Composite Monarchies

These were not unusual in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Spain and Portugal largely began their experience as colonial powers.Footnote ¹ At first sight, the Kingdom of Portugal’s territorial unity made it appear otherwise. Certainly, Portugal was not a composite monarchy in the same sense as Spain, which consisted of several kingdoms, principalities, and territories until the first Bourbon monarch forcibly united the Crowns of Castile and Aragon. On the other hand, the kingdom of Portugal shared with Spain a complexity of jurisdictions and sovereignties, such as those exercised by the secular nobility, the episcopate, the Military-Religious Orders and the towns, parallel to those of the crown. Both the Hispanic and Lusitanian Monarchies were ancien régime societies in which corporate loyalties and identities predominated, and in which the monarch acted as arbiter of this complex network. Continual negotiation subsisted between the unity represented by the Crown and the autonomy of the parts. For Spain, the overriding problem never ceased to be jurisdictional and monetary fragmentation. We might describe each of the two Monarchies as a unity of pluralities.Footnote ²

Even though the Crown shared jurisdiction with a wide range of estates and corporations, it could not be entirely ignored. Colonial and metropolitan administrations had somehow to find equilibrium in order that the overseas territories should continue their business as peacefully as possible. The “state” in colonial Brazil, for instance, sought sporadically to assert its authority amongst a labyrinth of competing interests. As Schwartz points out, it allowed dominant social groups to control resources in so far as this remained compatible with the interests of those in power in the metropolis.Footnote ³ An example of such a criss-cross of interests would be the tactical alliance of Brazilian planters with Portuguese merchants anxious to limit the influence of the nobility in the circles of power in Lisbon.

In practice, effective authority depended on the capabilities of each monarch, viceroy, and captain general. These latter worked closely with the municipalities, which regulated local trades and, as best they could, the food supply.Footnote ⁴ Amadori draws attention to the perennial problem of enforcing or persuading obedience to the royal executive in Madrid. Olivares met resistance at every level in his attempts to rationalize the administrative structure of the Monarchy and speed-up the processes of enforcement, in response to Spain’s urgent European commitments after 1621. Negotiation frequently characterized the way power was exercised. In effect, social interests permeated royal administration, making it distinctly porous. Little possibility existed of isolating the Council of the Indies and the American audiencias from their social context.Footnote ⁵

Eighteenth-century governments faced similar problems. Although commercial and administrative reforms set a course for tighter political control and increased revenues, American interest groups were even stronger and more entrenched than they had been in the Habsburg era. Nevertheless, the royal government was able to introduce a range of reforms, though it encountered opposition, subversion, delaying tactics, and indifference. Metropolitan ministers ultimately took the decision to confront the most powerful corporations, the Consulados of Cádiz, Mexico City, and Lima, purge the audiencias of local interests, bring financial administration under closer supervision, and control the municipalities. Such policies had mixed results. Although government, on the whole, was neither stultifying nor oppressive, its policies were frequently contradictory and unsystematic. Much depended on the competition for power within the courts and ministries of Madrid or Lisbon. Even so, many ministers and colonial administrators proved to be of the highest standard in terms of education and capabilities.

In Spain and Portugal, relations between government and nobility took different directions. In Spain, the Bourbons still employed senior noblemen, as individuals, in the highest positions of state, including the officer corps and the diplomatic service, but they promoted lesser and provincial notables alongside them. Charles III’s government did this strikingly by attacking the career base for the higher nobility in the university higher colleges. Leading ministers from the 1770s onward came more from the professional classes, many of them lesser nobles, rather than grandees. American viceroys and Intendants, furthermore, usually came from military backgrounds under the Bourbons.Footnote ⁶ In Portugal, by contrast, hierarchy within the nobiliar estate crystalized upward, and the polarity between Court and provincial nobilities increased. High civil, military, and ecclesiastical offices, at least until the time of Pombal from 1750 to 1777, tended to be concentrated in the senior nobility, which held most positions on the governing Councils. Noblemen, including the middle-ranking fidalgos, also staffed the governorships and captaincies of the overseas territories, including the office of Governor-General of Portuguese America. Yet, the same tendency toward the selection of military officers apparent in the Hispanic Monarchy could also be seen in the Lusitanian Monarchy during the eighteenth century. In fact, service in Brazil, Angola, or India, unpopular as it generally was, often contributed to promotion within the ascending scales of government.Footnote ⁷

How absolute was Absolutism?

Responses from governments to the political and religious turmoil across most of Western and Central Europe from the 1520s to the 1640s led to the construction of a juridical basis for absolute monarchy, in which the basic text was Bodin (1529–96), Six livres de la République. Absolutism in the historical sense signified the king’s release from constraints imposed upon him by the corporations of the realm – nobility, clergy, provinces or realms, and towns – and, in the Iberian context, from the corporately structured Cortes, the representative body inherited from the Middle Ages. In Habsburg Spain, the Cortes met at royal summons until the accession of Charles II in 1665 and sporadically under the Bourbons after 1700, though only to ratify hereditary succession, as in 1760 and 1789, when the Cortes last met under the ancien régime.Footnote ⁸

The monarch in both Spain and Portugal remained, however, subject to divine law and the “fundamental laws of the realm,” swearing to respect them at accession. These latter were the codified laws and charters of privilege (“fueros” in Spanish; foros in Portuguese), which established the juridical relationship of the constituted bodies of each kingdom or principality, with the nobility and Church at the head, to the king and to one another. The doctrine originated, in part, in the belief that royal power was delegated by God to the monarch. This entailed mutual obligations by the monarch and the religious authorities to sustain one another. The king’s principal function was still to see that justice was dispensed.Footnote ⁹

Repeated obstruction by local or privileged interest groups generally led to modification of government policy or outright frustration of the desired goals. Tenacious adherence to “the fundamental laws of the realm” provided the principal means of curbing royal power. Portillo, however, points out that none of the Spanish political thinkers discussing the future constitutional form of the Spanish dominions – Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos, Antoni Capmany, Álvaro Flórez Estrada, Francisco Martínez Marina – ever explained how the proposed revival of the “traditional constitution” of rights and privileges deriving from the medieval Hispanic kingdoms might be applied to the Americas, that is, to the whole Monarchy, rather than just the peninsula.Footnote ¹⁰

The principal difference between absolute monarchies and parliamentary systems was that in the latter the representative body exercised a determining control over the raising of taxation. The gradual – and often interrupted – growth of royal power at certain points in the Castilian Middle Ages had already occasioned the imposition of the sales-tax, the alcabala, from 1342. Despite this, monarchs and ministers regularly ran into financial difficulties, most notably during the 1640s and 1650s, and were unable to implement the policies they wished in part or in full.Footnote ¹¹

In the Spanish peninsula, the component kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon, including the Principality of Catalonia, retained their distinct institutions and practices throughout the Habsburg era. Philip V’s Nueva Planta decrees of 1707–16, however, submerged their representation into the Castilian Cortes as punishment for opposition to the new Bourbon dynasty during the War of Succession. The Kingdom of Navarra and the three other Basque Provinces kept their institutions and privileges, since they had not been compromised.Footnote ¹²

Absolutism in practice was more precarious than the term would suggest. Real power often proved to be tenuous, since the business of government required a range of ministers and subordinate officials to administer the state and assuage the array of interests that pressed their cases at court. This may be described in the following way:

Considerable leeway was left to the administrative agencies in the Americas. The viceregal courts in Mexico City and Lima exercised broad powers of patronage. This enabled the viceroys to co-opt a wide range of interests into their networks of power.Footnote ¹⁴ Local élites implicitly played a significant role in the political processes as they did at the apex of the social structure:

The American viceroys were, as Cañeque states, the king’s living image, rather than the head of a centralized colonial bureaucracy emanating from a political center. American government, then, did not take the form of an unbroken chain of command: on the contrary, political power was dispersed throughout the system, while the king’s authority remained “absolute.” This “dispersion” of power meant that metropolitan and royal authority in the localities and at the level of the Indian pueblos remained in practice relatively weak.Footnote ¹⁶

