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6. The Second Reglamento del Comercio Libre (1778)
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Greater colonial consumption of goods cheapened by competition, leading to new mine openings , consequently increased Xows of money to Spain [and led to] growth, the end of smuggling , [and] the expansion of our navigation. “Copia del pliego entregado al . . . Marqués de Sonora en . . . 1778” Mercantile organization[s] and the monied people who did business with them prophesized . . . the loss of the American colonies, the end of manufactories, peninsular agriculture, and the Treasury—if the system were changed. José María Quirós, “Memoria de instituto . . . 1819” The Atlantic economy to which the young Ulloa was Wrst exposed in the 1730s had changed dramatically by the 1770s when the mature Ulloa brought his extraordinarily valuable convoy safely into the Bay of Cadiz. Both shores of the Atlantic were now in a phase of rapid expansion. Europe’s exports of manufactures were matched by a corresponding rise in raw materials and precious metals exports from Spain’s New World colonies, expanding the base of unequal exchange between Europe and its colonial periphery, which in the nineteenth century would emerge as the international division of labor. In the eighteenth century, this “colonial pact” was hardly questioned, because it seemed naturally and mutually beneWcial. As a result, the requirements of the English and French colonial economies in the Caribbean (the “West Indies”) in the 1760s induced London to formulate its Freeport system to attract merchants from nearby Spanish possessions, and Paris to open its colonies to trade with all French ports, as well as with England’s North American colonies.⁄ In the Spanish sector of the Atlantic system in the last third of the century , the potential for overall growth through diversiWcation by adding the agricultural and ranching export economies of Cuba, Venezuela, and the 6.The Second Reglamento del Comercio Libre (1778) • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Rio de la Plata to the mining complexes of New Spain and Peru was probably greater than in the Spanish metropole itself—ultimately justifying Madrid’s decision to choose the colonial option. In the silver-mining centers of New Spain and Upper Peru, output was rising and population recovery was evident, as was increased agricultural production for internal consumption and intercolonial trade (encouraged by Madrid after the early 1770s). To Spanish analysts, growth in Cuba’s trade and Catalonia’s exports to that colony after about 1765 (and even earlier) pointed to what an extensive reform in the Spanish transatlantic trading system might generate. Accompanying colonial economic growth came the diVusion of monetization —the process of incorporating Indian and mestizo consumers and producers into the European market economy by drawing upon their liking for Spanish wine and brandy, European linens, woolens, silks, cottons, laces, and hardware—including, it was hoped, Spanish textiles, when available. Symptomatic of the appearance of these new colonial consumers was the move to eliminate the reparto de mercancías, a form of forced commercialization of colonial peoples that had long been an aspect of the economies of New Spain and Peru. In eVect, by the 1770s, the Spanish transatlantic economy was outgrowing the constraints of the convoy system, which had been refurbished a little in 1720 (with the addition of the Jalapa fair), then suspended in 1739, and revived only for New Spain in 1757. When Madrid introduced new taxes— toneladas and palmeo—on colonial trade in 1720 and systematized the accumulation of duties (“Santelmo, extrangería, visitas, reconocimiento de carenas , habilitaciones, licencias para navegar”) to some extent, the objective was Wscal, not developmental. Fifty years later, Wscal needs remained paramount, but the intention of Madrid policy-makers in the 1770s was to broaden the tax base by a developmentalist strategy, Wrst applied to the metropole and then, once Esquilache’s renovación had been stalled, redirected primarily to the colonial world. Colonial trade became the engine of peninsular growth for many governmental and private sector analysts.¤ The Spanish state was reacting to a variety of pressures to adjust its secular patterns of trade between Peninsula and colonies. Agricultural and commercial interests developing in peripheral Spain were now impatient to break into the colonial trading enclave so long the monopoly of Andalusian interests , Wrst at Sevilla and then, in the eighteenth century, at Cadiz. They were irked too by the few surviving privileged trading companies, notably the Havana and Guipuzcoan companies. In Galicia, Asturias, the montañas of Burgos, the Basque provinces, and Catalonia—provinces characterized by marked population growth, proliferating medium and small landholdings, 144 • The Colonial Option [3.236.111.234] Project MUSE (2024...