Edge of Crisis: War and Trade in the Spanish Atlantic, 1789–1808

6. Mining and Its Fissures

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 6. Mining and Its Fissures The Zacatecas–Mexico City axis symbolized in good measure the spinal column of New Spain. Laura Pérez Rosales The operating costs [of the “Valenciana” mine] have risen at an astonishing rate. Alexander von Humboldt The men and women [of Guanajuato] who were exiled, imprisoned, mutilated, or hanged and quartered at the order of José de Gálvez. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez The war for independence [was] situated in the Bajío . . . precisely in those very regions aVected by forced recruitment for the mines. Brígida von Mentz New Spain’s economy in 1800—its population close to that of England and Wales, its wealth measurable in high per capita silver output and consequently its demand for imports and remittances of silver—made that colony across the Atlantic the major pole of the Spanish empire’s economic growth at the end of the eighteenth century, as the late proyectistas recognized. It was the mainstay of Spain’s metropolitan economy as well.… New Spain’s mining operations and the annual coinage reports of Mexico City’s mint were swiftly communicated to would-be speculators in Spain, France, and England, which explains the immediate utility and widespread popularity of Alexander von Humboldt’s Essai politique, his handbook on New Spain, which quickly became a bestseller. His data, generously provided by statistically-minded colonial civil servants, soon would become the basis of analyses in the Edinburgh Review and later in the two-volume Mexico, written by England’s minister to Mexico in the 1820s, H. G. Ward. Mexico’s silver production in coin and bullion dominated world production, as Humboldt reiterated, and he put it tellingly, noting that all French minting Mining and Its Fissures • 163 could at best occupy Mexico City’s Casa de Moneda for about fifteen working days per annum. Silver and Trade New Spain’s silver production was the barometer of its external trade, the regulator of its exchanges with the metropole and its busiest port, Cadiz. Its silver pesos and reales flowed out of about five hundred mining camps and thirty-five hundred mines, large and small, through wages paid to thirty thousand workers, purchases of locally produced foodstuVs, forage for mules and horses, leather, and inputs from Europe of iron, steel, and mercury .À Silver was the vehicle by which consumer demand in the colony’s principal monetized zones—Mexico City, Puebla, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and Oaxaca—for imports of linens, woolens, and cottons, along with wines and brandies from Spain, was satisfied. Silver was the foundation of the peninsular merchant community concentrated at Mexico City, with links of interest and kinship to Cadiz and Manila and to Spain’s other peripheral urban centers.à The colonial civil servant Beleña encapsulated the importance of New Spain’s mines when he once noted that silver constituted “the most important item of the Crown and foments not only all the Nations of Europe but also the principal nations of the rest of the globe.”Õ There was a factual basis for Beleña’s observation. For 234 years, from 1537 to 1771, New Spain’s average annual output had been 1.9 million pesos. In the next half-century, from 1772 to 1821, the total output was virtually double that of the previous centuries, reaching an average annual output of at least 17.4 million, a ninefold increase.Œ And in the twenty-two years before the outbreak of civil war in New Spain, from 1789 to the year of crisis, 1810, the average annual output of coined silver and gold of Mexico City’s mint was at least 22.6 million; this does not include unregistered silver in coin or bullion.œ The peak occurred in 1805 with the astounding oYcial figure of slightly more than 27.1 million pesos in silver and gold coined, immediately recognized as “the largest coinage since the Crown took over the Mint.”– Silver enjoyed decided advantages over other colonial exports: meteorological fluctuations had minimal impact on output, and silver could be warehoused indefinitely. In this connection, at least 50 percent of total silver production in 1796–1810, about 190 million pesos, may have been retained in New Spain to avoid maritime risks after 1805, when war between England and France broke out again.— What did aVect output was the supply of bar iron and steel for mining equipment and especially imports of mercury, a government monopoly. Mercury shortages account for the wartime trough [13.59.36.203] Project MUSE (2024...