Structure and Profitability of Royal Finance in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1790

The Spanish American empire was the most bureaucratic and sophisticated royal government operating in eighteenth-century America. The complexity of its intervention in the daily economic, social and political life of its citizens was reflected in the number of paid royal officials in the judicial, administrative, military and religious hierarchies. To maintain this bureaucracy, the Crown developed a complex system of taxation on colonial production, commerce and population. It also established state monopolies (tobacco products, playing cards, mercury, stamped paper, etc.) for further extraction of funds from its subjects. The tax structure was administered by a large number of paid royal treasury officials, supplemented by private tax farmers. The resulting proliferation of royal treasury account records is extraordinary, constituting a very rich but little used source of documentation on the economic life of the colonies.

Historians have, of course, looked into these sources. But in the historiography of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, with which this study is particularly concerned, there have been few systematic and detailed analyses based on these records.¹ It is the aim of the present essay to begin an exploration of the most general of these documents, the annual accounts of the cajas reales of each of the major districts within the Viceroyalty. My reason for undertaking such a study is first of all to determine the structure of royal income. By this I mean measuring the relative importance of different types of taxes, as well as determining the most important revenue-producing zones within the Viceroyalty. I am also seeking to determine the interrelationship of the producing zones and the way net revenue flowed through the system. On the side of expenditure I am concerned with determining the major cost items to the royal budget, and the balance of expenditures and incomes by type of tax and by region. The final area of concern is the question of the financial benefits derived by the Spanish Crown itself from its control of the Viceroyalty, and whether there was a reasonable distribution of services for costs between the various regions.

In attempting to answer these related sets of questions about the structure and income (gross and net) of the royal financial system in the Río de la Plata, two different approaches can be taken. The first method is to develop a detailed analysis of the net income of the Viceroyalty by type of tax and by district in a given base year. The second approach would call for the construction of long time series for each tax and each treasury office, to determine the trends over time. The present initial essay on the problem takes the first approach and investigates at a given point in time the totality of the royal revenue system.

In selecting 1790 as my base year for a comparative synchronic analysis, I have been governed by a number of considerations. First of all, the quality and uniformity of the royal accounts of 1790 are unusually high, by previous standards. The Intendency Reforms of 1782 had been largely directed toward reorganization and standardization of royal accounts and financial procedures.² By 1790 these procedures were more or less uniform throughout the Viceroyalty. By 1790, as well, the economic dislocations caused by the Tupac Amaru rebellion of 1780 had been totally eliminated and royal income had achieved its pre-revolt levels and/or surpassed them in all the Alto Perú zones affected by the revolt. Finally, 1790 was a crucial year in international trade for the Río de la Plata area. The trade liberalization program of 1778 did not come fully into effect until after the war with England (1779-1783), and from that period until 1795 the port of Buenos Aires experienced a major era of expanding international commerce, which was an important source of taxable income for the Crown.³

To collect and distribute government revenue the Spanish Crown maintained a large staff of officials in the Treasury Department (Hacienda Real). These officials were distributed among the administrative provinces in a network of treasury offices (cajas reales). In every important town there was a local office. Those offices located in the principal cities were considered central offices (cajas principales), to which the local offices (cajas subordinadas) sent their accounts and income. In turn, there were two central zonal treasury offices. These were Potosí and Buenos Aires, which even before the creation of the Viceroyalty were central offices for all the cajas principales in their respective regions: that of Potosí for all income coming from the districts of Upper Peru, and that of Buenos Aires for all income coming from anywhere in the Río de la Plata region. The final and supreme office, after the creation of the Viceroyalty in 1776, was of course in Buenos Aires. Here there existed the Tribunal Mayor de Cuentas, or Principal Accounts Office, to which all annual accounts were sent from the principal treasuries, and which in turn sent on a basic accounting to Spain.⁴ Also, after 1776, all excess income obtained anywhere in the Viceroyalty was now shipped to Buenos Aires before its redistribution.

