The traditional, stereotyped interpretation of economic relations between Spain and Spanish America during the colonial period may be summed up as follows: the principal motive for Spanish imperial expansion was the search for gold; the commercial system created in the sixteenth century for the regulation of trans-Atlantic trade succeeded on the whole in protecting treasure shipments, but its restrictive features encouraged Spanish Americans to turn to contrabandists for supplies of manufactures and outlets for their produce; an official preoccupation for over two centuries with shipping to Spain as much American bullion (initially gold, subsequently silver) as possible, caused inflation and...

The discovery (or rediscovery by Europeans) of America in 1492, although in one sense accidental, was also an inevitable feature of a general process of European expansion into the Atlantic, which had gathered pace in the first half of the fifteenth century and of which in 1492 only Spain was capable of taking full advantage in the American hemisphere.¹ Any attempt to distil the complex mosaic of Spanish religious, cultural and economic motives and impulses into a single causal factor explaining its willingness and ability to begin to colonise America in the late-fifteenth century is bound to be simplistic. It...

The social, biological and ecological consequences, for both Europe and America, of what is commonly called ‘the Columbian exchange’—that is, the transfer between the European and American continents of animals, seeds, plants and diseases (and, of course, subdivisions of the human species) not common to them before 1492—constitute a fascinating, complex and important field of study, of great significance for not only historians but also many other groups of disciplinary specialists, including geographers, epidemiologists, pharmacologists, and agronomists.¹ At the human level the unconscious introduction by Spanish settlers to first the Caribbean, and subsequently Central America, Mexico and Peru...

Although historians continue to debate and differ over the perhaps insoluble issue of when the medieval world ended and modern history began, virtually all are agreed that the expansion of European trade beyond the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic—first with Portuguese expansion down the coast of Africa throughout the fifteenth century, and, from 1492, with the initiation of Spanish expansion in the Caribbean, into the American hemisphere—was crucial in the transition from an essentially inward-looking Europe to a truly global economy, albeit one which European powers would continue to dominate until the twentieth century. The dramatic expansion after...

As we have seen in Chapter 4, in the discussion of trans-Atlantic trade in the Hapsburg period, and as we shall confirm in Chapters 8–9, when we examine the trading developments of the eighteenth century, historians of commercial relations between Spain and Spanish America now have a reasonably comprehensive macro-level understanding of the general trading patterns of the entire colonial period. Indeed, it might almost be argued that they have a better grasp of the issue than did the Spanish crown and its officials, even in the relatively efficient eighteenth century, for it is clear to any twentieth-century historian...

As we have seen in Chapter 4, the Spanish crown’s overriding insistence on the need to impose an effective control upon the extraction of silver from the mines of New Spain and Peru, coupled with its aspiration to ensure the safe and regular despatch of treasure to Spain, underpinned the development by the second half of the sixteenth century of a trans-Atlantic commercial structure whose three administrative centres were Lima, Mexico and Seville, and whose principal ports were Callao (linked to Spain via Panama-Portobelo), Veracruz and Seville-Cádiz. In some respects this restrictive system was less rigid than it might appear...

As we have seen in the discussion in Chapter 5 of the relationship between inter-colonial trade and theCarrera de las Indias, and in Chapter 6 of the economic significance (in terms of both the generation of contraband and increased local defence expenditure) of foreign commercial and territorial penetration of America in the seventeenth century, any attempt to isolate internal and regional economic activity in colonial Spanish America from either trans-Atlantic trade with Spain or illegal international commerce with other nations is difficult and in some respects artificial. Similarly, because of the complex social and economic inter-relationships which existed between...

The question of how to interpret Spanish aims and achievements with respect to America in the eighteenth century is one which continues to preoccupy historians. Was it, as the ministers of Charles III and the historians of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who accepted their interpretation insisted, a period of unhindered progress and prosperity, when the implementation of a rational reform programme awakened Spain from its slumber of the seventeenth century, and then enabled it to ‘rediscover’ America, and turn it into the material and spiritual force for the further regeneration of the metropolis? Or, as the more critical historiography...

The decision of Charles III to promulgate the famousReglamento para el comercio libreof 1778 on the symbolic date of 12 October, the anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, was designed to emphasise the importance which he and his ministers attached to this fundamental measure of commercial reform.¹ The document’s guiding principle, its preamble explained, was the king’s fundamental goal, which had determined all his policies since his accession to the throne in 1759, of securing ‘the happiness of my beloved Vassals of these Kingdoms and those of the Indies’ and his conviction that ‘only a free and...

The basic aim of this chapter is to provide an evaluation of the imperial response to the introduction of ‘free trade’ in 1778 by means of a detailed, quantitative examination of American exports to Spain in the period up to 1796, within the context of a qualitative discussion of the development of the American economy prior to the introduction of neutral trade in 1797. It considers, first, the volume of American trade with Spain in the period 1778–96, as measured by the registered values of American cargoes landed in Spanish ports; second, the distribution of imports from America between...

As the detailed discussion in Chapter 10 has indicated, the last quarter of the eighteenth century was an era of unprecedented prosperity and economic growth for Spain and Spanish America, a period in which for the first time the metropolis succeeded in unleashing the agricultural potential of its American possessions, whilst also promoting the continued expansion of mining production. The relationship between this economic growth and the liberalisation of trade is abundantly clear. It must be recognised, however, that the era of genuine ‘free trade’ in the Hispanic world as envisaged by the economic theorists of Bourbon Spain was short-lived....

It seems appropriate that this study should conclude with some general reflections about the importance of economic causation in creating revolutionary situations in Spanish America by the early nineteenth century by discussing briefly the principal conspiracies and insurrections of the late colonial period prior to 1810, with a view to determining, first, the extent to which they were ‘revolutionary’ and, second, and more specifically, the relative importance of economic grievances in their formulation and motivation.

The point has already been made in Chapter 11 that even in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when Spain had lost effective economic...

One of the more significant trends in international historical scholarship as a whole since the 1950s has been the integration of political history with social and economic history, a process which has involved the movement of specialists from their isolated intellectual fortresses towards at least an awareness of the indivisibility of man’s past into convenient academic packages. Although most European universities—and to a lesser extent those in the Americas—continue to provide some shelter for dwindling groups of researchers concerned almost exclusively with traditional political history (the activities of kings, queens and courtiers, dynastic marriages, high-level diplomacy, and so...