While it is true that the viceroys presided over “courts,” their powers were never clearly defined. Competing authorities and hierarchies in the Church, the Inquisition, the audiencias, and cabildos counterbalanced, though rarely countermanded, viceregal authority. In New Spain, outright conflict within this ruling élite in 1624, 1647, and 1692 did gravely compromise viceregal power. Cañeque convincingly argues that this competition for power had nothing to do with formal or informal checks and balances but derived from a combination of the Hispanic political inheritance and American realities. The audiencia was a Castilian institution, which right from the first decades stood at the core of administration in the Indies. However, its constitutional relationship with the viceroy, who did not appoint its magistrates, and with the city councils, which arose originally from among American residents, remained largely undefined.Footnote ¹⁷

Bourbon monarchs were wedded to the idea of reinforcing the absolute power of the Crown and its governing organs, stressing the divine origin of royal sovereignty. This policy affected the Indies as much as peninsular Spain. Evident in the reigns of Philip V and Ferdinand VI (1746–59), this tendency became considerably more pronounced under Charles III (1759–88). The objective was to tighten metropolitan control and reinforce peninsular supremacy. We can speculate concerning what might have happened had the metropolitan government decided upon the opposite course of action, namely the institutionalizing of American penetration of governing agencies through some form of limited home government within the framework of the Monarchy and in accordance with its juridical structure. In such a way, men educated in the Indies or shaped by the experience of everyday life would have constituted the effective governing cadres, regardless of whether they were of Spanish peninsular or creole origin. Instead, Charles III’s ministries controversially opted to do the opposite.Footnote ¹⁸

By the nature of the Iberian monarchies, neither the Braganza nor the Bourbon dynasty intended to eliminate the corporate juridical structures of society, but, where they could, to subordinate them, including the Church, to royal and ministerial objectives.Footnote ¹⁹ Religious symbolism and ritual gave legitimacy to the dynasties in Spain and Portugal, and instilled a sentiment of loyalty in their subjects. Since this divine infusion also guaranteed existing networks of respect and obedience beyond the structures of the state, little force was necessary in maintaining imperial rule. Most rebellions, even recognized the authority of King and Church.

Once the Holy Office of the Inquisition began to function in both Monarchies, it quickly acquired a bureaucracy of its own, plus a circle of lay officers, instilled an atmosphere of distrust, opened the way for calumny, and stifled the exchange of opinions through fear of anonymous denunciation, confiscation of property, and imprisonment.Footnote ²⁰ No such formal institution, however, was ever established in Portuguese America. For that reason, the Brazils acquired a reputation of greater safety for the spread of ideas and the clandestine practice of variant religions. Pombal went some way to clip the public significance of the Inquisition by abolishing the open-air drama of the acts of penitence (autos da fé) in 1773–74.Footnote ²¹ Bourbon monarchs and their ministers, for their part, would have liked to exercise tighter state control over the Inquisition but they did not dare risk a direct assault.Footnote ²² The constitutional position of the Holy Office never ceased to be a troublesome matter for viceroys and bishops, who frequently complained that it did not seem to be controlled by anyone. The Inquisition could hardly be regarded as an expression of state control, since it often seemed to be a rival power to the viceregal administration, opening dangerous divisions at the top level of political life.Footnote ²³

The Council of Castile remained the superior authority in the Spanish administration, its powers reinforced whenever it met together with other Councils in the form of an Extraordinary Council. Such a body could issue orders of restraint, requiring “silence and obedience,” whenever the government wished to obviate public discussion of a controversial policy. This it did in 1767, when the Crown took the decision to expel the Society of Jesus from all its realms. It showed the capacity of absolutist government to act decisively on occasions, especially when civil and ecclesiastical authorities were united in a common purpose.Footnote ²⁴

During the 1770s and 1780s, a relative slackening of censorship enabled freer discussion of issues and the circulation of printed matter, some of it even imported. This period corresponded to the ministry’s adoption of certain principles associated with the European Enlightenment and their extension to the overseas territories. Several bishops, royal appointees, were themselves proponents of the new ideas and methods. The American Inquisitions began to appear less formidable, although customary practices of censorship and investigations of moral conduct continued. This situation lasted until the metropolitan government started to panic in 1789–90 at the reception of news from France. Revolutionary ideas emanating from Paris were seen as threats to the alliance of Throne and Altar, which was being dismantled in France.Footnote ²⁵

The Limits of Colonialism

As historical interest in the imperial experience of the Iberian powers deepened during the 1960s and 1970s, J. H. Parry identified three main characteristics of empire: first was the capacity of the metropolis to maintain control over its outlying or overseas territories, the second in terms of the economic and strategic benefits accruing to the metropolis from its colonies, and the third in the responsibility assumed by the metropolis for the defense and security of those territories.Footnote ²⁶ This present book draws attention to the difficulties Spain and Portugal faced as imperial metropoles. Kenneth Andrien, for instance, has argued that “the overall decline of Spain in Europe during the seventeenth century was due largely to the crown’s inability to increase its control over the economic resources of the Monarchy.”Footnote ²⁷

Despite the mercantilist tendencies of the two metropolitan governments, neither Spain nor Portugal was able to mobilize sufficient resources either to become the effective metropole of its empire or to prevent rival states from engaging in commerce, legal or otherwise, with these overseas possessions. Accordingly, “manufacturies” arose in practically all of their American continental dependencies. These responded to growing market demand in the internal trade, which has still not been given sufficient attention in the historical literature. We might describe this process as proto-industrialization, and it sprang up within the colonial system, complementary to rather than in opposition to whichever of the external trades predominated in any particular territory.Footnote ²⁸

From time to time, metropolitan governments instructed their overseas representatives to suppress these industries. Philip II (1556–98) had instructed Viceroy Francisco de Toledo of Peru in 1569 to put an end to them. After apprising himself of American needs, Toledo put the order to one side and, accepting realities, drew up his own regulations for the workshops in 1577, while seeking to improve working conditions. The king persisted but without success. In 1596, he instructed Viceroy Luis de Velasco to prohibit the establishment of new workshops but authorized those already in existence.Footnote ²⁹ Whether these decrees were intended to be serious attempts or simply repeated statements of principles, which could rarely, if ever, be put into effect, is difficult to assess. The reality was that production continued, whether in workshops (obrajes) producing woolens or in artisan domestic form, usually producing cottons, or in other commodities such as ironware, foodstuffs, alcoholic beverages, furniture, stocking or hat-making, or ancillary to sugar-production as basic refineries. The woolen textile industry of Quito competed with southern Andean cities for the Peruvian and Chilean markets. The Upper Peruvian mining city of Potosí took its textiles mainly from not-too-distant Cochabamba. In New Spain, woolen manufacture in Querétaro, in response to the expansion of markets in the center-north and north after c. 1740 encouraged Puebla to transfer primarily to cottons, the raw material taken from the Gulf and Pacific coasts. City merchants financed raw-material production, putting-out to artisan producers, and the final distribution.Footnote ³⁰

Many of the predominant groups in the Americas, irrespective of origin, came to hold, as we shall see, significant commercial and financial interests in such industries and in the distribution of their products, regardless of whether they also had interests in the external trades, mining or agriculture. Among leading producers in Querétaro, supplying the mining zones, were Tomás de Ecala and Pedro de Septiém, Subdelegate of nearby Celaya-Salvatierra in the Intendancy of Guanajuato from 1796 to 1810. Production doubled or trebled during the transatlantic war years in the 1790s and 1800s. In the Guanajuato towns of San Miguel el Grande and Acámbaro, the owners of obrajes were mainly merchants and among the wealthiest residents.Footnote ³¹

