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The issue of our commerce with America [is] the most important of those that may now lay the foundation of the Spanish empire and the strength of its navy and merchant marine. Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes, governor of the Consejo de Castilla, to Colonial Secretary Antonio Valdés y Bazán (1788) Our American subjects must be content to cultivate and process the fruits of the soil, and in exchange receive our fruits and manufactures. Consulado de Barcelona, “Informe sobre el comercio de América” (1788) As Spain’s dependence upon New Spain’s pesos fuertes deepened in the 1780s, the commercial and Wnancial interests of Cadiz and Mexico City monopolizing that colony’s external trade necessitated sensitive handling by state authorities. By 1787, four years after a long war in the Atlantic and an extraordinary short-term postwar trade boom, Madrid’s earlier decision in 1778 to shield New Spain’s commercial interests from a full program of Spanishstyle comercio libre needed reexamination, particularly when merchants in peninsular ports were convinced that they were suVering a commercial depression with wide repercussions in New Spain. In October 1788, Wrst a mémoire by Prime Minister Floridablanca to the aging Charles III—eVectively , an accounting of his ministry’s policies—and then a widely circulated anonymous political lampoon, involving characters transparently identiWable as Charles III, Floridablanca, Gálvez, and Treasurer-General Francisco Montes, signaled to Spain’s political class how Madrid intended to manage the commercial crisis in New Spain: the full incorporation of the silverproducing colony of New Spain into the imperial system of comercio libre. Floridablanca’s apologia for eleven years as prime minister, which expatiated on his administration’s major policy initiatives, expressed marked sat9 . Incorporating New Spain into Comercio Libre (1789) • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • isfaction with two in particular, the Banco de San Carlos and comercio libre. The Reglamento of 1778, claimed the memorial, had “tripled” colonial trade, “doubled” the empire’s customs revenues, and created a “fortunate revolution in the trade of Spain to its colonies.” Three paragraphs on comercio libre show that Floridablanca used data from sources both within and outside the bureaucracy that buttressed that policy.⁄ To the perceptive among the political class, the memorial foretold Floridablanca’s intent to extend comercio libre to New Spain—which recently deceased Colonial Secretary Gálvez had scrupulously kept separate in 1778—despite the opposition of the inXuential Cadiz and Mexico City merchant establishments. Within a week, Floridablanca’s memorial was followed by an anonymous “Letter from an Egg Merchant of Fuencarral [Cadiz] to a Lawyer [Floridablanca] on the Egg Trade,” in which a well-informed satirist pilloried the Cadiz commercial community for resisting imperial trade adjustments , lampooned the Consulado de Cadiz’s former lobbyist in Madrid’s bureaucratic networks, Treasurer-General Francisco Montes (satirized as “Cerote who is artful”), and criticized the late Gálvez (a “trouble-making clerk”) for ineVective implementation of comercio libre, because “his head was not screwed on right” (an insider’s allusion to rumors of Gálvez’s mental illness during his commission of inquiry in northern New Spain, which Mexico City’s almaceneros had helped Wnance).¤ Floridablanca’s apologia and the satire reveal how important the inclusion of Spain’s wealthiest American colony under comercio libre had now become, an issue impressed upon Gálvez’s successor, Antonio Valdés, appointed in July 1787. Valdés, then forty-three, came from a well-connected Asturian family that for at least two generations on the paternal side had been in state service. His grandfather had been an army oYcer, his father intendente-corregidor of Burgos. At thirteen, in 1757, Valdés joined the navy, and in 1762, he participated in the defense of Havana against the English. Twenty years later, he was navy minister and an activist who urged Floridablanca to revitalize the Junta de Estado in order to put a stop to interministerial bickering; on Gálvez’s death, Floridablanca appointed him interim secretary of the Guerra and Hacienda de Indias ministry. Immediately, he circularized colonial oYcers for reports on local conditions, ordered Wscal data from the colonies and pressed the Casa de Contratación at Cadiz for more commercial data. Small wonder that the “Carta de un Huevero” praised him as a man who was “most honorable, judicious, [who] wants the best, and tries to understand by listening to all parties.”‹ Gálvez died on 17 June 1787, and just three weeks later, the government 268 • The Colonial Option [3.14.70...

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