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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 4. Reorganizing New Spain’s ExternalTrade:The Effects of Comercio Libre, 1789–1796 Merchants of sound judgment are sure that comercio libre has not given earnings for distribution , rather heavy losses and delays bemoaned. Manuel García Herreros Monopoly . . . is finished, one cannot give another name to a commerce in which those in this Kingdom with money, as a group, invested in buying up everything brought by flota. Tomás Murphy Only the class of merchants prospers and enriches itself, and those who establish commercial houses there are leeches who swell with the sweat of native peoples. II conde de Revillagigedo, 1794 Over a three-year period the colonial administration of New Spain, under the direction of the recently arrived viceroy, II conde de Revillagigedo, undertook an examination of the performance of the colony’s economy on a scale and precision rarely, if ever, before seen there. Revillagigedo executed the survey successfully; its inspiration had come earlier, in the administration of his viceregal predecessor. It is not far-fetched to speculate that the colonial oYce, under new management, hoped to validate Floridablanca’s “feliz revolución” and—an outside chance—to stimulate metropolitan entrepreneurs . Noteworthy, however, is the eVort to marshal quantitative rather than purely qualitative or descriptive data in order to refute the virtually unanimous position of Mexico City’s Spanish-born merchant enclave, probably New Spain’s most influential interest group.… Stimulus to the inquiry came from Antonio Valdés’s colonial oYce in 1787, hard on the death of the Consulado de México’s patron at Madrid, José de Gálvez, who, as we have seen, had stalled the extension of comercio libre to New Spain since 1781. With his death, the Consulado de México lost its most influential defender at Madrid. 92 • Fissioning of New Spain Valdés’s initiative reflected two governmental goals: to furnish advance warning to Mexico City wholesale merchants, the almaceneros, of the intention to extend comercio libre to the empire’s wealthiest colony; and to obtain on a regular basis trade information about colonial demand, supply, and population growth and hence to permit estimates of per capita consumption of imports, prices, and variation in colonial consumers’ luxury-goods preferences. Motivating this initiative may also have been Valdés’s need for data to support Madrid’s intention to curb the coercion of native peoples under the repartimiento system, specifically prohibited in the Ordenanza de intendentes, extended to New Spain in 1786. In the late 1780s the colonial oYce and interested merchant houses knew that the volume and value of the colonial trades was rising, although the magnitude and composition were debatable. Such information disseminated in the metropole via the newly established government-supported commercial periodical, the Correo Mercantil de España y sus Indias, would make available to peninsular merchants outside the close-mouthed Cadiz mercantile enclave quantitative rather than impressionistic commercial intelligence indispensable for business decision making. Up-to-date, reliable data could be an incentive to merchant houses to commit their and other investors’ funds to sustained involvement in colonial markets. For the function of commercial intelligence had been imperfectly executed by government-financed packet boats (avisos) inaugurated in 1765 after research and recommendation by Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes, then fiscal of the Consejo de Castilla. In two separate orders of 1787 Madrid directed the Consulado de México and then Viceroy Flores to prepare and forward such quantitative information.À In light of Flores’s close ties to the Mexico City merchant community and its connections with major colonial civil servants, his administration characteristically ignored the government’s request despite the evident impatience of Madrid. The accession of a monarch in Spain usually opened the way to some changes, and in colonial aVairs at this time matters were pushed along by the death of the colonial oYceholder, Gálvez, who knew New Spain well and had followed developments with information from merchants and civil servants there, as well as from civil servants in retirement at Madrid. In 1786 Gálvez put the intendancy system into eVect in New Spain and gradually advanced the possibility of including New Spain in the wider system of imperial trade inaugurated in 1765. In fact Gálvez had postponed including New Spain, aware of the resistance to inclusion in comercio libre of the wealthy, influential merchant elites dominating the external and internal trade of the colony. These elites were equally opposed to the intendancy [3.15...

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