Portuguese America was no exception. It may come as a surprise, in view of the historiographical attention given to the plantation economy and the slavery tied to it, to discover that Brazil also experienced this phenomenon of protoindustrialization, despite the predominance of the export trade.Footnote ³² A range of activities, sometimes ancillary to the export trade, sprang up in coastal cities and through the interior. Sugar had to be refined before export and around 1800 refineries, often on plantations, existed by the end of the eighteenth century; gold had to be smelted into bars; slaves and free workers needed clothing and housing; furniture, carpentry, and vehicles were all needed; iron-making was vital in many spheres. Shipbuilding developed from the mid-seventeenth century, principally in Salvador but also in Pernambuco, Alagoas, and Pará during the following century. Caulking, cordage, and sail-making accompanied this. Cottons were produced in land-locked Minas Gerais even before the gold boom of the 1690s–1760s. The royal policy of exploring the river systems and founding townships along the river banks facilitated settlement, transportation, and commerce, assisted by knowledge of the timing and levels of flooding. Southern Bahia, the Amazonian river network with its focus on Belém do Pará, and the Paraguay River and Pantanal area became of primary importance in this respect. That brought the interior, such as Goiás and Cuiabá, and even the far west into the commercial orbit.Footnote ³³

Minas Gerais, which dropped out of the export trade across the Atlantic after the disintegration of the gold boom, became the major center of textile and iron-working. Initially, gold stimulated the deployment of capital and labor into industries for the local and interregional markets. Pombal’s projects for stimulating manufacture in the Portuguese homeland and his creation of three monopoly companies to develop Grão Pará-Maranhão in the Brazilian north, Pernambuco-Paraíba in the north-east, and whaling on the coast, did not lead to any metropolitan attempt to restrict or suppress colonial manufacturing. Within Minas Gerais, the large slave population, previously employed in gold-panning, was distributed among provincial industries. This province of around 320,000 inhabitants at the end of the eighteenth century accounted for one-fifth of Brazil’s total population, estimated at between 2.3 to 4 million inhabitants. It also had the largest concentration of slaves, which from the 1770s were employed in neither mining nor plantations, and this continued to be so after Independence under the post-1822 Brazilian Empire. An explanation for that lay in the abundance of available land, which attracted the free population away from hiring their labor.Footnote ³⁴

Into this situation of local proto-industrialization and interregional trade came the Royal Decree of January 5, 1785, prohibiting the manufacture of cottons, woolens, lines, silks, and embroidery, as well as iron-working. It arrived at a time when 30,000 spinners were at work in Minas Gerais alone. How the Crown proposed to enforce such a decree was entirely unclear and what effects it had, if any, still need to be explained. Although its issue pointed to an existing reality in Brazil, the Crown soon found that it needed to repeat the decree in 1788 and 1802, which suggests the difficulty of enforcement. We also need to know whether there was any connection between its arrival and the attempted rebellion in Minas Gerais in 1789. Whatever the case, the ministry, dominated by Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho during the 1790s, lifted the prohibition of iron-working in 1795. When in 1808 the royal family and government transferred to Brazil, the 1785 prohibition was lifted altogether and industry officially encouraged in the colony.Footnote ³⁵

In many respects, Portuguese home industry was hardly more advanced than Brazil’s, although it did benefit from a high tariff, which shielded it from more technically advanced British producers. Even so, market capacity in Brazil remained restricted, even after the freeing of external trade in 1808 and 1810. British textiles still had to pay tariffs. Accordingly, Brazilian industrial production survived the transition from colony to Independence well into the nineteenth century.

Magistrates in Government

The principal judicial and administrative organ of Spanish royal authority was the audiencia, a high court that acted as administrative and legislative organ as well. As the Castilian Crown extended its authority in the Indies, this organ became the crucial unit of government. The audiencia was meant to be the instrument of Castilian absolutism in the Americas. Appreciation of the importance of the audiencia, first established in Santo Domingo in 1511, is fundamental to any understanding of how the Hispanic Monarchy functioned overseas. As in Spain, the audiencia combined both administrative and judicial functions, but in the Americas it acted as the viceroy’s consultative committee (Real Acuerdo) and governed in the absence of a viceroy (the audiencia gobernadora). It also coordinated the fiscal bureaucracy through the position of its financial attorney (fiscal de Real Hacienda). The jurist, Juan de Solórzano Pereira (1575–1655), who from 1609 to 1627 acted as one of the magistrates (oidores) of the Audiencia of Lima, listed fourteen specific faculties of the Spanish American audiencias, all indicative of the court’s decisive political role.Footnote ³⁶

Colonial laws, finally codified in 1682 as the Laws of the Indies, specified that audiencia magistrates were not to marry into local families within the territory of their jurisdiction. In practice, however, several did, with the result that local legislation in 1627, 1634, and 1688 repeated the proviso, though evidently without much success.Footnote ³⁷ The result was heavy magisterial involvement in local society and its affairs. The discrepancy between theory and practice, law and reality, in Spanish America was outstanding. The whole system functioned for so long in the Americas because of the discrepancy. What happened in practice from day to day, receiving de facto sanction, enabled Spanish colonial America to sustain a delicate balance between despotism and anarchy. Should that tenuous equilibrium be removed, those latter tendencies could unpleasantly confront one another.

Solórzano argued that American audiencias had become more powerful than their peninsular progenitors. They acted as the principal administrative body and were the ultimate court of appeal before recourse to the Council of the Indies in Madrid. They supplied the senior members of the fiscal bureaucracy, were attached to the military command as judge advocates, exercised the Patronato real over ecclesiastical appointments, and one of their number performed the duty of judicial Protector of the Indians. Finally, they performed the judicial examination of district administrators at the end of their terms of office. Given this range of major functions, the Crown required regular scrutiny of their conduct in office.Footnote ³⁸

In Portuguese America, the situation was different. The Relação or High Court, modeled on the High Court of Oporto for northern Portugal and the Casa de Suplicação of Lisbon for the center, south, and Atlantic islands, was never as powerful as its Spanish American counterpart. In fact, only one existed in Portuguese America, the Relação of Bahia, belatedly established in 1606 under Habsburg rule, though not functioning between 1626 and 1652, when the north-east region was contested with the Dutch. Officially, ten magistrates dealt with civil cases, while an ouvidor geral (from 1696) heard criminal cases. The question remains why this should be so. The explanation may lie in the relative proximity of the enclave economy of coastal Brazil to the metropolis, in contrast to the inland locations of the Spanish American mainland. The relationship between the Governor-General of Brazil and the High Court was never satisfactorily resolved, despite the fact that both offices represented the Crown’s desire to increase its control over the American dependencies.Footnote ³⁹

The High Court of Bahia did not assume a governmental role in the absence of a Governor-general or exercise political powers comparable to the audiencias. A second American Relação began operations in 1752 in Rio de Janeiro in response to the volume of judicial business resulting from the gold discoveries in the interior. The crown, however, had first legislated for this in 1734, but it took eighteen further years for it to become a reality, largely because of the shortage of funds in Lisbon. When in 1763 the crown transferred the capital to the south-eastern city, the Viceroy (the title preferred for the Governor-General after 1720) presided over the High Court. Along with the Relação of Goa, established in 1544 as the first overseas Court, these three Relações remained the only ones in the empire until the establishment of a further two in Maranhão in 1812 and Pernambuco in 1821. These latter foundations reflected the presence of the Royal government in Rio de Janeiro between 1808 and 1821. With the abandonment of Lisbon to the Napoleonic Army, the Crown raised the Rio Relação to the status of the Casa de Suplicação, which in Lisbon had exercised supreme judicial power over all the High Courts.Footnote ⁴⁰

The struggle with the Dutch after 1624 for control of Brazilian sugar and the Portuguese rebellion against Habsburg rule in 1640 formed the background to the decision to establish an Overseas Council in Lisbon in 1642. Although modeled on the Spanish Council of the Indies, it reflected governmental intention to keep foreign competitors out of Brazil and salvage what was left of the Asiatic territories after Dutch spoliation. The Overseas Council, however, had to compete with existing councils, notably the Councils of State and Finance, and jurisdictions to determine the extent of its authority. The Relações fell under the jurisdiction of the Casa de Suplicação; ecclesiastical affairs were supervised by the Mesa da Consciência e Ordens, established in 1532; while the highest court in the Monarchy continued to be the Desembargo do Paço, appointing to all judicial offices.Footnote ⁴¹

