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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 5. A HegemonyThreatened: Mexico City andVeracruz Indeed the reglamento of . . . 1778 can be considered by the people of Veracruz as the cédula creating its Pueblo. Tomás Murphy, 6 December 1802 The Consulado de México hasn’t even the vaguest notion of Veracruz’s commerce, its economy . . . its products, or the other benefits that tie it to its consulado. Pedro Pablo Vélez to Consulado de Veracruz, 15 June 1808 [Veracruz], the sole key to the large, rich, and opulent Kingdom of New Spain . . . one of the most active trading ports of the dominions. AGN, Consulado The establishment of a merchants’ corporation, or consulado, at Veracruz in 1794 was far more than a generous and unsolicited stimulus by the Spanish imperial government to a neglected port on New Spain’s Gulf coast. It was formal if belated recognition of Veracruz’s emergence as an aggressive competitor of Mexico City’s for New Spain’s internal commercial circuits and for hegemony over the burgeoning economy of Spain’s principal Caribbean possession, the island of Cuba. One major thread running through the evolution of the colony of New Spain, what the Spanish colonial administration often called “América Septentrional” after 1763, was the counterpoint between Havana interests and those of Mexico City and Veracruz, as well as between Mexico City and Veracruz. Analysis of the factors leading to the establishment of Veracruz’s consulado and the schisms it generated oVers further evidence of colonial growth and the unavoidable tensions between commercial interests within the Spanish Atlantic system of the late eighteenth century. Of course the dynamic growth factor of “America Septrional” remained what it had been for more than two hundred years, its mining economy, A Hegemony Threatened • 131 which to onlookers mushroomed in the closing decades of the century. Growth in silver output and in population heightened New Spain’s importance in the New World and, as will be seen, further tied the colony to another expanding source of growth, agriculture around Cuba’s main port, Havana. Again, a broad conspectus is appropriate, since the Cuban phenomenon was part of the general phenomenon of agricultural expansion in both the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean areas. Veracruz shipped to Europe not only Guatemala’s major exportable, indigo (añil) but also cochineal ( grana) from New Spain’s province of Oaxaca and vanilla from Veracruz , while Havana exported sugar and molasses, tobacco, and coVee. Unlike in New Spain, with its reserves of indigenous labor, in Cuba the diversification and expansion of its exports required imported labor, African slaves, along with food and clothing, cattle and lumber. To obtain these inputs Cuban interests expanded old links to nearby areas and crafted new ones. For African slaves they turned to dealers at Port-au-Prince (SaintDomingue ) and Kingston (Jamaica), who also provided cottons and a variety of other goods. From North American ports, mainly Philadelphia and later Baltimore, planters obtained cattle and lumber; for basic commodities like corn and wheat flour they relied largely on North American ports, to a lesser degree upon Puebla through Veracruz. Important as Cuba’s relations with English, French, and “Anglo-American” (U.S., that is) suppliers were after 1783, Cuba’s major lifeline led to New Spain and its silver. New Spain financed Cuba’s colonial bureaucracy with annual subsidies (situados), which steeply increased after the English occupation of 1762–63, for military forti- fications, shipyards, troop support, including food and salaries, and the purchase on government account of Cuban leaf tobacco, shipped overseas to the metropole’s tobacco factory at Seville for the manufacture of snuV, cigars, and cigarettes.… From the late 1780s on, New Spain’s merchants, joined by the resident factors of merchants in Spain, transferred silver to Havana for investment in sugar exports to the metropole. Cuba’s labor force in sugar, tobacco, and coVee production required large flour imports. At most a trickle came from Santander millers, who received supplies from the metropole’s Tierra de Campos; but over the forty years after the English occupation of Havana a growing percentage of flours came from Philadelphia and Baltimore, particularly after Madrid loosened constraints on slave trading with nearby foreign colonies in 1789. Then demand for flours soared, and New Spain’s haciendas in the Puebla area could not meet the challenge. For a brief period in the 1780s and early 1790s Veracruz exported flours, but the volume gradually dropped in the face of U.S. competition. Whatever the constraints on Puebla...

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