight years old ended up in royal textile factories, known as the Reales Fábricas. Men and boys older than eight were deported to the royal shipyards. Both groups were subjected to the same regime: forced labor, abuse, and malnutrition, exacerbated by the outbreak of diseases.

The operation remained active for five years. The estimated death toll amounts to approximately 20,000 Romani people.

Why the plan was designed to be self-financing

This is the detail that breaks the mold. Incarceration did not seek only to punish or make people disappear: it had to produce. The goal of the labor regime was to cause death after generating economic yield for the royal treasury to offset the cost of the operation itself. In other words: the operation's budget was covered by the labor of those who were destined to die in it.

The fall of Ensenada in 1754

In 1754, at midnight, a military squad arrested and imprisoned Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea, the marqués de la Ensenada, who had been the kingdom's prime minister since 1748, in Madrid. Historical accounts place this event 269 years ago. With his arrest, the architect of the 1749 plan disappeared.

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From suspicion of a trap to historical substance

The reception of the matter unfolded in two stages. The first was one of distrust: the idea spread that the approach itself functioned as a trap intended to provoke denunciations. The second delved into the substance. There, openly critical readings of the plan coexisted with some support for the measure alongside lamentations that it was left unfinished, and doubts regarding the scale of the figures.

Skepticism found its most concrete argument in economic logic. If the inmates were meant to offset the cost of the operation, why starve them just as they had learned to work? It is a reasonable question, though it does not dismantle the documented design of the operation: self-financing does not require the business to be efficient, only that someone attempts it.

A comparative line also emerged. It was noted that similar policies were applied in other European countries targeting Romani or Jewish populations, citing the case of the sterilization of Romani women in Sweden or Finland at the beginning of the previous century.

Common reader questions

The two most frequent questions have short answers. The first, how many people were arrested in total, clashes with a figure that is only provided as a minimum. The second, why Ensenada fell five years later, remains without a definitive explanation.