In the procedures of the Royal Treasury in the late eighteenth century, accounts were divided into two rough and not always mutually exclusive categories. The first of these accounts (or ramos), were called the Ramos de la Masa Común, or more simply, by the last years of the century, Ramos de Real Hacienda. These were the taxes whose income was disposable at the will of local royal authorities and for satisfaction of local, regional, or American needs. The second set of accounts (ramos) were called ramos particulares and were those which the Crown specifically earmarked for remission of income to Spain, or whose income went to other agencies (e.g., pensions to officials). These latter were sometimes given the special title of ramos particulares ajenos.⁵ These divisions were extremely rough ones, for the Crown officials in the colonies often did not repatriate ramos particulares funds, but used them for local expenses, especially during emergencies.

Aside from these two broad divisions of the taxes, the Treasury also maintained two separate accounts for the holding of funds and for the transfer of income. The first, called depósitos, was used to hold miscellaneous private and public funds. Private funds were mostly funds held in escrow as security for individuals having contracts with the Crown, while the royal sums were monies owed to private individuals or other treasuries, or awaiting transfer to other accounts.

The second of these accounts was called Otras Tesorerías (or other treasuries) and as the name implies, these were funds coming into the given royal caja from other, usually subordinate, cajas. In the larger centers this ramo also handled the funds coming from autonomous bodies such as the Mint (Casa de Moneda) and the minerals-purchasing Banco de San Carlos in Potosí, as well as the subordinate but separate Aduana (Customs House). The two largest cajas, Potosí and Buenos Aires, had the largest of these Otras Tesorerías accounts. The former used them for the gathering of surplus revenues from all the cajas of Alto Perú, as well as from the several semi-autonomous agencies in Potosí. These funds were in turn sent to the Otras Tesorerías section in Buenos Aires. This latter included the funds from Alto Perú as well as miscellaneous income from the local Real Aduana and funds from the Río de la Plata region.

In  Appendix I, I have listed all the major taxes and sources of income for all the eight intendencies and the two independent cajas which made up the ten basic income-producing units in the Viceroyalty in 1790. As  Appendix I makes evident, a few centers produced the bulk of the royal income. Between them Buenos Aires and Potosí alone produced more than two-thirds of that income, or 2.6 of the 3.7 million pesos. Adding the next two largest zones of La Paz and La Plata (or Chuquisaca) brings the total to just over 3 million pesos (or 86%). If we were to divide the regions into rough categories of importance based on gross income, we would discover four major groupings. The first category would be the zones with 1 million pesos and over (Buenos Aires and Potosí), then a much lower grouping of those zones between 200,000 and 300,000 pesos (La Paz and La Plata). Oruro and Cochabamba fall between 100,000 and 200,000 pesos, and finally there are four centers under 100,000 (Salta, Paraguay, Carangas and Córdoba).

What is obvious from this rough breakdown is that the bulk of the wealth of the Viceroyalty derived from the port of Buenos Aires on the one hand and the Indian and mining-dominated lands of Alto Perú on the other. The Platine regions other than Buenos Aires province were a negligible quantity as royal income producers. Paraguay, like the Malvinas, the Patagonia Coast and the fortress of Maldonado in the Banda Oriental, required important subsidies out of the royal income of the Intendency of Buenos Aires. The gross income figures however do seriously distort one of the low-category regions, that of Carangas. Though its gross income figure implies that Carangas was a poor income-producing zone, its net income was quite high, since it was a small but important mining center on the Altiplano, shipping most of its income out to Potosí and thence to Buenos Aires as surplus revenue.

As to the relative importance of the various taxes in making up Viceroyalty income, it emerges that the taxes on mining and associated silver minting charges, the tribute tax paid by Indians, and the taxes on trade (alcabalas, almojarifazgo, etc.) outweigh all other sources by far. As can be seen in Table I, these taxes on mining, commerce and the population brought in 2.4 million pesos (or 70%) of the total of 3.4 million pesos collected in 1790.

