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

7. Export Agriculture: Growth and Conflict

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 7. Export Agriculture: Growth and Conflict In fact the condition of our colonies’ agriculture and trade is improving every day, to the mutual benefit of the colonies and their metropole. Correo mercantil de España y sus Indias, 9 July 1795 Coercion . . . was the sin qua non of colonialism. Robert Patch The Bourbon reformers . . . failed to recognize that the repartimiento existed for rational economic reasons. Jeremy Baskes Emphasis on growth and change in New Spain’s mining industry after 1789 in terms of silver’s spectacular predominance in the value of aggregate exports and its dynamic eVects on New Spain’s interregional economy should not minimize the colony’s commodity production for internal and external markets. To judge by data assembled for Revillagigedo’s informe on the impact of comercio libre in the colony after 1778, agricultural production climbed steadily in the 1780s, and the growth trend continued over the following two decades partly in response to capital outlays by merchant groups noting the profits in agriculture and ranching, in corn, sugar and sugar brandy (aguardiente), cochineal ( grana), in sheep and cattle.… In short, merchant investors drawing upon earnings from trade, mining, and finance now focused on the possibilities of both domestic and external markets for commodity production. The demographic growth of the colony from 1790 to 1810, when the population reached 6.1 million—recently calculated as roughly 1.3 percent annually—coupled with the expansion of the urban population, in particular at Mexico City, created a demand for foodstuVs, beverages and clothing , for maize and wheat, cacao and sugar, aguardiente and pulque, mutton Export Agriculture • 189 and beef, raw wool and cotton.À Furthermore, export possibilities were also shaped by the growth of population in western Europe; economic expansion there; and demand for cotton, dyes such as New Spain’s cochineal, cultivated in Oaxaca, and sugar. Expanding sugar consumption in Europe in the early eighteenth century had brought the extraordinary economic phenomenon of Jamaica and, spectacularly, Saint-Domingue, with its largescale imports of African slave laborers and its output of sugar, indigo, and coVee. And European demand sparked the emergence of Spain’s largest possession in the West Indies, and a world-class sugar producer, the island of Cuba.à In belatedly opening the Cuban slave trade to foreign and national slave traders and eliminating metropolitan export duties on milling equipment (copper utensils, iron presses) in 1789–91, Spain’s imperial policy and the initiative of Cuban planters laid the basis for the island’s agricultural expansion once the rebellion of Saint-Domingue’s slaves awed plantation owners throughout the Western Hemisphere and curtailed Europe’s sugar supply. The disruption of Saint-Domingue also revived the production of sugar in Brazil’s nordeste and encouraged sugar planters and merchant investors in New Spain’s plantations south of the CentralValley, between Cuernavaca and Cuautla.Õ There were, in addition, agricultural commodities whose potential drew producers and their merchant associates: corn and wheat flours grown in Puebla for consumers in Tabasco and Campeche, especially Cuba. Indeed, the volume of Cuba’s needs attracted Puebla’s wheat hacendados and also the overpowering production of the United States in Baltimore’s hinterland.Œ Yet for a brief moment New Spain’s corn, wheat, and cattle hacendados enjoyed the mirage of a kind of continued economic hegemony over Spain’s major Caribbean possession that went beyond the colony’s annual silver subsidies and even promised to overcome long-recognized obstacles to New Spain’s growth in exportables other than precious metals. Since conquest, New Spain’s commodity production for export had been centered in the Central Valley and its nearby northern extensions and in Oaxaca in the south. Sustained exports consisted mainly of silver and cochineal, whose low bulk and high value counterbalanced the prohibitive costs of transport by wagon or mule; mules rather than wagons provided the basic transport between Mexico City and the port of Veracruz. With reason, in the 1790s backers of a Veracruz consulado repeatedly criticized the Mexico City consulado for 250 years of neglect by allocating insignificant portions of its avería income for road construction and maintenance of the vital transport section linking the New World’s largest capital to its Veracruz entrepôt. While a generation of recent immigrants among Veracruz’s mer- 190 • Fissioning of New Spain chants wanted to access farmland, criollo landowners refused to sell or even rent to Veracruz entrepreneurs desiring...