State-civil society cooperation and conflict in the spanish empire: The intellectual and political activities of the ultramarine consulados and economic societies, c. 1780-1810

Journal of Latin American Studies

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 263-298

  Paquette, Gabriel B ^a  

^a TRINITY COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AUTHORITARIANISM; CIVIL SOCIETY; COLONIALISM; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; IMPERIALISM; POLITICAL CONFLICT; POLITICAL REFORM; PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION; STATE-LOCAL RELATIONS;

ARGENTINA; ATLANTIC ISLANDS; ATLANTIC OCEAN; CARIBBEAN ISLANDS; CHILE; CUBA; EURASIA; EUROPE; GREATER ANTILLES; SOUTH AMERICA; SOUTHERN EUROPE; SPAIN;

EID: 34248561162     PISSN: 0022216X     EISSN: 1469767X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X07002386     Document Type: Article

References (228)

1. Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, A Voyage to South America (London, 1760), bk. 1, ch. 1, p.47.
2. See, in particular, Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic 1750-1900 (Pittsburgh, 1973)
3. David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge, 1991)
4. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, 2001).
5. Brian Hamnett, 'Process and Pattern: A Re-Examination of the Ibero-American Independence Movements, 1808-1826', JLAS vol. 29 (1997), pp. 283-4.
6. M. A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, From Impotence to Authority: The Spanish Crown and the American Audiencias 1687-1808 (London, 1977)
7. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge, 1998).
8. See, in particular, Kenneth Andrien, The Kingdom of Quito, 1690-1830: The State and Regional Economic Development (Cambridge, 1995)
9. Jacques Barbier, Reform and Politics in Bourbon Chile, 1755-1796 (Ottawa, 1980)
10. David Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge, 1971)
11. A. J. Kuethe and G. D. Inglis, 'Absolutism and Enlightened Reform: Charles III, the Establishment of the Alcabala, and Commercial Reorganization in Cuba', Past and Present vol. 109 (1985), pp. 118-43
12. Anthony McFarlane, Colombia Before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge, 1993)
13. and Stanley Stein and Barbara Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III (Baltimore, 2003).
14. For an analysis of the most recent scholarship, see Gabriel B. Paquette 'Empire, Enlightenment and Regalism: New Directions in Eighteenth-Century Spanish History', European History Quaterly Vol. 35 (2005), pp. 107-17.
15. One must distinguish between intentions and results. Cádiz continued to handle the overwhelming proportion of transatlantic trade: 76 per cent of imports from Spanish America in terms of value between 1782 and 1796, and 84 Per cent of the return traffic in the same period: See John Fisher, 'Commerce and Imperial Decline: Spanish Trade with Spanish America, 1797-1820', JLAS vol. 30 (1998), p. 462.
16. The Bourbon focus on trade policy on the imperial periphery should not obscure the Crown's reliance on bullion, mainly from Peru and Mexico, which accounted for 77 per cent of the cargo value of imports into Spain until at least 1778: See David Brading, 'Bourbon Spain and its American Empire', Historical Journal vol. 39 (1981), pp. 961-9.
17. See especially Kenneth Andrien, 'Economic Crisis, Taxes and the Quito Insurrection of 1765', Past and Present vol. 129 (1990), pp. 104-31
18. Anthony McFarlane, 'Rebellions in Late Colonial Spanish America: A Comparative Perspective', Bulletin of Latin American Research vol. 14 (1995), pp 313-38
19. John Leddy Phelan, The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison, 1978)
20. and Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in the Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Durham NC, 2003).
21. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain in Spain in America, 1492-1830 (London and New Haven, 2006), p. 319
22. Anthony Pagden and Nicholas Canny, 'Afterword: From Identity to Independence', in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton, 1987), p. 275.
23. As Anthony McFarlane argued, these rebellions and conspiracies 'did not generally indicate desire for independence from Spain [but were] aimed at perpetuating past practices, not with overthrowing them... Enmity toward metropolitan Spaniards was insufficiently strong or widespread to underpin nationalistic sentiment or to provide a focus for rebellion against Spain': See McFarlane, 'Identity, Enlightenment and Political Dissent in Late Colonial Spanish America', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. vol. 8 (1998), p.322.
24. Other historians argue that it was the death of José de Gálvez in 1787 that brought 'an abrupt halt and repeal of some of the key measures already enforced': See John Fisher, Government and Society in Colonial Peru: The Intendant System, 1784-814 (London, 1970), p. 60.
25. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, pp. 324, 365.
26. Victorián de Villava, 'Apuntes para una Reforma de España' (1797) in Ricardo Levene (ed.), Vida y Escritos de Victorián de Villava (Buenos Aires, 1946), p. cxvi; Villava was a peninsular professor of political economy who became an oidor of the Audiencia of Charcas.