The Portuguese and Hispanic monarchies shared the practice of appointing men with experience in various overseas territories to councils and courts. The Lisbon Overseas Council proved to be no exception, since those with experience in Brazil, Africa, or Asia held positions on it. Magistrates of the Spanish American audiencias, for their part, might look for promotion to the Council of the Indies in Madrid, although they would not always be successful in so doing. Myrup calculates that 146 individuals, whether noblemen or lawyers, manned the Overseas Council during the almost two centuries of its existence. Nobles predominated from 1643 until 1700, whereas lawyers formed the majority from 1751 until 1807, an indication of preference for professionals, especially for those with prior experience on the Casa de Suplicação. He makes the significant point that Portuguese lawyers “never gained the prestige and power of their Spanish counterparts and cannot necessarily be considered a separate lettered class.”Footnote ⁴²

In both Monarchies, we should be wary of assuming that those who manned the formal institutions in the overseas territories constituted a caste apart from the local élites. Myrup’s central argument concerning the function of local power networks and their wider linkages not only corroborates other studies of the Lusitanian Monarchy but also provides a viable basis of comparison with the Hispanic Monarchy, at least until the second half of the eighteenth century. Patronage networks of varying types, such as those that Cañeque has identified as stemming from the viceregal court in Mexico City, and personal relationships complemented the formal institutions. Such linkages bound the Portuguese Monarchy together, thereby enabling its long survival through tempestuous times.Footnote ⁴³ Mercantile, financial, and family linkages were not exactly informal; they were conventional, involving trust earned through knowledge and personal contacts.Footnote ⁴⁴ Beneficiaries of such linkages wanted government to bend in their direction.

Families, Properties, Offices, Business

Incoming peninsular officials tended to become co-opted into these American networks, the members of which often had different ways of thinking to metropolitan policy-makers. If in-coming administrators wished to avoid conflict – and most did – they would have to take these interests and views into consideration. The financial and military capacity of metropolitan Spain and Portugal rarely permitted direct repression. Instead, the long duration of Iberian rule in the Americas may be explained more by negotiation than by force or fear.Footnote ⁴⁵

Members of the Hispanic-American élite found informal ways of gaining access to positions technically reserved for peninsulares. The municipal councils of Mexico City and Puebla, however, failed in 1636 and 1637 to persuade Olivares that one-half of audiencia positions in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Guatemala, and Manila should be reserved for Americans in return for a vote of funds. Although Atlantic transit between Spain and the Indies considerably diminished in the periods from 1606–10 and 1646–50, the American Empire did not drift apart. Even when Spain was at its weakest, between the 1650s and the 1680s, the Monarchy as a whole remained intact. Delgado Riba argues for the successful establishment of equilibrium between governmental objectives and colonial interests, that is, between official policy and local perceptions.Footnote ⁴⁶

Metropolitan financial needs in the long run overruled prohibitions. Between 1701 and 1750, the Crown appointed 108 Americans to 136 audiencia positions in Lima. In 1767, eight of the twelve oidores (magistrates) in the Audiencia of Mexico were Americans.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such a situation suggests that it might have been more rewarding to reformulate Spanish monarchical government in the Americas less in terms of absolutist theory and more with respect to what was actually happening on the spot.

Traditionally, audiencia positions had not been up for sale. Sales had, however, taken place. Proof of this was the Crown’s prohibition of sales of judicial and fiscal offices in 1689. The financial needs of the war against France led to royal permission for sales in 1692. Philip V, inheriting a hard-pressed treasury, sold both vacant positions and the rights to future offices. The Crown also created a fluid number of “supernumaries” and auctioned access to them. These individuals would then have the right to take places that subsequently became vacant. The largest number of sales took place in 1706–11, grim war years, and in 1740–50, during the War of the Austrian Succession and its aftermath. Between 1707 and 1711, seven Americans born in New Spain purchased judicial office on the Audiencia of Mexico. During the 1740s, one half of the membership of the Audiencia of Mexico consisted of Americans. By 1750, the Crown had earned one million pesos from the sale of one-quarter of all American audiencia positions.Footnote ⁴⁸

Family and commercial networks penetrated senior and junior administrative positions. Joseph Joaquín de Uribe y Castrejón, for instance, was a product of the Colegio Mayor del Arzobispo in the University of Salamanca. Appointed oidor of the Audiencia of Mexico in 1701, he took a Mexican wife, a hacienda-owner in the Puebla district of Huejotzingo. By 1716, Uribe had become the owner of the Hacienda de San Juan Molina and the Rancho de Aitic in the Tlaxcala district of Iztacuixtla, with adjacent mills. He became alcalde mayor of Puebla between 1723 and 1726. A royal license on December 22, 1734 permitted the married couple to found an entailed estate from their joint properties. Uribe died in 1738 on another of his properties, the Hacienda de Atoyac in Puebla. The Archbishop-Viceroy’s report on his death to the metropolitan government apparently saw no reason to mention the late oidor’s matrimonial and property connection, perhaps because they were not unusual. Uribe’s three daughters married men holding administrative positions. The first married into the Lardizábal family; the second’s husband became an oidor of the Audiencia of Guadalajara in 1740; the third married into a Venezuelan cacao-planting family, and her husband, son of the Marqués del Toro, purchased the office of oidor supernumerario in the Audiencia of Mexico in 1741, and took office two years later. Joseph Rodríguez del Toro, born in 1715 and educated at the University of Salamanca, still held this office in 1770, when his daughter married, with special royal license, the Corregidor of Oaxaca (1769–74), Pedro de Pineda. One of Uribe’s sons married the daughter of Domingo Válcarcel, alcalde del crimen (from 1728) and oidor of the Audiencia of Mexico (from 1736).Footnote ⁴⁹

Valcárcel had been a product of the Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso at the University of Alcalá de Henares. His father and grandfather had served on the Council of Castile. From his position as oidor in Mexico, Valcárcel purchased a royal dispensation to marry in 1732 the daughter of the Conde de Santiago de Calimaya, one of the Mexican nobility, whose title originated in 1616. Viceroy Conde de Revillagigedo the Elder (1746–55) described Valcárcel, candidate for promotion to the Council of the Indies, as too involved in Mexican family interests to have an impartial judgment. His wife, in any case, opposed transfer to the peninsula. Valcárcel retired in 1778.Footnote ⁵⁰

The Lardizábal family descended from Colonel Miguel de Lardizábal, a Basque immigrant from Guipúzcoa, whose four sons made good marriages and secured high positions. His first son married the daughter of the President of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo. Their son, born in Veracruz in 1733, became alcalde mayor of Tehuantepec in 1766. Lardizábal’s second son became senior councilor on the Council of the Indies; his third son, José Antonio Lardizábal y Elorza, became Bishop of Puebla in 1723–33. The fourth son, Francisco, married into the Uribe family of landowners in Tlaxcala and Puebla. He was the father of two brothers who would gain importance during the crisis years of the Monarchy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Manuel de Lardizábal y Uribe, born at the Hacienda de San Juan Molino, rose to become fiscal of the Council of Castile under Charles IV. Miguel de Lardizábal y Uribe, born in Puebla, represented Mexico on the Supreme Central Junta in 1809, which led Spanish Patriot resistance to Napoleonic rule in Spain. He was a member of the First Regency Council of 1810–11, a bitter opponent of the Liberals in the Constituent Cortes of 1810–13, and duly became Ferdinand VII’s Minister of the Indies in 1814–15, at the beginning of the first restored absolutist regime.Footnote ⁵¹

Many peninsulares married American wives and thereby integrated into their families. Robert Ferry has drawn attention to the habit in Venezuelan landed and business families of seeking immigrant husbands from Spain for their American daughters in the case of Caracas and its agricultural zone. In such a way, they hoped to distinguish the family and at the same time bring in further commercial contacts.Footnote ⁵² Although Venezuela was not one of Spain’s principal American territories, cacao production from the 1630s to 1740s had created substantial fortunes among hacienda-owners in the Province of Caracas, using African slave labor, through the lucrative trade to New Spain and the contraband trade to Dutch Curaçao. The metropolitan government’s efforts to re-channel trade toward the peninsula by creating the monopoly Guipúzcoa Company in 1728 and forcing down prices aroused hostility among a range of planters. A brief protest movement in 1749 was treated as rebellion and repressed in 1750–53, with long-lasting and bitter memories. The élites salvaged their position by coming to an accommodation with the Ensenada administration in Madrid.Footnote ⁵³

