Response to Carlos Marichal and William Summerhill

HAHR - Hispanic American Historical Review

Volumn 88, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 235-245

  Irigoin, Alejandra ^a   Grafe, Regina ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67649541011     PISSN: 00182168     EISSN: 15271900     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2007-159     Document Type: Note

References (44)

1. To name a few: Frank Jay Moreno, "The Spanish Colonial System: A Functional Approach," Western Political Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1967): 308-20
2. Zacarías Moutoukias, Contrabando y control colonial en el siglo XVII: Buenos Aires, el Atlántico y el espacio peruano (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1988)
3. John Leddy Phelan, The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century: Bureaucratic Politics in the Spanish Empire (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967)
4. and the more recent Alejandro Can̄eque, "Cultura Vicerregia y Estado Colonial: Una aproximación crítica al studio de la historia política de la Nueva España," Historia Mexicana 51, no. 1 (2001): 5-57
5. David Brading noted that "[This] new absolutist state ... failed to form any true alliance, founded on common interests, with the leading sectors of the colonial society." David Brading, "And Its American Empire," in Colonial Spanish America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 132
6. From another point of departure, Sergio Serulnikov has shown that the power relation between "Bourbon Absolutism" and Upper Peruvian indigenous peasantry was one of "an intertwinement, not the clash," as the Bourbon reforms "came to represent a major instrument of Andean resistance against entrenched structures of exploitation and political oppression in the rural villages." Sergio Serulnikov, "Customs and Rules: Bourbon Rationalizing Projects and Social Conflicts in Northern Potosí during the 1770s," Colonial Latin American Review 8, no. 2 (1999): 247-48 (emphasis in the original)
7. John Coatsworth, "Political Economy and Economic Organization," in The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, ed. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, John H. Coatsworth, and Roberto Cortés Conde (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006). At the time we wrote the article his chapter had not yet been published
8. Brian Hamnett, like many other historians, assigns the nature of Spanish rule to the pervasiveness of corruption: "Since royal bureaucracies could be neither adequately staffed nor adequately paid, inefficiency and corruption, collusion and extemporary practices filled this vacuum, where perhaps representative institutions might have stood." Brian R. Hamnett, "Process and Pattern: A Re-examination of the Ibero-American Independence Movements, 1808-1826," Journal of Latin American Studies 29, no. 2 (1977): 292
9. Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2003)
10. Sinclair Thomson, "'We Alone Will Rule ...': Recovering the Range of Anticolonial Projects among Andean Peasants (La Paz, 1740s to 1781)," Colonial Latin American Review 8, no. 2 (1999): 275-99. Admittedly, one of the problems with research on these rebellions is that it is not always well specified against whom or what they were directed
11. Rebecca Earle Mond, "Indian Rebellion and Bourbon Reform in New Granada: Riots in Pasto, 1780-1800," Hispanic American Historical Review 73, no. 1 (1993): 99-124
12. Anthony MacFarlane, "The Rebellion of the Barrios: Urban Insurrection in Bourbon Quito," in Reform and Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru, ed. John R. Fisher, Allan J. Kuethe, and Anthony MacFarlane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1990)
13. John Leddy Phelan, The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978)
14. MacFarlane, "Rebellion of the Barrios," 239
15. Kenneth Andrien has found socioeconomic problems (other than taxation) arising from freer trade policies and fierce competition from European manufactures underpinning these attempts to "control public policy and advance economic welfare and political liberties." Kenneth J. Andrien, "Economic Crisis, Taxes and the Quito Insurrection of 1765," Past and Present 129 (Nov. 1990): 107
16. Phelan, The People and the King, xviii
17. Regina Grafe and Maria Alejandra Irigoin, "The Spanish Empire and Its Legacy: Fiscal Redistribution and Political Conflict in Colonial and Post-Colonial Spanish America," Journal of Global History 1, no. 2 (2006): 255. Our regression analysis suggests that an additional 1 peso of net intraregional transfers was associated with a 0.4 peso increase in military expenditure
18. Coatsworth has several examples and lists among the "main institutions of colonial rule ... the delegation of the production of public goods and services to private bodies." Coatsworth, "Political Economy and Economic Organization," 256, see also 241, 243, 246, 249, 253, 254
19. Already in the late sixteenth century a similar system of revenue transfers from interior cajas to a main port, Cartagena, was in place in what would become New Granada after 1717. Hermes Tovar Pinzón, El Imperio y sus colonias: Las Cajas Reales de la Nueva Granada en el siglo XVI (Bogotá: Archivo General de la Nación, 1999)
20. See "Bargaining for Absolutism," 189 n. 50
21. J. Marchena concludes that "maintaining the military structure generated an immense economic activity, which was very important within the general context of the financial and commercial development of the colonies" (our translation). J. Marchena, "La financiación militar en Indias, introducción a su estudio," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 36 (1979): 110