27. Francisco Silvestre, Governor and Visitor of Antioquia (New Granada), quoted in Margarita Garrido de Payan, 'The Political Culture of New Granada, 1770-1815 ', unpubl. PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1990, p. 35.
28. Biblioteca del Palacio Real (Madrid) [hereafter BPR] II/2866, Josef Fuertes, 'Pensamientos, o Proyecto Sobre Volver a Reconciliar con la Madre Patria las Provincias Discolas de la América Meridional' (1781), fo. 261 v.
29. Such a scheme was not peculiar to Spain. John Fothergill's Considerations Relative to the North American Colonies (1765) had made the identical point:
30. see Richard Warner Van Alstyne, Empire and Independence: The International History of the American Revolution (New York, 1965), p. 28.
31. Valentín de Foronda, 'Carta Sobre Lo Que Debe Hacer un Principe que Tenga Colonias a Gran Distancia' (1800) in Escritos Políticos y Constitucionales (Vitoria, 2002), p. 249.
32. Archivo General de Indias [hereafter AGI] Santo Domingo 2665, Navarro to Valdes, 16 April 1789, fos. 327-28.
33. The American contribution to the Crown's ordinary income increased in both absolute and relative terms between 1790 and 1810, rising from 25 per cent in 1790 to 40 per cent in the 1802-1804 period, before increasing again to 50 per cent between 1808 and 1811: See Carlos Marichal, 'Beneficios y costes fiscales del colonialismo: Las remesas americanas a España 1760-1814', Revista de Historia Económica vol. 15 (1997), p. 478
34. Civil Society is defined here as a 'complex and dynamic ensemble of legally protected non-government institutions that tend to be non-violent, self-governing, self-reflexive and permanently in tension with each other and with the state institutions that "frame", construct and enable their activities': See John Keane, Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Cambridge, 1998), p. 6; this article stresses co-operation between the Bourbon state and Spanish American civil society institutions.
35. Although this article focuses on the mercantile privileges extended by the Crown, other concessions were extended as well, for example the fuero militar: See Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, p. 300.
36. This concept is developed by Peter Evans, 'Introduction' in Evans (ed.), State-Society Synergy: Government and Social Capital in Development (Berkeley, 1991), p. 2.
37. For a contrasting view, which construes the creation of Consulados as an 'explicit manifestation of [the Crown's] impotence', see Manuel Lucena Giraldo, 'F¿ilántropos u Oportunistas? Ciencia y Política en los Proyectos de Obras Públicas del Consulado de Cartagena de Indias, 1795-1810', Revista de Indias vol. 52 (1992), pp. 627-46.
38. Quoted in Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713-1826 (Baltimore, 1983), p. 128.
39. On die emergence of a public sphere in the late colonial period, see Victor Uribe-Uran, 'The Birth of the Public Sphere in Latin America during the Age of Revolution', Comparative Studies in Society and Histry vol. 42 (2000), pp. 425-57.
40. Quoted in Iris Engstrand, Spanish Scientists in the New World: The Eighteenth-Century Expeditions (Seattle, 1981), p. 11.
41. For the case of New Granada, see Renán Silva, Los Hustrados de Nueva Granada, 1760-1808: Genealogía de una Comunidad de Interpretación (Medellín, 2002), p. 583.
42. The major work on the Economic Societies remains Robert Jones Shafer, The Economic Societies of the Spanish World 1763-1821 (Syracuse, 1958).
43. On the discourse of 'improvement' in the contemporary British empire with significant application to other European empires, see the pioneering study by Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the 'Improvement' of the World (New Haven, 2000).
44. John Lynch has pointed out that 'the Enlightenment remains one of the understudied subjects of Latin American History ... The ideological origins of the Spanish American revolutions is still waiting to be written': See Lynch, 'Spanish American Independence in Recent Historiography' in Anthony McFarlane and Eduardo Posada-Carbó (eds.), Independence and Revolution in Spanish America: Perspectives and Problems (London, 1999), pp. 35-6.
45. José Ignacio de Pombo, 18 April 1807, reprinted in Escritos de Dos Economistas Coloniales: Don Antonio de Narvaez y la Torre y Don José Ignacio de Pombo (Bogotá, 1965)
46. for the intellectual context of the Consulado's activities, see J. F. Wilhite, 'The Enlightenment and Education in New Granada, 1760-1830', unpubl. PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1976, esp. pp. 248-315
47. On the formation of separate, creole identity as a prelude to independence, see Anthony Pagden, 'Identity Formation in Spanish America', in Pagden and Canny (eds.), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, p. 92.
48. Robert Sidney Smith, The Spanish Merchant Guild: A History of the Consulado, 1250-1700 (Durham, NC, 1940), pp. 3-15.
49. C. H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (Gloucester MA, 1973), pp. 256, 300.
50. There had been an earlier attempt to establish a Consulado in New Granada in 1694, but it had dissolved in 1713. In 1784, a Consulado for Mompox was formed, but soon became defunct: See Garrido de Payan, 'The political Culture of New Granada', p. 50.