Credit and family ties tended to be interconnected; they lay at the heart of these linkages. Merchants in the Hispanic dominions acquired a range of interests, which extended from import of European goods through Veracruz or Callao to the financing of mine-production, the textile trades, and internal commerce. Essentially, the interests of the networks operating in Spanish America were American-oriented; merchants of peninsula origin did not usually aspire to return to the peninsula in the way senior ecclesiastics or administrators did in order to further their careers. Mercantile interests spread through New Spain, for example, and outwards from Mexico City during the course of the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁵⁴

Eighteenth-century linkages broadened and deepened in response to population recovery and the growth of the economy. In New Spain, which provided the most striking instance of both, merchant-financiers took the lead in forming contracts and associations, not only with one another but also throughout the economy and the royal administration. Francisco Ignacio de Yraeta was one of the most important figures. His company involved two other key Spanish merchants, José de Yraeta and Gabriel de Iturbe, both of Basque origin. This company regularly traded with commercial houses in Cádiz and with two in Bilbao, although not as their subordinates. The company also operated the sugar refinery of San Nicolás Tolentino in the Puebla district of Izúcar, the largest of the Hispanic properties in the area. Since the sugar plantation was surrounded by Indian pueblo lands, there were constant disputes between the proprietors and the villagers over land usage and access to the waters of the Río Atoyac, especially from the 1790s. Yraeta at that time had become interested in the techniques employed in sugar production in Cuba.Footnote ⁵⁵ This merchant also had financial and commercial interests in Oaxaca through the mediation of the district administrators. Yraeta and his heirs traded along the Pacific coast, above all to Guayaquil and Callao, across the Pacific to Manila, and through the Caribbean to Havana, New Orleans, and other positions. They exported Oaxacan cochineal dye and Guatemalan indigo, and marketed the cotton cloth of the Oaxaca sierra. Rumor had it that they also took part in the clandestine trade with British Jamaica.Footnote ⁵⁶

Iturbe and Iraeta happened to be the only two Mexico City merchants in favor of the metropolitan government’s comercio libre policy. It is not entirely clear why this should be so. Evidently, they did not feel threatened by it, as did most members of the Consulado. Perhaps the scale of their operations secured them from unexpected reverses of fortune. In the port of Veracruz, Iraeta’s contacts were Pedro Miguel de Echeverría and Francisco Guerra y Agreda, who would become leading members of the newly established Consulado there after 1795. Their commercial interests within New Spain extended to the struggling Oaxaca mining industry, which operated on a much smaller scale than the industry of central and north-central Mexico. In Oaxaca, they did business with the Yrizar brothers and Colonel Victores de Manero, dependent of Juan María García, business associate of Fausto de Corres, alcalde mayor of the cochineal district of Miahuatlán, south of the central valleys of Oaxaca. Iraeta guaranteed the financial operations of García and Manero in Mexico City, while these two merchants attended to the payment or collection of Iraeta’s bills of exchange in Oaxaca. Iraeta’s main contact in Oaxaca, over three decades, was Alonso Magro, from 1769 to 1797. Magro, with his political base on the city council in the 1770s and 1780s, was one of the city’s most powerful merchants. He became the Consulado of Mexico’s agent in the city in 1793. Pablo Ortega, alcalde mayor of Villa Alta from 1784 to 1789, subsequently acted as Iraeta’s business administrator in the cotton-textile trade for the Bajío and the mining districts. This would be continued by Bernardino Bonavía, Subdelegate under the Intendant system from 1790 to 1796. Magro, for his part, played the role of intermediary between Iraeta and the Guatemalan merchants and the cacao traders of Soconusco.Footnote ⁵⁷

Another peninsular merchant of Oaxaca, Tomás López Ortigosa, similarly had an extensive commercial network. He imported European textiles through Veracruz and re-exported them to Guatemala, where his business associate was none other than the Marqués de Aycinena, the most powerful merchant in that Kingdom. López Ortigosa also imported iron products from Vizcaya through Veracruz for use in the mines at Ixtepejí, in the sierra north of Oaxaca City. The return cargo would be cochineal dye from the Pacific district of Jicayán.Footnote ⁵⁸

Local Élites and Municipalities

Town and city councils became expressions of local élite interests. The royal authorities in both Monarchies sought to control them as best they could at long distance. The municipalities reflected ancien régime juridical and political structures, since they boasted royal charters and delineations of privileges. The town authorities in Spain collected the indirect and consumption taxes upon which the royal government so greatly depended.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is important to throw the focus on their American counterparts because they weathered the crisis of the colonial regime through the 1810s and early 1820s, although not unchanged.

Municipalities (senados da câmara) in the Portuguese imperial world generally acquired greater political weight than their Spanish American counterparts (cabildos or ayuntamientos), largely because of the long absence of higher bureaucratic and judicial structures in the former. C. R. Boxer compared the Spanish and Portuguese colonial municipalities in the following way:

The Portuguese Crown initiated the process of regulating the municipal councils in the Lusitanian Monarchy in accordance with its General Rules of 1504. This provided for the annual election by ballot of their members – but in the presence of a royal magistrate. Outside Portugal, the overseas councils were modeled on those of Lisbon and Oporto, and they had the right to correspond with the Crown directly, rather than through the governors of provinces or viceroy. There would be fifteen of these ouvidores in each of the Brazilian provincial Captaincies. In many respects, the Crown sought to counterbalance the senados da câmara and the senior royal officials. The councils, for instance, had a marked tendency to encroach on functions technically the preserve of the royal administration and judiciary, resulting in a repeated jockeying for position. In Brazil, the functions of the senado da câmara also extended to slave control.Footnote ⁶¹

In both empires, royal officials might come and go, as they followed their career patterns throughout their respective Monarchy’s territories, including those of the peninsula. Municipal councils, however, always remained and with a certain amount of continuity of personnel. Russell-Wood rightly stresses the municipal councils’ stabilizing effect:

Portuguese merchants in Bahia were involved in the processes of sugar production by extending credit to planters and overseeing marketing. Their capacity for diversification through the various sectors of the local economy, from sugar refining-plants to urban-property ownership, remained a striking feature. Activities such as these helped to explain the absorption of merchants into the landed elites. The Crown specifically stated in 1740 that merchants were eligible for municipal and bureaucratic office. In the municipal councils of Bahia, they gained greater influence in the latter part of the eighteenth century. There were some 150 merchants, most of them of Portuguese origin, in Salvador, out of a total city population of around 7000. A large proportion (c. 45 percent) were converted Jews (cristais nôvos). Such diversification helps to explain why the Portuguese colonial councils were never as closed as the oligarchies dominating Spanish American municipalities until at least the latter part of the eighteenth century. The Portuguese Crown’s insistence that Portuguese-born residents should have an equal footing on the electoral lists to Brazilians significantly needed to be repeated at least three times, in 1709, 1711, and 1746.Footnote ⁶³ As the gold boom from the 1690s onward drew population inland, the Crown authorized the establishment of municipal councils in the interior provinces of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, and Goiás and inland in Bahia. The two Minas Gerais towns of Vila Rica (the future Ouro Preto from 1823) and Sabará, for instance, received councils in 1711.Footnote ⁶⁴

