This book examines the impact of public policy on long-term socioeconomic development in the Kingdom, or Audiencia, of Quito from 1690 to 1830. It is an extension of the inquiry that resulted in my Crisis and Decline: The Viceroyalty of Peru in the Seventeenth Century. In that work I traced the political and economic causes for the fiscal decline of the Spanish colonial state in South America, which allowed provinces like Quito to gain greater regional autonomy. During this period the Kingdom of Quito became linked to an integrated network of secondary regional markets whose prosperity began to evolve independently of the more visible colonial export sector. By the eighteenth century global economic patterns, imperial reform policies, and a series of complex regional and local socioeconomic changes converged to reverse this trend towards greater autonomy and transformed development patterns in Quito. This study focuses primarily on how state policy contributed to these profound socioeconomic changes in the kingdom, from the onset of the demographic and economic crises of the 1690s to the culmination of the independence movements by 1830. Such a longitudinal examination of Quito can help to answer a fundamental but often ignored historical question: how did the colonial and early republican states contribute to shaping the political economy of Spanish America?

The major study of political economy in the Kingdom of Quito remains La economía política del Ecuador durante la colonia by José Maréa Vargas. In recent years, however, a number of detailed regional studies have examined the variegated process of socioeconomic change throughout the Andean region, including the Kingdom of Quito.