51. Brian Hamnett made a similar point in relation to New Spain: 'Mercantile Rivalry and Peninsular Division: The Consulados of New Spain and the Impact of the Bourbon Reforms, 1789-1824', Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv vol. 2 (1976), p. 276.
52. On the Consulado of Lima in the period, see Patricia H. Marks, 'Confronting a Mercantile Elite: Bourbon Reformers and the Merchants of Lima, 1765 -1796', The Americas vol. 60 (2004), pp. 519-58.
53. Burkholder and Chandler, From Impotence to Authority.
54. Hamnett, 'Mercantile Rivalry and Peninsular Division', pp. 274, 278.
55. The new measures were an assault on the corporate power and privileges, not the profits, of Mexico and Peru. According to John Fisher, 'agricultural economics in regions hitherto marginalised from the official routes of transatlantic trade - notably in the Río de la Plata, Venezuela, Central America and Cuba - experienced upsurges in export-led production, but not at the expense of traditional centres of Spanish authority, Mexico and Peru, which maintained their majority shares of commercial activity in their respective regions, particularly because of the continuing predominance of silver in exports to Spain': see Fisher, 'Commerce and Imperial Decline', p. 461.
56. In Mexico royal bureaucrats, especially at the local level, became embedded in family and commercial networks and more often acted out of motives of greed than good governance: See Linda Salvucci, 'Costumbres viejas, "hombres nuevos": José de Gálvez y la burocracia fiscal novohispana (1754-1800)', Historia Mexicana vol. 33, (1983), pp. 224-64.
57. AGI Caracas 908, Francisco de Saavedra to Gálvez, 2 May 1785.
58. AGI Santa Fe 957, Juan Francisco Gil y Lemos to Antonio Valdes, 15 March 1789
59. ibid., 30 Oct. 1790.
60. Viceroy Pedro Mendinueta to his successor Antonio Amar y Borbón (1803), in José García y García, (ed.), Relaciones de los Virreyes del Nuevo Reino de Granada (New York, 1869), 508.
61. Many officials, it must be conceded, held creoles in contempt. New Granada's Viceroy in the 1780s, for example, complained that his subjects were 'incapable of understanding the justification for royal taxes. All they aspire to is their own self-interest, which is absolute and unlimited libertinism... The goal of government must be to force the plebeians to respect public authority so that their subordination and obedience is preserved': F. Gutiérrez de Piñeres to Gálvez, quoted in Phelan, The People and the King, p. 33.
62. AGI Caracas 152, José María Chacón to Antonio Valdes, 25 Jan. 1788.
63. AGI Caracas 908, Francisco de Saavedra to José de Gálvez, 2 May 1785.
64. Ibid.
65. AGI Caracas 908, Cabildo to the Council of the Indies, 16 July 1788.
66. AGI Estado 54, no. 3, Lazaro Maria de Herrera and José Ignacio de Pombo to Viceroy Caballero y Gongora, March 1789.
67. Notwithstanding these pledges, the rise of the colonial Consulado was a gradual process. In Buenos Aires, for example, it was preceded by the emergence of informal merchant associations (Juntas de Comerciantes y Mercaderos). There was often a sizable lag between the initial petition - the majority of which were presented in the early 1780s - and the grant of a royal charter, the majority of which were approved in the mid-1790s. Susan Migden Socolow argued that this lengthy petition process is evidence that the merchants possessed 'virtually no power vis-à-vis the entire colonial empire and in metropolitan Spain': Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires 1778-1810: Family and Commerce (Cambridge, 1978), p. 173.
68. R. L. Woodward, Class Privilege and Economic Development: The Consulado de Comercio of Guatemala 1793-1871 (Chapel Hill, 1966), pp. 25-6.
69. Real Cédula de Erección del Consulado de Chile (Madrid, 1795), p. 20. The cédula for the creation of the Consulado of Buenos Aires employed identical language: See AGI Buenos Aires 583.
70. Pedro Navarro Floria, Manuel Belgrano y el Consulado de Buenos Aires, Cuna de la Revolución (1790-1806) (Buenos Aires, 1999), p. 48
71. for an appraisal of this Consulado's accomplishments, see German O. E. Tjarks, El Consulado de Buenos Aires y sus Proyecciones en la Historia del Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires, 1962), vol. I, p. 103; vol. II, 874
72. On Colonial Consulados more generally, see Manuel Nunes Dias, El Real Consulado de Caracas (1793-1810) (Caracas, 1971), esp. pp. 232, 574.
73. P. J. Lampros, 'Merchant-Planter Cooperation and Conflict: The Havana Consulado, 1794-1832', unpubl. PhD diss., Tulane University, 1980, pp. 14-28.