Mining, through a multiple series of taxes, was the single most important source of government income. In addition to the direct 10% tax on silver production, there were rights to be paid for minting silver money (Casa de Moneda), income made from purchasing miners’ production (the Banco de San Carlos),⁶ and various taxes on mining and minting gold. Together these silver and gold taxes brought in 935,849 pesos, or 27% of total revenues. It would appear that the figure of some 900,000 pesos is a reasonably accurate one for royal mining and minting income.

Taking the five years prior and posterior to 1790, as in Table II (p. 446), indicates that for Potosí at least, 1790 was a relatively normal year. It was only 10% above the average for the 11-year period, with most of the excess being accounted for by the unusually high income from the silver-purchasing Banco de San Carlos. The silver mining taxes collected in 1790 were actually 3% under the 11-year norm. The 166,793 pesos obtained from the sale of mercury (azogue) was not precisely a tax, and there is some indication that this represented a simple return on costs to the mercury mines, which were royal government monopolies.⁷

The next major category of taxable resources was commerce. The sales tax (alcabala) and import duties (almojarifazgo) drew in some 572,000 pesos, with local alcohol and other regional product taxes (sisa or impuestos) bringing in another 137,000 pesos. Taxes on local taverns (pulperías) and the 11% the Crown obtained of the tithes (diezmo) on agricultural products brought total income up to 750,000 from these production and commerce taxes.⁸

The last of the three major producers of revenue were the Indian rural masses. The tributo was a head tax on all rural Indians under Spanish jurisdiction, varying from 1 peso to over 20 pesos per annum per adult male (18 to 50 years of age). The variation in rates depended on a whole set of variables. Rich or poor regions were taxed accordingly, and within each region, Indians in free land-owning communities (or ayllus) were charged heavier rates than landless yanaconas (or peones) on Spanish- or mestizo-owned haciendas. Even in the ayllu, the Crown recognized a distinction between the original settlers who had rights to the land (originarios con tierra) and later landless settlers who were also associated with the ayllu (forasteros o agregados sin tierra).

After these three basic sources, the Crown gained considerable income from others, including the many forms of taxation on its own royal bureaucracy. The sale of public offices, the traditional levy of one half of the first year’s salary of any new office (media anata), and the various forms of collection for pensions from civil and military officers (Monte Pío de Ministros, Monte Pío Militar and Inválidos), all brought in considerable income, though nothing like the three major sources. Also, a good part of these funds (some 57,103 pesos out of a total of 122,981) were destined for private consumption in the form of pensions. The Crown also heavily taxed the yearly salary of its lower clergy (sínodos) and picked up odd income from clerical positions left vacant during the year (vacantes mayores and menores) and from the inheritance of the upper clergy (espolios).

The major royal monopoly, tobacco, was collected by a separate Renta Administrativa and not included in the caja accounts. But other monopolies do appear there: a tax on playing cards (naipes), which though actually collected by the tobacco administration was turned over to the local cajas; papel sellado (official legal and stamped stationary); and the Cruzada or sale of papal bulls of dispensation. Among the miscellaneous income, that belonging to Otras Tesorerías would, when broken down, probably fall into the usual tax categories, while the Temporalidades—here most probably understated since no income was fisted for Paraguay—represented income from the exJesuit properties.

While serious complaints about malfeasance in office and failure to collect royal taxes were frequent in the last half of the eighteenth century,⁹ the figures given by the individual cajas seem to indicate a relatively efficient collection procedure in most districts. The average for the 6 cajas that provide figures showed that only 6% of the funds due the Crown in 1790 (or 140,727 pesos of debt against 2,162,759 pesos of collections), were not collected in 1790. La Plata, however, was an exception, listing 23% of its total estimated revenue in 1790 as being in the form of uncollected debts.