22. These were old features of the imperial defense finances according to G. Cespedes del Castillo, "La defensa militar del istmo de Panamá a fines del siglo XVII y comienzos del XVIII," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 9 (1952)
23. Interestingly, both authors blame the inefficacy of Spanish military might on the shortage of money, the lack of provision, and the limited resources rather than analyzing where the money really went. Cespedes del Castillo, "La defensa militar," 262, 264, 266, 274. See also Allan J. Kuethe, "The Development of the Cuban Military as a Sociopolitical Elite, 1763-83," Hispanic American Historical Review 61, no. 4 (1981): 695-704
24. Regina Grafe and Maria Alejandra Irigoin, "The Political Economy of the Spanish Imperial Rule Revisited" (paper presented at the conference Economic Growth: Genealogy in the Shadow of the Spanish Empire, Milan, 2007)
25. Patrick K. O'Brien, "The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660-1815," Economic History Review 41, no. 1 (1998): 1-32
26. Instead they spent about 44 percent on civilian wages and other expenditures, which went back directly into the local economy. See Grafe and Irigoin, "The Political Economy of the Spanish Imperial Rule."
27. Carlos Marichal, La bancarrota del virreinato: Nueva España y las finanzas del imperio español, 1780-1810 (Mexico: El Colegio de México / Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999). See chap. 3 and appendix 3 for details on conditions and collaterals of non-interest-bearing loans (suplementos) to the crown, which was in dire need of funding for the war efforts after 1780
28. Grafe and Irigoin, "The Spanish Empire and Its Legacy," 255
29. Stephan R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300-1750 (London: Routledge, 2000). We are particularly grateful to Bill Summerhill for bringing Larry Epstein's contributions to the discussion and for allowing us to acknowledge our great debt to his work and incisive comments, which inspired us to write this paper
30. Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, "Constitution and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England," Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4(1989): 803-32
31. Whereas this is a valid suggestion, most social scientist and economic historians tend to operate in a bipolar world. J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer, "Princes and Merchants: European City Growth before the Industrial Revolution," Journal of Law and Economics 36 (1993): 671-702
32. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990)
33. Attempts to use more complex scales have failed for the early modern period because of lack of data. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, "Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation," American Economic Review 91, no. 5 (2001): 1369-401
34. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James R. Robinson, "Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution," Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, no. 4 (2002): 1237-94. Hence authors fall back on dichotomist specifications, for example Mark Dincecco, "Political Regimes and Sovereign Credit Risk in Europe, 1750-1913" (Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, 2007)
35. The positive impact of parliamentary constraints on growth through lower interest rates in the private market have also been shown not to hold historically, because there is little evidence that private interest rates reacted to the premiums paid by the crown. See Gregory Clark, "The Political Foundations of Modern Economic Growth: England, 1540-1800," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 26, no. 4 (1996): 563-88
36. S. Quinn, "Goldsmith-Banking: Mutual Acceptance and Interbanker Clearing in Restoration London," Explorations in Economic History 34, no. 4 (1997): 411-32
37. Peter Temin and Hans-Joachim Voth, "Credit Rationing and Crowding Out during the Industrial Revolution: Evidence from Hoare's Bank, 1702-1862," Explorations in Economic History 42, no. 3 (2005): 325-48
38. Data from F. Ruiz Martín, "Crédito y banca: Comercio y transportes en la etapa del capitalismo mercantil," in Actas de las primeras jornadas de metodología aplicada de las ciencias históricas (1973) (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1975). Drelichman and Voth have recently argued that Spanish interest rates were low because the debt was actually sustainable throughout and that "defaults" were more often a relatively pain-free rescheduling than the consequence of a position that was fiscally unsustainable. M. Drelichman and J. Voth, "Lending to the 'Borrow from Hell': Debt Sustainability in the Age of Philip II" (Graduate School of Economics Conference on Financial Crisis, Barcelona, 2007)
39. Dincecco, "Political Regimes and Sovereign Credit Risk in Europe, 1750-1913."
40. The list of 15,000 people and institutions transferred to the colony by the British Navy on the occasion ranged from the Queen Mother to the Royal Library, including the court; the hierarchies of the army, navy, judiciary, and high treasury officials; and all institutions of governance. Leslie Bethell, "The Independence of Brazil," in The Independence of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 169-70
41. It would be impossible to list here all the relevant literature. On the almost simultaneous extinction of the institutions of governance and slavery, see Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000)
42. See also Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), which had not been published at the time of writing the article
43. For a description see Timothy Anna, Spain and the Loss of America (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983)
44. and J. Rodriguez, The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999)