74. As Carlos Díaz Rementería wrote, the avería began as a 'special tax by which interested parties collaborated to finance the costs of armadas to protect the flota' in Ismael Sánchez Bella, Alberto de la Hera and Carlos Díaz Rementería, Historia del Derecho Indio (Madrid, 1992), p. 381
75. R. S. Smith, 'Origins of the Consulado in Guatemala', Hispanic American Historical Review vol. 26, no. 2 (1946), p. 159. Some Consulados also were empowered to take the peage, a toll collected on vehicles and pack animals using the roads.
76. AGI Chile 445, Consulado to Gardoqui, 16 June 1797: The figures are extrapolated from a chart entitled: 'Estado que Manifiesta lo que ha producido el 1/2 percent de avería concedido por SM a este Real Consulado en 1796'
77. AGI Buenos Aires 586: The figures are extrapolated from a chart entitled: 'Productos correspondientes al Tribunal de Consulado por el medio por ciento de avería cobrado ... en 1796'.
78. Quoted in Terence Hutchinson, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662-1776 (Oxford, 1988), p. 290.
79. Stanley Stein and Barbara Stein, Silver, Trade and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 164-72.
80. Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia 1770-1835 (Chapel Hill, 2004), p. 48.
81. AGI Caracas 908, Francisco de Saavedra to José de Gálvez, 2 May 1785.
82. The Viceroy of New Granada also cited road construction as a principal rationale for the Consulados: See AGI Santa Fe 957, Juan Francisco Gil y Lemos to Antonio Valdes, 15 March 1789.
83. Andrien, The Kingdom of Quito, pp. 214-5.
84. Nicolas Calvo y O'Farrill, 'Sobre la Necesidad de Construir Caminos en esta Isla, Medios de Hacerlos y Dirección que Deben Tener' in Memorias de la Sociedad Patriótica de la Habana (Havana, 1795), vol. III, appendix, doc. 2.
85. Before the establishment of the Consulado in 1794, there had been strenuous efforts by the Governor-General, in collaboration with the sugar magnates, to compel inhabitants to volunteer personal labour in order to maintain bridges and roads: See Sherry Johnson, The Social Transformafion of Eighteenth-Century Cuba (Gainesville, 2001), pp. 129-35.
86. AGI Buenos Aires 585, unsigned, first (top) document in legajo.
87. AGI Caracas 152, José María Chacón to Antonio Valdes, 25 Jan. 1788.
88. AGI Estado 25, no. 41/1, Marqués de Branciforte to Godoy, n.d. fos. 1, 4.
89. Vicente Basadre, 'Memoria sobre la Construcción de Sumideros para Purificar la Atmosfera' (1797), in Javier Ortíz de la Tabla DuCasse, ed., Memorias Políticas y Económicas del Consulado de Vera Cruz, 1796- 1822 (Seville, 1985), p. 15.
90. José Donato de Austria, 'Memoria Sobre la Construcción de un Camino Carretero desde Vera Cruz a México' (1800), in ibid., p. 27.
91. BPR II/2896, 'Relación del Gobierno del Exmo. Sr. D. Josef de Ezpeleta (...) a su Succesor el Exmo. D. Pedro Mendinueta' (1796), fo. 274v.
92. AGI Chile 445, Consulado to Miguel Cayetano Soler, 13 June 1800.
93. AGI Santa Fe 957, Joachim de Cañavernal to Diego de Gardoqui, 3 Nov. 1795.
94. Viceroy Amar y Borbón, quoted in Silva, Los Ilustrados de Nueva Granada, pp. 629-30.
95. AGI Chile 445, Consulado to Cayetano Soler, 15 July 1800.
96. McFarlane, Colombia Before Independence, p. 316
97. Hamnett, 'Mercantile Rivalry and Peninsular Division'
98. Lampros, 'Merchant-Planter Cooperation and Conflict'.
99. David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation (Berkeley, 1988), especially pp. 124-5.
100. This analysis draws on Albert Hirschman's observation that, 'the by-product of individuals acting predictably in accordance with their economic interests was therefore not an easy balance, but a strong web of interdependent relationships... Ambition, the lust for power and the desire for respect can all be satisfied by economic improvement': Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, 1997), pp. 51, 110.
101. McFarlane, Colombia Before Independence, p. 316.
102. Manuel Belgrano, 'Medios Generales de Fomentar la Agricultura, Animar la Industria, y Proteger el Comercio en un País Agricultor' (1796), in Museo Mitre, Documentos del Archivo Belgrano (Buenos Aires, 1913), vol. I, p. 59
103. on the impact of physiocracy in the Spanish empire, see Ernest Lluch and Lluís Argemí i d'Abadal, 'La fisiocracia en España', in Agronomía fisiocracia en España (1750-1820) (Valencia, 1985)
104. on the translation of works of European political economy into Spanish, see Vicent Llombart, 'Traducciones españolas de economia política (1700-1812): Catálogo bibliográfico y una nueva perspectiva', Cromobs 9 (2004), pp. 1-14.