Nor does the cumulative debt of previous years, also listed in the royal accounts, indicate any serious problems with collections. While some cajas, like La Paz with its 696,356 pesos debt, were in apparent trouble, the others were within reasonable bounds. Oruro listed a high 192,537 pesos in uncollected pre-1790 cumulative debts, but Cochabamba had only 33,878 and Paraguay just 18,619. The very high debt of Buenos Aires, listed at 1,256,181 prior to 1790, was mostly due to a short term debt of one million pesos from the Real Hacienda en Común account. Apparently, according to the 1790 Carta Cuenta from Buenos Aires, 992,322 pesos of this debt was paid off at the end of fiscal 1790, so that the pre-1791 debt listed for the next fiscal year of 1791 was only 280,102. Of this 280,000 cumulative debt, some 200,000 was due to the failure over many years of one small group of villages on the Banda Oriental to pay their tribute of about 4,000 pesos per annum. In the overall income structure, this was a relatively minor problem, and given the very long time period involved, was probably an uncollectable debt anyway.¹⁰ Assuming that such long term uncollectable debts existed for the other cajas, it would appear that the charges of lax collections cannot be sustained for 1790 from the current year of account or cumulative pre-1790 debt listings.¹¹

Before concluding this analysis of income, it should be recalled that the accounts of the cajas reales did not fist all the income collected by the Crown from the colonies. At least another 300,000 pesos of income was produced by the collection of Church tithes (diezmo).¹² This important production tax was fanned out, with the Crown receiving only 11% of the total revenues for its own benefit, while the rest went to the maintenance of schools, churches and hospitals run by the Church. The Crown also maintained a separate Renta de Tabaco to administer its monopoly on the production and sale of tobacco products. The income from tobacco for the Río de la Plata at this time is difficult to estimate. However, for the period 1798 to 1802 the net return per annum of this monopoly for the entire viceroyalty was 173,533 pesos.¹⁸ If the income-expenditure ratio was like any other major tax, this would mean that total revenue collected was probably in the range of 250,000 to 300,000 pesos. Thus adding these two separate funds to the regular caja real incomes would yield a rough total royal taxation income of a minimum of 4.2 million pesos.

In relation to the other regions of the Spanish empire, the Vice-royalty’s gross income is comparable to that of the Viceroyalty of Peru,¹⁴ but distinctly inferior to that of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico). The latter zone produced gross royal revenues of some 19.2 million pesos in 1789.¹⁵ Mining taxes, mintage charges and mercury sales alone produced 4.6 million pesos in New Spain in 1789, compared to the only 1.1 million pesos produced from the same source in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1790.¹⁶ Because of this enormous income, Mexico was able to return to Spain in net income far more than any other region in the Americas, or, according to Humboldt, something like 5 to 6 million pesos in 1789.¹⁷

Aside from providing the specific figures for net returns for New Spain, Humboldt also estimated the total net revenue produced and sent to Spain by all other Viceroyalties as well. After the giant returns of New Spain, he noted, came Peru and the Río de la Plata, with the former estimated to be returning in the 1790s about 1 million pesos per annum (even though its gross income was on a par with the Río de la Plata), and the latter 600,000 to 700,000 pesos. Finally came New Granada with a net return to Madrid of some 400,000 to 500,000 pesos. The capitanías generales (Caracas, Chile, Guatemala, Cuba and Puerto Rico) barely paid for themselves and produced no surplus revenues. Thus, Spain received from the Americas between 7.0 and 8.2 million pesos per annum. But these figures of Humboldt were only rough estimates except for Mexico, and are more valuable for ranking the Viceroyalties and other regions in a relative order of importance than for providing precise data. A detailed examination of expenditures for the Viceroyalty at Buenos Aires reveals a quite different estimate of net revenues than that given by Humboldt.¹⁸

In attempting to determine the actual revenue realized by the Crown in each district and through each tax, it is obviously necessary to deal with expenditures. But here a problem of method arises, in that expenditures were based on total income (the given year plus carryover) within each account. Thus many accounts which showed no income in 1790 had large expenditures. The funds for these expenditures came from unexpended amounts accumulated in the particular account from previous years, rather than any transfer of funds from another source of income. An analysis of all the royal expenses (the so-called datas) will yield only an approximate notion of the gains and losses in a given year in a given account. However, the expenditure picture does give an excellent overall idea of regional incomes and expenses. (See  Appendix II.)