The municipalities appointed ordinary justices (juízes ordinarios) to cope with local cases. The Portuguese Crown, however, instituted a higher level above them, in order to prevent collusion between existing administrators and the principal families of Bahía. The first was the juíz de fora of Salvador in 1695, the title implying an appointment from “outside.” Others would follow in Olinda, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro. In the following year, the crown sought even greater control over the Salvador municipality by authorizing the Relação to select its members. Relations between the municipality and the High Court, located in the same city, had for long been uneven, although the cost of referring cases to Lisbon outweighed opposition to having a High Court in Brazil. Similarly, in 1696, the Crown appointed an ouvidor geral to supervise judicial administration in the Captaincy of Bahía. Others followed in response to repeated unruliness in the mining zones and on the expanding southern and western frontiers, but soon there appeared to be a conspiracy between royal officials and freebooters to disobey laws emanating from above. By 1714, there were four in Minas Gerais.Footnote ⁶⁵

The degree of effective royal supervision varied according to empire and to the social and economic utility of the component provinces. A Spanish official, the corregidor, convened and presided over the cabildos, with the intention of denying the élites free control of political space. This official became the essential channel for the assertion of royal control. Although viceroys generally appointed them, the Crown reserved the right to appoint to the most important corregimientos, such as Mexico City and Zacatecas, Cuzco and Arequipa. The royal government codified regulations in the Laws of the Indies.Footnote ⁶⁶ Even so, the city council of Mexico City was controlled, by the late 1620s, by a tightly knit group of families, who had inherited or purchased their offices. The seventeenth-century councilors of Popayán in southern New Granada had either purchased their offices from the Crown or been elected (annually) by proprietary members and outgoing councilors. By the 1630s, leading families were in control there, even though the composition of the council still fluctuated, since membership, which was honorary, proved to be inconvenient for landowners and long-distance traders.Footnote ⁶⁷ In 1696, the Lisbon government attempted to clip the freedom of action of the senados da câmara by specifying that councilors were to be annually selected by governors on the basis of three-yearly voting lists by heads of households. A royal-appointee would preside over the councils.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Example of the City of Puebla

In Puebla, a city that was in this respect no exception, an intimate relationship between landowning families, merchants, and municipal office-holders developed from an early date. We could compare it, for instance, with the capital city of the Kingdom of Guatemala, or with Medellín in New Granada.Footnote ⁶⁹ Situated in the heart of what had been a densely populated area of indigenous villages at the time of Conquest, the city of Puebla lay relatively close to Mexico City. A Hispanic foundation, Puebla had its own characteristics and networks, which prevented it from ever becoming a subsidiary of Mexico City. Its immediate linkage was to the port of Veracruz, and thence to Havana and Spain. Several other major cities – Jalapa, Orizaba, Córdoba – stood along the two routes to Veracruz, each with their own councils, principal families, and connections. The economic interests of its city notables explain this clearly when we look at textile production in New Spain and the areas of cotton supply on the Gulf and Pacific coasts.Footnote ⁷⁰

By 1797, the city of Puebla reached an estimated total of 52,717 inhabitants. The Intendancy, established in 1786, contained as many as 811,285 inhabitants, of which around two-thirds were officially classified as “Indians.” The diocese, extending beyond the Intendancy boundaries, yielded the second largest revenues after the Archdiocese of Mexico. The large number of haciendas (764) suggested small or medium size, especially since there were even more ranches (911) formed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on less fertile soil on the highland slopes. The main cereal zones lay in the central valleys. The towns of Huejotzingo and Atlixco, both with a mild climate and access to water, produced the best wheat and attracted Hispanic settlement.Footnote ⁷¹

Puebla’s connection with the upland city of Orizaba and the port of Veracruz explained the careers of several of its key merchants. Joseph de Bringas Manzaneda and Pablo Escandón, merchants from Orizaba, joined the Puebla élite in the 1760s and 1790s, respectively. The former’s marriage into the Puebla family of José Antonio de Ravanillo, another merchant, deepened his business activities. Ravanillo’s financial guarantor had been Francisco Lardizábal y Elorza, the Bishop’s brother. Escandón originated from Asturias, arriving in New Spain in his twenties during the 1790s. He married into Jalapa’s Garmendia family, which administered the Royal Tobacco monopoly. His principal activity was investment in cotton cultivation in three of the Gulf coast districts. He became town councilor and constable (alcalde ordinario) of Orizaba and captain of the Patriotic Militia during the counterinsurgency of the 1810s. In Puebla, he became consular deputy and a leader of the business community, along with Joaquín Haro y Portillo, future deputy to the Madrid Cortes in 1820. The latter had come from Santander on the Cantabrian coast of northern Spain in 1777 and married into the long-established Tamariz family of Puebla in 1797. Haro owned five estates of his own and acquired control of his wife’s entail in the maize-producing district of Tepeaca plus a flour mill and bakery. He held municipal office in Puebla from 1802 until his death in 1825. By 1807, he had become one of Puebla’s principal cotton dealers, importing from the Gulf zone, and distributing cotton textiles. The Escandóns continued to be active businessmen well into the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷²

The Ovando family entail of four Tepeaca haciendas dated from 1728. This family had a tradition of municipal office-holding: Agustín Ovando, born in Puebla in 1745, held office in 1773–92 and his son, Joaquín, was elected constable for 1797–98. He was one of the 140 estate-owners and merchants who, in 1811, contributed a substantial sum toward the maintenance of the “Volunteers of Ferdinand VII” for the defense of the city against encroaching insurgents.Footnote ⁷³ James Furlong, a Catholic refugee from Belfast in the 1760s, married in Puebla in 1772. His son, José Sebastián, city councilor in 1811–12, was listed in 1813 as a leading merchant and owned a bakery. His grandson, Vicente, became an alcalde ordinario in 1818, 1823, and 1824, serving also as a militia captain. Patricio and Cosme Furlong both became Governors of the State of Puebla under the First Federal Republic, the former in 1829 and 1833, the latter in 1834 and 1853. Patricio had been one of eight city councilors in 1823.Footnote ⁷⁴

Combatting the Insurgency, members of the Puebla élite assisted in managing the transfer from Spanish dependency to independent state after 1821, staffing not only the city council but also the institutions of the Federal Republic, while continuing to uphold their business interests. The ease with which peninsular merchants merged into the prominent families never ceases to impress. Continuity over several generations points to an integrated and self-renewing élite, perhaps in contrast to a perceived instability in the mining districts further to the north of Mexico City.

The Business Communities of Peru

In the Viceroyalty of Peru (before the division of the Perus in 1776), the dominant nexus was between the mercantile community of Lima, as creditors, and the silver-miners of Potosí in Upper Peru.

The vital sub-link was the mercury mine of Huancavelica in Lower Peru for the so-called amalgamation (or “patio”) process in extracting silver from the ore. Related to this central-southern Andean complex were the cereal and clothing suppliers of Cuzco (Lower Peru) and Cochabamba and other Upper Peruvian localities. Cotton came from the Santa Cruz district in the eastern lowlands beyond the Andean chain.Footnote ⁷⁶ Marks argues for a division between Atlantic and Pacific interests in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: “metropolitan merchants” – ship-owners and agents largely resident in Spain, though sometimes in Lima for long periods, had direct ties with the Consulado of Cádiz; “limeño merchants,” by contrast, were Lima residents, usually peninsulares, many of whom had crossed over to Peru in the 1750s and 1760s, primarily engaged in the Pacific trade. By the 1780s, their leading figure was the Conde de San Isidro, who had strong interests in the interior trade, particularly the repartimientos distributed to Indian communities by their corregidores.Footnote ⁷⁷

Bourbon Ministers intended to tighten Peru’s administration and break open the commercial monopolies and inland trades. They sought to do this by enabling the Cinco Gremios Mayores de Madrid, an association of five trading corporations at the center of the imperial capital’s commercial and (informal) banking system, to trade in Peru. The royal government, in 1784, authorized the Cinco Gremios to commence operations in the prosperous southern city of Arequipa, and two years later in Lima. By 1795, the Cinco Gremios controlled one-third of the trade of Peru.Footnote ⁷⁸ With the same objective in mind, the royal government authorized the formation of the Royal Philippine Company on March 10, 1785 and sanctioned its trading with Peru. This enabled Lima merchants to send domestic (and imported) produce across the Pacific to Manila in Company ships in return for Asiatic goods, despite recurrent protests from the transatlantic merchants. Pedro de Abadía, the Philippine Company Factor in Lima, became one of the most influential figures in the city by 1806.Footnote ⁷⁹ Commercial and institutional changes apart, the role of the Consulado of Lima continued to be of the utmost significance to the royal government.Footnote ⁸⁰