105. AGI Buenos Aires 585. Such an embrace of physiocracy would have not been construed as politically radical. As McNally suggested in his examination of Quesnay, 'the unity and stability of the social order presuppose a centralised political authority which can establish the framework by which private interests unintentionally further the general welfare': See McNally, Political Economy, p. 124.
106. Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford, 1999), pp. 58, 63
107. for additional treatment of Belgrano's economic ideas, see Oreste Popescu, Studies in the History of Latin American Economic Thought (London, 1997), pp. 156-71,
108. and Navarro Floria, 'Notas para un estudio del ideario económico y político de Manuel Belgrano', Quinto Centenario 13 (1987), p. 183
109. on the importance of Campomanes in Belgrano's thought, see Jorge I. Segura, El Pensamiento Económico de Manuel Belgrano (Mendoza, 1953), p. 7.
110. On this idea, see John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge, 2005), p. 38.
111. In relation to the Spanish Atlantic world, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra described political economy as part of a 'patriotic epistemological discourse at the core of the Spanish enlightenment... of a "cosmopolitan" kind': 'Eighteenth-Century Spanish Political Economy: Epistemology of Decline', Eighteenth-Century Thought vol. 1 (2003), pp. 301, 314.
112. AGI Indiferente General 2467, Real Consulado de Caracas to Madrid, 18 April 1801.
113. Manuel de Salas to Diego Gardoqui (1796), in Escritos de Manuel de Salas (Santiago, 1910), vol. I, p. 161
114. for an older but very thorough treatment of the organisation and activities of Santiago's Consulado, see Elsa Urbina Reyes, 'El Tribunal del Consulado de Chile: Sus origenes y primeros años', Boletín de la Academia Chilena de la Historia vol. 29 (1962), pp. 104-43.
115. Archivo Nacional (Chile), Tribunal del Consulado, vol. 34, 'Representación al Ministerio de Hacienda sobre "El Estado de la Agricultura, Industria y Comercio en Chile"', Jan. 1798. Hereafter national archives are referred to as AN followed by the name of the country.
116. AGI Chile 443, 'Memoria de Consulado de Chile', 29 February 1797. On population expansion schemes, see Gabriel B. Paquette, 'Governance and Reform in the Spanish Atlantic World, c. 1760-1810', unpubl. PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2006, esp. Chaps 3 and 4.
117. AN (Chile) Tribunal del Consulado, vol. 34, 'Representación al Ministerio de Hacienda sobre "El Estado de la Agricultura, Industria y Comercio en Chile"', Jan. 1796.
118. Belgrano, 'Medios Generales de Fomentar la Agricultura' in Roque Gondra, Las Ideas Económicas, p. 156
119. for an examination of the critical emulation of foreign political and economic ideas during the Bourbon reform period, see Paquette, 'Governance and Reform', especially Chap. 2.
120. AN (Chile) Tribunal del Consulado, vol. 34, Memoria, Jan. 1799.
121. AN (Chile) Tribunal del Consulado, vol. 34, 'Memorial Sobre Educación Popular', 1808.
122. William Callahan, Honor, Commerce, and Industry in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Boston, 1972)
123. Belgrano, 'Memoria' of 14 June 1798, reprinted in Roque Gondra, Las Ideas Económicas, p. 194.
124. AN (Chile) Tribunal del Consulado, vol. 34, 'Representación al Ministerio de Hacienda sobre "El Estado de la Agricultura, Industria y Comercio en Chile"', Jan. 1796
125. Luís Celis Muñoz, El Pensamiento Político de Manuel de Salas (Santiago, 1954), p. 50.
126. Quoted in Woodward, Class Privilege, p. 107.
127. AN (Chile) Tribunal del Consulado, vol. 34, Memoria of Anselmo de la Cruz, Jan. 1807.
128. Juan Egaña, 'Oración Inaugural para la Apertura de los Estudios de la Real Universidad de San Felipe en el Año 1804', in Escritos Inéditos y Dispersos (Santiago, 1949), pp. 14-17.
129. Pombo (1810), quoted in Silva, Los Ilustrados de Nueva Granada, p. 399
130. On the translation and dissemination of Adam Smith in the Spanish Atlantic World, see R. S. Smith, 'The Wealth of Nations in Spain and Hispanic America, 1780-1830', Journal of Political Economy vol. 65 (1957), pp. 104-25.
131. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 101, doc. 4990, José Ignacio Echegoyen, 20 Feb. 1798
132. On collaboration between planters and crown officials in Cuba, see Johnson, Social Transformation, pp. 128-66.
133. A. J. Kuethe, Cuba 1753-1815: Crown, Military and Society (Knoxville, 1986), p. 74.
134. For an overview of the Consulado's activities, see Salvador Arregui Martínez-Moya, 'El Real Consulado de la Habana, 1794-1834', unpubl. PhD diss., University of Murcia, 1992
135. and Lampros, 'Merchant-Planter Cooperation and Conflict'.
136. Francisco Arango y Parreño, 'Discurso Sobre la Agricultura de la Habana y Medios de Fomentarla' in Obras (Havana, 1952), vol. 1, pp. 117-118
137. W. Pierson, 'Francisco Arango y Parreño', Hispanic American Historical Review vol. 16 (1936), pp. 467-8
138. Francisco J. Ponte Domínguez, Arango Parreño: Estadista Colonial Cubano (Havana, 1937), esp. pp. 6-77
139. Dale Tomich, 'The Wealth of Empire: Francisco Arango y Parreño, Political Economy, and the Second Slavery in Cuba', Comparative Studies in History and Society vol. 45 (2003), pp. 5-7
140. for a negative view of Arango's activities, see Johnson, Social Transformation.
141. Memorias de la Sociedad Patriótica de la Habana (Havana, 1794), Vol. II, pp. 133-4.
142. Arango and his fellow champions of less-regulated trade conveniently failed to mention the major injections of capital which Cuba regularly received from the mid-1760s. As Stein and Stein indicate, 'an impressive proportion of [New Spain's] surplus funds was earmarked for financing Cuba's defences': Apogee of Empire, p. 353
143. see also Carlos Marichal and Matilde Souto Mantecón, 'Silver and Situados: New Spain and the Financing of the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean in the Eighteenth Century', Hispanic American Historical Review vol. 74 (1994), pp. 588-9.
144. Arango y Parreño, 'Reflexiones Sobre la Mejor Organización del Consulado de la Habana, Considerado como Tribunal' in Obras, vol. 1, p. 209.
145. Arango y Parreño, 'Discurso Sobre la Agricultura de la Habana y Medios de Fomentarla' in ibid., p. 153.
146. AGI Estado 5B, no. 4, 'Puntos que ha tratado en la Junta de Gobierno del Real Consulado de la Isla de Cuba ... Arango en la Relación que de su viaje ha hecho' (1796 ?), fos. 1-5 passim.
147. AGI Estado 3, no. 7/6, Arango y Parreño, 22 April 1796, fo. 2.
148. Memorias de la Sociedad Patriótica de la Habana, vol. I, p. 35
149. on Anglophilia and Anglophobia, see Gabriel B. Paquette, 'Enlightened Narratives and Imperial Rivalry in Bourbon Spain: The Case of Almodóvar's Historia Política de los Establecimientos Ultramarinos de las Naciones Europeas (1784-1790)', The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Intepretation vol. 48 (2007), forthcoming.
150. Also called the Sociedad Patriótica in America and, of course, Sociedad Ecónomica de Amigos del País in peninsular Spain.
151. Shafer, Economic Societies of the Spanish World, pp. 48-9.
152. These essay prizes usually related to a specific aspect of agriculture. For example, AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 92, doc. 3926, 'Expediente Relativo a los Premios Ofrecidos por la Real Sociedad Patriotica a los Mejores Escritos Sobre Ciertos Ramos de Agricultura, especialmente Café, Añil y Algodon', 15 Jan. 1796
153. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg, 99, doc. 3841, 'Expediente Relativo al Premio ... al que componga el Mejor Tratado Para el Gobierno Económico de los Ingenios de Fabricar Azucar en esta Isla', 17 Jan. 1799
154. Francisco José Caldas (1811), quoted in Antonio LaFuente, 'Enlightenment in an Imperial Context: Local Science in the late Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World', Osiris vol. 15 (2000), p. 170.
155. Rocío Sánchez Lissén, 'Aportaciones de las Reales Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País al pensamiento económico español', in Maria Consolación España, ed., Las Reales Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País y el Espíritu Ilustrado: Análisis de sus Realizaciones (Seville, 2001), pp. 125, 127.
156. Foreign visitors to Spain offered little praise for the Amigos del País societies. Henry Swinburne noted that they had 'gone on but slowly in their improvements in literature and agriculture. I doubt that they have yet got into a proper method; for they undertake many things and finish none'. See his Travels through Spain in the Years 1775 and 1776 (London, 1787), vol. II, p. 203.
157. On British views of the Bourbon reforms, see Gabriel Paquette 'The Image of Imperial Spain in British Political Thought, 1750-1800', Bulletin of Spanish Studies vol. 81 (2004), pp. 187-214.