An analysis of the expenditures of each caja compared to its per annum income makes it obvious that the Crown “over-spent” overwhelmingly in the Intendency of Buenos Aires, if we take into account only current income figures. But royal officials consistently viewed the income of a ramo as its cumulative income. Thus taking the region of Buenos Aires, its actual income from its own regional resources was a total of 2,264,816 pesos: that is, 1,336,768 pesos in 1790 receipts, and 928,048 pesos carryover income from previous years. Its actual expenses were 3,032,388. The difference between these two figures was met by the transfer of funds from other regions, above all from Potosí. When these transfer funds are added to total income (per annum and carryover), Buenos Aires ends up with an income of 3,348,347 pesos, for a total gain, or accumulated cash surplus for 1790 of 315,959, which was only a third of the carryover available from 1789. Clearly then, the largest of the intendencies, Buenos Aires, was unable to pay for local expenses through local income. This was a situation which in fact existed even before the creation of the Viceroyalty, since Buenos Aires in the first half of the century received an enormous annual subsidy from Potosí.¹⁹ In 1790 Potosí shipped, according to Buenos Aires caja figures, 818,768 pesos.²⁰ Of all these local, carryover, and transfer funds, only 103,821 pesos left the region in this year for Spain; thus the bulk of these funds (97%) went for local expenses.

Of the 3 million pesos expended by the Crown in the Buenos Aires region, 1.9 million, or 65%, was expended for Gastos de Real Hacienda, or administrative expenses. A breakdown of these administrative expenses can be seen in Table III.

In contrast to Buenos Aires, which had the largest total income of any zone in the Viceroyalty, but also the largest expenditures and therefore the least surplus revenue, Potosí had by far the largest surplus income. Of its almost 1.7 million pesos in expenditures, over half a million pesos, or 44%, was caused by income which it shipped as a subsidy to Buenos Aires. If these transferred incomes are retained and the carryover income figure is added, the surplus income of Potosí rises to an impressive 1,277,388 pesos. Of this amount 587,020 pesos comes from the 1789 surplus, 87,260 from the 1790 surplus and the rest from the returned transferred funds. If one does not take into account transferred or 1789 surplus income, then the single most productive caja in terms of budget surplus in 1790 was the caja of La Paz in Alto Perú.

In Table IV, I have tried to reconstruct the net or surplus income in each of the 10 cajas principales, and in Table V, I give the rank ordering of the cajas by net income. It emerges that the agricultural and mining centers of Alto Perú were the richest in excess revenue production, just as they were in total revenue. In Table V we also see that Carangas, a relatively low total revenue producer, was a high “profit” area for the Crown. The area with the greatest disparity between its total revenue rank order and its profitability is of course Buenos Aires.

The single largest expense of the royal government in the Vice-royalty was the maintenance of its own civil, religious and military bureaucracy. While the breakdowns are neither complete nor totally unambiguous (for example in the differentiation between salaries of Real Hacienda officials and those of civil and judicial authorities), an approximate idea of the importance of this cost to the Crown can be obtained.