Lima, by the last decades of the colonial era, no longer held the monopoly of commercial activity in Peru. Several merchants took up residence in Arequipa, and maintained contacts in Cádiz. This city did not have disparities of wealth and status comparable to those in Lima or Mexico City. It had few exceedingly rich families and there was a good deal of interconnection between land-ownership, commercial activity, and professional status. The three most important of the Arequipa families were the Moscosos, the Goyeneches, and the Tristáns. Members of all three families played active roles in the political, economic, religious, and military history of the late colonial and early republican periods in Peru.Footnote ⁸¹ Juan Manuel Moscoso was Bishop of Cuzco at the time of the Tupac Amaru Rebellion of 1780–81. His nephew, Lieutenant-Colonel Josef Gabriel Moscoso, became Intendant of Arequipa in 1810 and strongly supported Viceroy Abascal’s opposition to the South American autonomists and separatists during the following years. The Cuzco Rebellion of 1814–15, however, spread rapidly through the southern Andes and he was seized by the rebels and executed in January 1815 after they had taken control of Arequipa.Footnote ⁸²

The Goyeneche family illustrated the depth of the ties between Spain and Peru, and it also maintained close connections to the Gárates, discussed below. The prime Cádiz connection was with the merchant house of Juan Miguel de Aguerrevere, who with Juan Miguel de Lestre also became a supplier of Juan Bautista Gárate. The Goyeneches were also by origin Navarrese, and the first Goyeneche in Peru married into a prominent Arequipa family. The importance of the Navarrese in the Castilian administration before 1700 and under the Bourbons in Spain and the Indies could be seen when Juan de Goyeneche (b. 1656) became a financial advisor to both Charles II and Philip V, and enjoyed the patronage of the Conde de Oropesa, President of the Casa de Contratación. His descendant, José Manuel de Goyeneche (b. 1776), went to the University of Seville for his further education. One of his uncles happened to be the General Administrator of the Royal Customs House there, and another, in Cádiz, managed the House of Aguerrevere’s trade with Peru. Gárate in 1779 referred affectionately to Juan Miguel de Aguirreb[v]ere, who had been seventeen years in Peru, as his “patrón.”Footnote ⁸³

The decline of silver-mining in Upper Peru at the beginning of the eighteenth century adversely affected Arequipa’s trade. Landowners like the Goyeneches diversified into importing, which had greater profits. At the same time, several of them invested directly or indirectly in local mining in the districts of Tarapacá and Puno. In 1780, for example, Goyeneche joined Manuel de Cossío and Antonio Alvizuri in forming a company to exploit the Lampa mine in the latter district. However, their broader venture, the Arequipa Mineralogical Society of 1792, designed to promote mining investment, had little success.Footnote ⁸⁴

José Manuel Goyeneche rose through the army under Charles IV to become in 1809 the Seville Supreme Central Junta’s commissioner to the Viceroyalty of Peru, returning there as a Brigadier. Abascal promptly employed him in the suppression of the autonomy movement in La Paz. Goyeneche became Commander of the Army of Upper Peru between 1810 and 1813.Footnote ⁸⁵ Juan Mariano, his brother, remained to manage the family estates in the province of Arequipa. During the second Spanish Constitutional Period (1820–23), he served as a member of the Provincial Deputation in 1822.Footnote ⁸⁶ José Sebastián Goyeneche, a product of the Royal College (Convictorio) of San Carlos and the University of San Marcos in Lima, became the first Bishop of Arequipa in 1817 and Archbishop of Lima in 1859 at the age of 75.Footnote ⁸⁷

The Tristán family remained ardent Royalists right through the 1810s and the first half of the 1820s. Pío Tristán y Moscoso only rallied to the republican cause after the defeat at Ayacucho on December 9, 1824. He had fought in Spain against the French Revolutionaries in 1793–95 and returned to Peru with Goyeneche in 1808, fighting with him in the Army of Upper Peru until 1813. The son of a Corregidor of Larecaja in the early 1780s, Pío Tristán became Intendant of Arequipa in 1815 and President of the Audiencia of Cuzco in the following year. For a few days after Ayacucho he became interim Viceroy of Peru, technically the last occupant of that office. His career continued in Republican Peru as Prefect of Arequipa from 1836 and then as president of the Southern State in the Peru-Bolivia Confederation of 1836–39.Footnote ⁸⁸

The Gárate family of Arequipa originated from another such metropolitan merchant, who had come from Navarra to Peru before 1770, and combined bullion export with refining. He became the owner of the Hacienda de Tingo, near the city. By 1803, Juan Bautista Gárate y Zelayeta, “was one of the most powerful merchants in Peru, and as such served as both prior (1807–8) and consul of the consulado. He maintained offices in Lima, Cuzco, Arequipa, La Paz and Cochabamba in addition to correspondents in Cádiz,” and trading with thirty-one merchant houses in the peninsula. He dealt in cotton, clothing, hosiery, spices and confectionary, cacao and chocolate, and wine, and was a major importer of European produce. Family ties linked the Arequipa family to business associates in Spain. In the elections to the Constitutional City Council of Lima, held on December 9, 1812, Juan Bautista Gárate was chosen as one of the sixteen regidores, along with the Conde de San Isidro. Both were elected to the renewed Constitutional City Council on December 7, 1820, after the fall of Ferdinand VII’s first absolutist regime in Spain.Footnote ⁸⁹

Tadeo Gárate (b. La Paz, 1774) became Peruvian deputy in the Cortes Extraordinarias. Elected deputy for Puno in July 1812, he arrived in Cádiz in July 1813. Gárate had been educated at the University of San Antonio Abad in Cuzco and had been the secretary of Bishop Las Heras in the same city from 1801 to 1806. A qualified lawyer from 1797, he became Subdelegate of Chucuito in 1807. He was a trusted figure in the confidence of Abascal. Gárate served with Goyeneche’s forces in the suppression of the La Paz movement in 1809. Luis Miguel Glave describes him as “linked to the reactionary local aristocracy of Cuzco.” He became an opponent of the Spanish Liberals and of the Constitution of 1812, signing the “Manifesto of the Persians” in 1814 and welcoming the restoration of absolutism by Ferdinand VII. As such he was a close ally of the notorious Blas Ostolaza, one of the king’s intimates, who originated from the prominent Trujillo family to which we shall refer in a moment. Ferdinand appointed Gárate Intendant of Puno, where he arrived in 1816, but after the collapse of Peruvian Royalism with Sucre’s victory at Ayacucho in 1824, Gárate emigrated to Spain.Footnote ⁹⁰

Mariano Rivero, the deputy sent by the Cabildo of Arequipa to the Constituent Cortes in Spain, proved to be no unquestioning partisan of Abascal’s policies. Rivero delivered a virulent attack on the viceroy for “despotism” on March 1, 1813, complaining of his suspension of liberty of the press. This, however, did not make him a separatist. Such views represented one element in the wider perspective of regional dislike of the predominance of Lima. Rivero and the City Council both favored removing Arequipa from the jurisdiction of the Audiencia of Lima, and on November 10, 1812 requested its inclusion in the jurisdiction of the Audiencia of Cuzco. He would repeat this request, writing to the restored Ferdinand VII on June 17, 1814. He also requested the foundation of a university in Arequipa.Footnote ⁹¹