158. Memorias de la Sociedad Patriótica de la Habana, vol. I, p. 2
159. on this subject, see Izaskun Alvarez Cuartero, 'Las Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País en Cuba (1787-1832): Una aportación al pensamiento Ilustrado' in Consuelo Naranjo Orovio and Tomás Mallo Gutiérrez (eds.), Cuba: Perla de las Antillas (Madrid, 1994), esp. pp. 37-8.
160. AGI Estado, no. 7/3, 'Discurso Sobre las Utilidades que Puede Producir Una Sociedad Económica de Guatemala' (1795), to. 6
161. Shafer, Economic Societies, p. 259.
162. Archivo Histórico Nacional [hereafter AHN] (Madrid) Estado 1927, no. 301, 'Ordenanzas para el Reglamento de una Academia de Jovenes Comerciantes [en Barcelona]' (1787)
163. AHN Estado 3188, no. 377, Eugenio de Santiago Palomares, 'Establecimientos de una Escuela de Comercio en Madrid o Valencia' (July 1786).
164. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 179, doc. 8213, Sociedad Patriótica to Godoy, 21 March 1797
165. AGI Estado 1, no. 32/1, Count of Santa Clara to Godoy, 22 March 1797, fo. 1.
166. Memorias de la Sociedad Patriótica de la Habana, vol. I, pp. 18-19.
167. Ibid., vol. III, p. 11.
168. AGI Buenos Aires 587, Consulado to Secretary of State, 24 April 1802
169. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 179, doc. 8213, 'Expediente Sobre Establecer en Esta Ciudad un Instituto de Ciencias Naturales y Proyecto de una Escuela de Náutica', 2 Dec. 1796.
170. Memorias de la Sociedad Patriótica de la Habana, vol. III, p. 19.
171. Maria Dolores González-Ripoll Navarro, Cuba, la isla de los ensayos: Cultura y sociedad (1790-1815) (Madrid, 1999), pp. 198-200
172. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 92, doc. 3925, 'Expediente Traducir al Castellano las Obras Francesas de Du Trône de la Couture y de Corbeaux, acerca del Cultivo de la Caña', 15 January 1796. These works were Précis Sur la Canne et Sur les Moyens d'en Extraire le Sel Essentiel and Essai sur l'Arte de Cultiver la Canne et d'en Extraire le Sucre: Memorias de la Sociedad Patriótica de la Habana vol. I, p. 13.
173. Memorias de la Sociedad Patriótica de la Habana, vol. I, pp. 14-5
174. on the sugar planters' embrace of new technology, see Maria M. Portuondo, 'Plantation Factories: Science and Technology in late Eighteenth-Century Cuba', Technology and Culture Vol. 44 (2003), pp. 231-57.
175. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 101, doc. 4990, José Ignacio Echegoyen, 20 Feb. 1798.
176. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 22, doc. 1295, 'List of books in a box shipped by the American Brig Boston for Havana, to the care of Antonio de Frias for, and on the account of, the President of the Consulado', 11 Nov. 1811.
177. Irving A. Leonard and Robert Sidney Smith, 'Documents: A Proposed Library for the Merchant Guild of VeraCruz, 1801', Hispanic American Historical Review vol. 24 (1944), pp. 84-102
178. Harry Bernstein, 'Documents: A Provincial Library in Colonial Mexico, 1802', Hispanic American Historical Review vol. 26 (1946), pp. 162-83.
179. Memorias de la Sociedad Patriótica de la Habana, vol. II, p. 16.
180. Ibid., vol. III, pp. 107-8.
181. Fernando Ortiz, 'La hija cubana del Iluminismo' in Recopilación Para la Historia de la Sociedad Económica Habanera: Tomo V (Havana, 1943), p. 14.
182. As McFarlane pointed out, 'Creole ideas about cultural identity and political rights were still expressed in the political language of the ancién regime, and, if creoles accorded themselves distinct identities within the Spanish monarchy, they did not imagine themselves outside of it': 'Identity, Enlightenment and Political Dissent', p. 322.
183. In pursuing this argument, this article does not disagree with Fisher, 'Commerce and Imperial Decline', who argued that the 'quest for free trade cannot be seen as a dominant factor in determining the political attitudes of Spanish Americans toward the crisis of the Spanish monarchy in 1808-1810'. Rather, the present essay has sought to suggest how traditionally cooperative elites, employing certain political and economic ideas, justified their incremental divergence from official policy within the boundaries of the empire's territorial integrity and political unity.
184. Fisher, 'Commerce and Imperial Decline', p. 462
185. for a nuanced view of Anglo-Spanish commercial relations in this period, see Adrian Pearce, 'Rescates and Anglo-Spanish Trade during the French Revolutionary Wars, ca. 1797-1804', JLAS vol. 38 (2006), pp. 607-24.
186. Jerry Cooney, 'Oceanic Commerce and Platine Merchants, 1796-1806: The Challenges of War', The Americas vol. 45 (1989), pp. 509-10.
