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8. A Colonial Response to Comercio Libre: New Spain
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Mexico Xourished as never before when Cadiz’s controls . . . loosened somewhat: in the decade from 1778 to 1788, customs revenues doubled and the empire Xourished. El Sol (Mexico City), 1823 This trade has been very inappropriately called free; it has never been, [since] shipowners must petition the court for licenses . . . and the ministry sets their number. What data or information are available? This explains the excessively large shipments. Manuscript in the Biblioteca del Real Palacio, Madrid On reviewing data for those sectors of the economy of New Spain closely watched by bureaucrats and businessmen in the metropole seeking to gauge the impact of the comercio libre of 1778, there were grounds for their guarded optimism by 1787. Colony watchers in the metropole paid attention to at least two statistical series, the output of the Mexico City mint, which theoretically coined all bullion produced in the colony, and transfers of silver from Veracruz to Spain, directly or via Cuba. The reasons were obvious: these data both helped Madrid better manage current and future outlays on bureaucracy, defense, and infrastructure and aided businessmen in settling accounts with creditors at Cadiz and in western Europe. Under the Xeet system, news of the safe arrival of inbound convoys from Veracruz invariably electriWed the public and private sectors. Comparing the two most recent Wve-year periods of peace in the late 1780s, observers found that the coining of silver had increased by over 12 percent between 1773–77 and 1783–87, accelerating a trend that had begun in the second quarter of the eighteenth century (although it slackened brieXy in the 1760s).⁄ And if they turned to data on precious metals shipped from Veracruz to Spain and its Caribbean posses8 . A Colonial Response to Comercio Libre: New Spain • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • sions in the same Wve-year periods, they discovered an extraordinary surge of 98 percent.¤ The statute of 1778—omitting the special circumstances of the war years, 1779–82—seemed only to have accelerated the upward trend in the economy of Spain’s principal American colony. Other economic indicators were also followed, notably data on metropolitan exports to colonial ports. It was state policy to use 1778 as the base year (although 1776 has recently been suggested as more representative). In any case, the average annual value of exports to the colonies in 1783–87, in constant oYcial prices, topped the benchmark year (1778) by a factor of more than Wve.‹ To be sure, other sources indicate a more conservative but still impressive rise of 50 percent. Spain’s Treasury had done well out of comercio libre, the French diplomat Jean-François Bourgoing noted, with metropolitan customs receipts rising from 6.8 million reales in 1778 to over 55 million a decade later.› Concomitantly, government receipts in New Spain in 1778–90 rose to almost double those in 1765–77.fi Given such comforting indicators of economic expansion in New Spain in the 1780s, we may ask, were transatlantic silver transfers and rising state revenues responses to recent modiWcations in colonial trade policy or reXections of longer-term trends? A Pillar of the Spanish Monarchy Over the eighteenth century, roughly six of New Spain’s mining districts put that colony far ahead of Peru as the mining core of the Spanish empire in America. New Spain’s principal mining areas were concentrated north of Mexico City in a zone stretching from Guanajuato to Zacatecas, and from Guadalajara eastward to San Luís Potosí. Three districts—Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and Catorce—produced about 50 percent of total eighteenthcentury output. Overall, silver production in New Spain rose at an annual rate of 1.4 percent; but Richard Garner has computed that in the period 1772–83, minting rose at almost double that rate (2.65 percent) and silver exports at the phenomenal annual rate of 9.6 percent. Comercio libre coincided with extraordinary growth in silver production and coinage; in concrete terms, between the ouster of Esquilache in 1766 and 1783, annual coinage by the Mexico City mint soared from 11.2 million pesos to 23.1.fl To note that New Spain’s mining and trade expansion coincided underscores the long-term connections among silver, the colony’s overall economy , its Spanish metropole, and the Atlantic system. Silver mining was the measure of New Spain’s signiWcance to its metropole; New Spain had no other major export to link it to the Atlantic or, for that matter, the PaciWc 224 • The Colonial Option [100.25.40.11] Project...