The first problem to be dealt with in estimating the cost is the need to include expenditures not directly labeled as such, which in fact went to pay for salaries, fortification, and other governmental needs. For example, 4% (or 8,631 pesos) of the expenditure figures from the tributo income went to pay the salaries of the local suboficiales and intendants who collected the head tax. As for judicial salaries, there were also probably another 33,000 pesos or so going from Potosí to the Audiencia of Charcas (in La Plata). Adding all these sources together gives a total minimum bill for royal salaries of judicial and administrative officials of 174,805 pesos for the entire Viceroyalty. Thus an estimate for these expenses might be anywhere from 200,000 to 250,000 pesos, or between 4% and 5% of total expenditures.²¹

The payment of royal treasury officials, while given at 174,579 pesos, also contains many omissions for the salaries of persons employed in such separate but related bodies as the Banco San Carlos, Casa de Moneda, and the various Reales Aduanas. Adding the estimated 39,000 pesos for such expenses in Potosí gives 213,579 pesos. Thus an estimate of from 250,000 to 300,000 for such costs would seem reasonable, accounting for between 5% and 6% of total expenditures.

Clearly the heaviest expense was for maintaining the military establishment. To the 755,066 pesos given in salaries and expenses for the land armies should be added another 17,000 for Potosí, bringing the total to 772,006. Another 271,934 was accounted for by the Royal Navy, with probably another 35,000 or roughly half of the subsidy to Patagonia and Malvinas also going directly for military expenses. Finally, all the income from the municipal de guerra tax went directly to maintaining the forts on the southern Indian frontier, which adds another 146,966. Summing these together gives the figure of 1,225,906 pesos. It can thus be assumed since this was a relatively calm year in which no major internal uprising or foreign wars occurred, that the peacetime costs of maintaining the royal armies, militias, frontier forts and coastal presidios, as well as the Royal Navy, probably accounted for some 1.2 to 1.3 million pesos, or between 25% and 27% of revenue.

The last major overhead cost for the viceregal government was the payment of clerical salaries. The income the Church received from the Diezmo was the prime source of monies for buildings, schools, and upper clergy salaries, but salaries (or sínodos) of the lower clergy came from regular royal income. Averaging around 200 pesos per local parish clergymen per annum, at least in the frontier areas, the Crown’s total salary bill was on the order of 60,000 pesos in 1790.²²

Taking all of these sums together gives a total of 1.9 million pesos for formal governmental or bureaucracy expenses. This represents, very roughly, 39% of total expenses going toward the maintenance of royal government. The true percentage was probably higher, since a great deal of the expenses in collecting individual taxes went to pay salaries and other costs of local bureaucrats. At the very least, however, it can be said that two-fifths of royal expenditures went to maintain the royal civil, military, juridical and clerical bureaucracy.

Given the enormous complexity of government expenditure materials, and the fact that my information comes from the summary libros mayores, I cannot at this stage of my analysis further clarify the breakdown of government expenses. The amount going to public works, the sums going back to local municipal governments, the amounts going to all other private and public individuals, can all be reconstructed from the detailed listings in the day by day and month by month accounts. The manuales, which are the next most complex listings after the summary libros mayores, still do not break this income down further, and one must resort in the end to the day to day expenses by ramo. Unfortunately, these detailed papers exist in the Buenos Aires archives only for the Intendency of Buenos Aires, and even these are not always complete for all months and all accounts. Until an exhaustive survey can be made of local daily account sheets for each of the ten districts, only approximate figures can be given.

The question of the “profitability” of various sources of taxation is impossible to deal with because of the lack of these detailed expenditure sheets, and the problem of the carryover income being included in the expenditure figures. One might state, for example, that the Crown was left with 24% of its income after expenses for the diezmos y cobos tax on silver, or with 61% of its income on the tributo, or 72% of its intake from the alcabalas and other trade taxes. But since no detailed breakdowns of expenses exist, and since there was considerable internal transfer of funds from one account to another, then it is evident that no true estimates of actual “profit” can be obtained at this level of analysis.