187. For another perspective on comercio neutral, see Jacques Barbier, 'Peninsular Finance and Colonial Trade: The Dilemma of Charles IV's Spain', JLAS vol. 12 (1980), pp. 21-37.
188. Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, 2007), p. 140.
189. AN (Argentina) IX 4-6-3, Consulado to Madrid (1798), fo. 134.
190. AGI Indiferente General 2467.
191. AN (Argentina) IX 4-7-9, Vicente Antonio del Murriela, 29 Oct. 1798
192. Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, pp. 125-9.
193. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 112, doc. 4702, Letter 'Sobre Cumplimiento de la Real Orden de 26 de Agosto de 1802, Relativa a la Situación de la Agricultura y Comercio de esta Colonia y especialmente del Contrabando', 25 May 1803.
194. AN (Cuba) Intendencia, leg. 876, doc. 22, Anon., Oct. 1798.
195. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 112, doc. 4702.
196. McFarlane, Colombia, p. 307
197. Fisher, 'Commerce and Imperial Decline', p. 459.
198. Brading, 'Bourbon Spain and its American Empire', pp. 961-9.
199. P. Michael McKinley, Pre-Revolutionary Caracas: Politics, Economy and Society 1777-1811 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 37.
200. AGI Buenos Aires 586, Consulado to Secretary of State, 23 Aug. 1798. The benefits of neutral trade did not counterbalance the negative effects of disrupted commerce: J. C. Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776-1860 (Cambridge, 1979), p. 47.
201. Cooney, 'Oceanic Commerce and Platine Merchants', p. 516.
202. AGI Indiferente General 2467, Consulado of Cartagena to Secretary of State, 31 Jan. 1799.
203. AGI Indiferente General 2467, Juan Bautista Echezuria [of the Consulado of Caracas to Madrid, 18 April 1801.
204. AGI Indiferente General 2467, Pedro Mendinueta [Viceroy of New Granada] to Madrid, 19 Sept. 1799
205. McFarlane, Colombia, p. 300.
206. AGI Indiferente General 2467, Vicente Emparam Superintendante General of Cumaná, 21 August 1799
207. on Venezuelan debates concerning comercio neutral, see Antonio García-Baquero González, 'El comercio de neutrales en Venezuela (1796-1802)' in his El Comercio Colonial en la Época del Absolutismo Ilustrado: Problemas y Debates (Granada, 2003).
208. Hemán Asdrúbal Silva, 'La estructuración del comercio y la navegación desde el Río de la Plata a Cuba', Anuario de Estudios Americanos vol. 51, no. 2 (1989), pp. 61-7.
209. McFarlane, Colombia, pp. 302, 374.
210. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 74, doc. 2845, 'Expediente Sobre Comercio Reciprico de esta Plaza con la de Montevideo', 18 Aug. 1812; reply 12 December 1812; AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 73, doc. 2804, 'Expediente (...) para Cimentar el Comercio Reciprico de Frutos, entre Buenos Aires y esta Colonia', 23 Aug. 1803.
211. Liss, Atlantic Empires, p. 174.
212. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 72, doc. 2788, 12 Feb. 1799.
213. AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 73, doc. 2804, 'Expediente (...) para Cimentar el Comercio Reciprico de Frutos, entre Buenos Aires y esta Colonia', 23 Aug. 1803.
214. Letter found in AN (Cuba) Real Consulado, leg. 72.
215. [Anon.], War in Disguise; or, the Frauds of the Neutral Flags (London, 1805), p. 72. North American commerce with Cuba exploded in this period:
216. see J. H. Coatsworth, 'American Trade with European Colonies in the Caribbean and South America, 1790-1812', William and Mary Quarterly vol. 24 (1967), p. 248.
217. Lampros, 'Merchant-Planter Cooperation and Conflict', p. 189.
218. The quotation is from William Robertson, History of America (London, 1777), Vol. III, book 8, p. 337.
219. Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, p. 23
220. Stein and Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Historical Perspective (Oxford and New York, 1970), pp. 92-3, 103-4.
221. Brading, The First America, p. 5.
222. Adelman, Republic of Capital, p. 68.
223. Adapted from T. C. W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743-1803 (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 34-7.
224. This analysis draws on the insights from Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660-1789 (Oxford and New York, 2001), p. 13.
225. It is necessary to acknowledge, however, Anthony Pagden's keen observation that less regulated trade 'meant creating a polity which was potentially open to foreign political influence'. See Pagden, 'Heeding Heraclides: Empire and its Discontents, 1619-1812', in Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker (eds.), Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott (Cambridge, 1995), p. 328.
226. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, p. 374
227. McFarlane, Colombia Before Independence, p. 307
228. Adelman cogently argues that 'American secession was a reaction to the metropolitan effects of Atlantic warfare, and not the expression of accumulated colonial grievances that spawned a separate political idenfity': Sovereignty and Revolution, p. 219.