In the second volume of his Spain under the Habsburgs, John Lynch attacked the hypothesis that Spanish America experienced a severe economic depression during the seventeenth century. He argued that the sharp decline in transatlantic trade with the Peninsula served rather to stimulate domestic industry and agriculture and to encourage interregional commerce. The balance of economic power within the Hispanic world shifted decisively in favor of the colonies. “Spain’s recession was America’s growth.” The theory heightens our sense of the impact of the Bourbon reforms. Lesley Byrd Simpson’s “forgotten century,” if pushed forward to encompass the years 1650-1750, was precisely the time when Spain derived least profit from its empire.
In contrast to this periodization, Demetrio Ramos implicitly accepts (his chapters divisions prove this) an older scheme in which only three main epochs were discerned: the first years of conquest and settlement; the long middle decades of quiet growth; and the final Bourbon assault upon the older order. In the first of the two essays into which his book is divided, Ramos examines the formulation of the various codes of law which governed colonial mining. He remarks the oddity whereby the Mexican industry was regulated not by the Toledan ordinances but by the Nuevo Cuaderno promulgated by Philip II for the Peninsula. He comments that the eighteenth century code was influenced by enlightenment notions of progress and efficiency. Ramos describes the main sea-lines of interprovincial trade in the Caribbean, the River Plate, and the Pacific. He neglects the long-distance commerce of the Mexican interior. He merely hints at the magnet-like quality of Potosí’s rich market. The consequence of comercio libre and its antecedents was to destroy the inter-regional “common market” in colonial produce which had developed under the Habsburgs.
The declared aim of this work is to describe the channels through which trade flowed. Ramos explicitly avoids any examination of supply and demand, of markets and producers, of the variations or cycles in the volume and value of merchandise. His few statistics are illustrative rather than demonstrative. Granted this abstention from any assessment of relative magnitudes or values, what remains is an impression of overall movement rather than any sense of the economic forces which prompted it. Ramos has read widely in the secondary literature of his subject and is careful to cite it all.