The connection between the leading families and the corregidores engaged in the repartos to the southern-Andean Indian communities has been clearly established by David Cahill. The Crown legalized this distribution between 1754 and 1780, which has frequently been seen as one of the causes of popular support for the Tupac Amaru insurrection. The reparto, with roots back in the seventeenth century, became a fundamental part of the economic life of southern Peru and the regions of Upper Peru connected to it. In Peru, the reparto represented a combined attempt by district administrators and their merchant-backers to oblige Indian communities to take commodities they might otherwise not need – Spanish imports, workshop-clothing, or mules, for instance, instead of local Andean pack-animals and home-produced clothing. In order to pay for such items, community Indians would be obliged to work as laborers on private estates, workshops, or in the mines. In such a way, the reparto broke open indigenous self-sufficiency and local intermarket linkages, binding indigenous peasant-artisans to a wider market chain. Cuzco’s leading families, several dating from the time of Conquest, presided over these activities. The Ugarte, Concha, Xara, Esquivel, Moscoso (with connection to Arequipa), and Peralta families were often connected with one another through matrimony and business. They derived their wealth from a combination of sources – usually agriculture, or ownership of obrajes. Credit was available through access to ecclesiastical corporations, in which sons and daughters were frequently members. Other family daughters married corregidores involved in the reparto, or strengthened the business network through intermarriage with other families.Footnote ⁹²

Cahill suggests a “golden age” of the Cuzco élites from the second half of the seventeenth century through the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. This derived from the prosperity of the internal trade in grains and textiles, connected to the mining industries of Lower and Upper Peru. The repartos helped supply the mining districts of Oruro and Potosí. Several factors, operating together from the late 1770s, contributed to the collapse of this earlier prosperity. The impact of the Tupac Amaru rebellion undermined the commercial networks, damaging some of the workshop installations, a rebel target, and impoverishing the credit supply and thereby hindering subsequent recuperation. Other textile centers, such as Huamanga, Arequipa, and Cochabamba, were better able to compete in the same market. The Crown’s decision to outlaw the reparto in 1780 compounded this problem. More important still were the structural alterations in the administration and commerce of the entire southern-highland region with the separation of Upper Peru from the government in Lima and its attachment to the new Viceroyalty in Buenos Aires in 1776. The opening of Buenos Aires to the transatlantic trade in 1778 drew Upper-Peruvian silver away from Cuzco and enabled the import of Catalan and other European commodities, particularly better-quality textiles, through the newer market network from Buenos Aires into Upper Peru. When transatlantic warfare was renewed after 1796, Cuzco’s textile industry had become too weak to take much advantage of the opportunity.Footnote ⁹³

The Andean south of Peru has received much attention in the historical literature, in part because it had been the heartland of the Inca Empire. Northern Peru also had a distinctive perspective. The social and ethnic composition of the north contributed another variant to the Peruvian whole. Ethnic distinctions were not as sharp in the north as in the Andean south; the neo-Inca tradition was not as prominent. Rising population, the growth of the internal market and interregional competition explained the increased economic activity, local specialization and product improvement. Polarization between the inland textile-producing cities and the ports and coastal cities became striking in their opposing reception of comercio libre during the 1770s. Northern merchant communities developed strong links with inland cities stretching into southern Quito and welcomed liberalization of the coastal trades from Panama and Guayaquil to Callao and Valparaíso. They benefited considerably from the opening of the port of Huanchaco in 1796, giving access to the sea for Trujillo, through which the city merchants exported sugar and obraje-produced woolens. Relatively close connection to Quito, Cuenca, and Loja pointed to what Elizabeth Hernández has described as “el gran espacio sur-ecuatoriano–norteperuano.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The northern regions of Peru also had sugar-estates, but they were not large-scale and they used a mixed system of labor, drawing from Indian communities, having resident Indian yanaconas on their lands, but also using Negro slaves. Slavery, however, did not predominate as it did on the haciendas of the coastal valleys south of Lima. Mining in the north did not predominate as it did in the Andean central core and the highlands of Upper Peru.Footnote ⁹⁵

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the cities of Trujillo, Lambayeque, and Piura grew in commercial importance. The relationship of their predominant groups to the Consulado of Lima remained complex. Family networks characterized local commerce, with the Ostolaza family in the lead in Trujillo. Such families eclipsed the more superficial presence of the royal bureaucracy, even despite the introduction of the Intendant system in 1784. They traded in cacao, cotton, tobacco, hides, and the quinine of Loja. Cristóbal Ostolaza and other hacendados like him had strong connections with the merchants, since aguardiente, produced from sugar-cane, was one of his principal products. Ostolaza also owned several shops in the city of Trujillo and a number of ships. Neither he nor his compatriots ignored developments in Lima, where his son, Juan, managed the family’s interests in association with none other than Pedro de Abadía. Juan Ostolaza was a friend of another Trujillo native resident in Lima, José Faustino Sánchez Carrión, at that time a teacher at the Royal College of San Carlos, who would rise to political prominence during the 1820s in association with the Liberators, José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar. The combination of interests suggests that some hacendados and merchants may be referred to as one group, while others remained apart. After Independence, merchants extended their interests as the consignees of foreign, mainly British, suppliers.Footnote ⁹⁶

Piura formed one of the ten partidos, or districts, of the Intendancy of Trujillo, which were administered by subdelegates. The city was linked to the Pacific through the small port of Paita. Two rivers, the Paita and the Chira, flowed down from the Andean sierra part of the district. Along their fertile banks the principal of the forty or so haciendas in Piura had formed. These estates combined with local commerce, and the distribution of European goods as consignees of merchants of the Consulado of Lima formed the basis of the wealth and influence of the Piura élite. Piura and Paita participated in the linkages that formed the Pacific trade network from Panama and Guayaquil to Chile, up to New Spain and across the Pacific to Manila and beyond. Parallel to this and an essential part of it was the inland trade to Cajamarca and northwards into Quito. Business and family connections linked local Americans to peninsula immigrants, often regarded as eligible husbands for the daughters of the élite, which was concerned to perpetuate the social dominance of a European-derived population that formed just under 7 percent of the total in the district. As a result, no divide could be perceived between the different origins of creole and peninsular. This would explain much of the political conduct of the Piura élites during the dynastic crisis after 1808, in the struggles over independence from Spain, and after the formation of the Republic in 1821. The élites remained committed monarchists, loyal to Spain and supporting the policies of Abascal. As in the case of the Royalist élite in Arequipa in 1824, they only changed sides, although earlier, in 1821, in order to preserve their social position and traditional local hegemony.Footnote ⁹⁷

Local production of sugar, cotton, and livestock would be discreetly supplemented by the contraband trade through Paita with administrative collusion. This enabled trade from Acapulco in Chinese products, distributed through Guayaquil and lesser ports, to pass into the Peruvian economy. When the northern Isthmus ports of Chagres and Portobelo were legitimized for commerce by the Crown in 1780, they proved to be further means of access for British contraband, usually from Jamaica, to pass down into Peru.Footnote ⁹⁸

The northern region did not develop its own political project as the southern Andes did, which we shall examine in the following chapter, during the eighteenth century and up to 1815. Trujillo proclaimed the Independence of Peru from the Hispanic Monarchy on December 29, 1820, the first Peruvian city to do so. This action expressed the desire of the dominant élites to salvage as much as they could from further maritime raids by the Patriots. Rather than separatist tendencies from the Peruvian successor state, northern regional sentiment expressed itself in the determination of its leading personalities to compete for influence and power in Lima. Sánchez Carrión certainly reflected such a strategy. Furthermore, the son of another Trujillo merchant family, Luis José de Orbigoso, became President of Peru from 1829–35. Martín Ostolaza became a deputy in the Constituent Congress of 1825. The brothers Santiago and Francisco Távara became leading figures among the northern merchants during the 1830s, the former a consignee on behalf of French mercantile interests.Footnote ⁹⁹

The capacity of the American élites for survival through the economic and political changes of the 1770s into the 1820s was remarkable. Their penetration of the royal bureaucracy was not entirely reversed by metropolitan policies during the eighteenth century. In any case, they continued to retain strong positions in the municipalities. Their interests spread over a range of activities – land, mining, commerce, industry, and civil, ecclesiastical, and military office-holding. Leading families were characteristically interlocked through matrimony and business. This did not exclude mutual rivalries and, particularly after 1808, political divisions. Even so, they presided over the transition from colony to sovereign state, in one form or another, allowing for entrants from other social categories. Yet, their position did not go without challenge.