CURRENT HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ITS LIMITATIONS

As we have seen in Chapter 4, in the discussion of trans-Atlantic trade in the Hapsburg period, and as we shall confirm in Chapters 8–9, when we examine the trading developments of the eighteenth century, historians of commercial relations between Spain and Spanish America now have a reasonably comprehensive macro-level understanding of the general trading patterns of the entire colonial period. Indeed, it might almost be argued that they have a better grasp of the issue than did the Spanish crown and its officials, even in the relatively efficient eighteenth century, for it is clear to any twentieth-century historian who has undertaken research on Spain's colonial trade with America that the vast majority of the tens of thousands of shipping registers, which provide the documentary raw material for modern scholarship, went straight to the archives of the colonial period without being scrutinised by ministers and their subordinates, as did even the annual summaries prepared by customs officials in some ports. However, despite the abundance of virgin documentation in the archives of Spain and America, historians of trade do have to try to come to terms with a number of rather intractable problems, including the impossibility of measuring with any degree of accuracy the all-pervasive but elusive contraband activity of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which, by its very nature, was not clearly documented. They also face the parallel difficulty of evaluating the reliability of the official registers prepared in Seville-Cádiz for every vessel which sailed to or returned from America from the early-sixteenth century until the late-eighteenth century (between 1765 and 1778, as we shall see in Chapter 9, a number of other peninsular ports were gradually licensed to trade with America, although about four-fifths of all shipping continued to use Cádiz). Despite these and related difficulties, it remains true, nevertheless, that the broad movements of trans-Atlantic commercial activity have been established, as have the general causes of its principal peaks and troughs.