All of these qualifications stated, what can be deduced from the expenditure materials? The first and most obvious conclusion is that without the use of the carryover income, 1790 would have been a deficit year. Even with the carryover income, the Crown ended up with only 360,045 pesos left over from 5,204,598 which it had fisted as income by the end of 1790 (3,550,642 in 1790 income and 1,653,956 in carryover from previous years). This represented but 7% of total governmental funds. Clearly, then, the Viceroyalty barely paid for itself, and was not a major revenue-producing unit for the Crown, or at least not on the scale estimated by Humboldt. While mercury and tobacco sales obviously brought income directly to Spain, the ordinary taxes on mining, commerce and Indians produced virtually no surplus. In 1790, for example, only a little over 100,000 pesos was shipped to Spain from the Viceroyalty, and almost all of this was accounted for by mercury sales. From the books of the caja of Buenos Aires (the cartas cuentas), it would appear that even such a small shipment as this was relatively rare. Thus between 1790 and 1795, several years saw no returns to Spain whatsoever, and even in the exceptional year of 1795 only 908,281 pesos were returned to Europe from the royal treasury of Buenos Aires, which gives an average of only some 168,000 per annum in this six-year period.²³ Minor shipments not recorded by the royal officials may have brought the figure up to the 200,000-pesos range, but even then it falls far short of the estimate made by Humboldt. Either his 600,000 to 700,000 pesos figure includes a very high return from the tobacco monopoly—which is a distinct possibility, and for which I could find no firm figures in the Argentine archives—or his estimate was a gross exaggeration. In either case, the currently available evidence proves that the income gathered by royal treasury officials from its regular tax sources exclusive of the tobacco monopoly simply went to pay for the maintenance of the royal presence in the Río de la Plata region, leaving little left over for metropolitan consumption.

Was the retention of this vast colony at the southeastern end of the southern hemisphere therefore a “profitable” venture for the Spanish Crown? This is a complex question, going beyond purely governmental considerations. Obviously, the Viceroyalty at least paid for itself and for its own very costly defense. It also contained within its boundaries the mining zone of Alto Perú, which greatly enriched local miners and Spanish merchants engaged in the silver trade. Also, the region provided a very large market for manufactured Spanish goods, as well as being an abundant and cheap source of hides for the Spanish leather industry. The Spanish shipping industry clearly benefited from the area’s rather steady import and export trade, even if this shipping was relatively minor compared to, say, that of Rio de Janeiro in this same period. On all such private Spanish industry, commerce, and shipping, the Crown levied important taxes, so that maintaining the colony indirectly benefited the Crown through the enrichment of private metropolitan interests which it taxed quite heavily. Thus in answering the question of “profitability” one could say that the Viceroyalty, though the second largest taxing zone in the entire empire after Mexico, did not generate a very high return to the royal treasury in Madrid. On the other hand, the Viceroyalty was not a deficit operation, and did enable the Crown to hold an area important to the metropolitan economy at no cost to its own metropolitan resources.

But was government profitable for all regions within the Viceroyalty’s boundaries? This is an entirely different question, which may relate to why the Viceroyalty at the end of the colonial period did not emerge as one unified nation. The richest single zone of income, outside the port of Buenos Aires and its trade (most of which was shipped to Alto Perú anyway), was the silver-mining, Indian-populated zone of Alto Perú. Since such a large share of its revenues went to pay for coastal defenses and fortifications against Indians of the plains, can Alto Perú be said to have been taxed beyond reason by the lowland regions? Aside from defense of distant frontiers, the Buenos Aires bureaucracy did not materially aid in the government of Alto Perú. This region had its own self-contained Audiencia at Charcas (or La Plata), its own complete mint and treasury staff, its own extensive armies (royal and militia), and its own archbishop. It did not even need the transportation and port facilities provided by the eastern lowlands, since it might ship its metal out through Lima or even the Chilean ports. While the northern Argentine Intendencies of Salta and Córdoba provided basic foodstuffs and mules to Alto Perú, the port of Buenos Aires was not essential. The region’s luxury imports could have gone equally well through Pacific coast ports, and in fact these did prove in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be the more rational geographic outlets for the Bolivian altiplano population. It could be argued that the cost to Alto Perú of being part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata may have been excessive for the minimal defense benefits that it received. Thus it is understandable that when Spanish hegemony was finally removed, Alto Perú felt compelled to break away from its costly and unequal relationship with the Río de la Plata region.

Royal Income in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1790 by Region

While the above listing is as complete as I could make it based on the accounts received in Buenos Aires, there are at least one and possibly two cajas which are missing, those of Carabaya and Chuquito. Like the caja at Carangas, the caja at Carabaya formerly had been part of the Viceroyalty of Peru [Guillermo Céspedes del Castillo, “Reorganización de la hacienda virreinal peruana en el siglo xviii, “Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español, tomo xxiii (1953), p. 339] and was listed in the Ordenanzas for the Intendants of the Viceroyalty of Buenos Aires as being transferred to that jurisdiction. Real Ordenanza para el establecimiento é instrucción de intendentes de exército y provincia en el virreinato de Buenos Aires, año de 1782, artículo 91. This artículo also listed Chuquito as a separate caja. Again, as in the case with Carabaya, a separate set of libros mayores could not be found in the archives in Buenos Aires. My assumption therefore has been that these two cajas probably reported their income under the rubric of one of the larger cajas.

In constructing this incomes table, I have revised standard treasury accounting procedures in several ways. I have deliberately eliminated from the Otras Tesorerías figures that income which was transferred from other cajas.^* I have done this in an effort to determine actual income for each local region. I have also eliminated the residuo del año anterior category from the total annual income. This residue or carryover income was the accumulated cash surplus in the accounts from the previous year. While Crown officials were supposed to discriminate between carryover income and the income for the year of current account, in this case 1790, this was not always done. Therefore wherever I discovered this undifferentiated global accounting, I subtracted the income of the previous year (1789) to obtain the 1790 total. I have also eliminated from the income side, as well as from the expenditure table, uncollected debts due to the Crown in years prior to the current year of account, a sum always added to both sides of the ledger by royal officials. I have, of course, left in debts due to the Crown during the year of account, since this represented part of the income supposed to be collected during 1790. After some hesitation, I have also included the unusual deposits account within the total income figure. This represented funds going to the Crown during the current year of account, for a whole range of purposes, some of which were related to income receivable by the Crown. These changes which I have made in the accounting procedure mean that my total income figure per region is consistently lower than the income figures given in the individual Libro mayor of the cajas reales. Finally, to simplify analysis, I have rounded out all income to tire nearest even peso, thus eliminating reales and maravedís as units of account. In all the accounting books, the Crown adopted as its unit of measure the peso corriente a 8, which consisted of 8 reales, or 272 maravedís.

Sources: Income (or cargo) figures were obtained from the following types of documents: The majority were in summary annual account books, broken down by ramos, and known as the Libro Mayor de Caja. In the case of Buenos Aires this libro mayor was known from 1762 to 1802 as a Libro de Carta Cuenta. Summary tables could also be found in the Manual de Caja, another bound annual volume which had its entries broken down by months rather than accounts (or ramos). Finally, if the summary tables appeared in neither type of bound volume, they could often be found in unbound bundles within general accounts papers from the individual caja. These bundles of summary tables alone were usually termed either a Tanteo or a Relación Jurada. All of these documents were found in the Archivo General de la Nación (Buenos Aires), División Colonia, Sección Contaduría, Sala XIII. For Buenos Aires see 14-2-4 (legajo 23, libro 1); Potosí in 6-9-2 (leg. 53, libro 1); La Paz in 29-2-5 (leg. 336); La Plata in 23-7-3 (leg. 24); Oruro in 27-11-1 (leg. 271); Cochabamba in 27-3-1 (leg. 228); Salta in 31-11-4 (leg. 467); Paraguay in 33-3-8 (leg. 548); Carangas in 1-5-1 (leg. 26, libro 1); Córdoba in 31-1-4 (leg. 428).

Royal Expenditures in the Viceroyalty of Buenos Aires in 1790 by Region

Author notes