Bureaucracy and Business in the Spanish Empire, 1759-1804: Failure of a Bourbon Beform in Mexico and Peru Open Access

Since publication of Herbert I. Priestley’s pioneer study of José de Gálvez, analyses of Spaniards’ efforts in the eighteenth century to “reform” or “modernize” colonial administration, finance, trade policy, and military posture testify to the conceptual boldness of the reformers. Some, relying heavily on legislation and the literature of eulogy, have perceived the outcome in a rosy light. Others have noted the resourcefulness and power of resistance to reform, and concluded that failure crowned the reformers’ work. Rarely, until recently, have the recurrent surges of Bourbon reform been examined at the grass-roots level. And yet it is precisely here that the origin and implications of change and of opposition to change can be most clearly discerned. This article, in correlating some old and new studies, printed and archival resources, presents one aspect of the Bourbon intendancy system in America, the reform of the local administrative unit known as corregimiento in Peru and alcaldía mayor in New Spain. It focuses particularly on the attempt to curtail collusion between bureaucrat and merchant in the commercial exploitation of the Indian through the repartimiento de mercancías, or forced distribution of goods. The intention is to provide a clearer understanding of social and economic pressures on one level, and imperial imperatives on another, which came into conflict in the last half-century of Spain’s rule over mainland America.¹

The corregimiento developed in Spain and its colonies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.² From the outset, however, obvious differences between metropolitan communities and those of conquered Indians led to divergent functions. In Spain, corregidores operated in urban centers with municipal authorities (the origin of “co-regidor”); in America, corregidores ruled Indian communities as day-to-day representatives of colonialist hegemony and they were invested with discretionary executive and judiciary powers over subject peoples, whose language and culture they ordinarily ignored. Unlike his metropolitan counterpart, the American corregidor collected the annual tributo, or head tax, which Indians as free vassals owed the Spanish crown; a percentage of the tribute collected went to provide the corregidor’s salary. Normally, when Indian population declined, so did corregidores’ income. As Rowe has shown for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Peru, the corregidor quickly compensated for population decline by requiring that Indians in his jurisdiction use his credit, buy his goods, supply him with tribute, goods, or services—all at prices he established. Forced sale of goods, or repartimiento de mercancías, never appeared in Spain, but flourished in the relatively densely populated Indian communities of the major silvermining colonies, Peru and New Spain.³

A major legacy of Hapsburg Spain to Bourbon administrators was ineffective control over local government, both metropolitan and colonial. Bureaucrats early borrowed from France one element of the Bourbon “model,” the intendancy, designed to weaken regional and local networks of interest and influence. Applied first to Spain in 1718, and formalized in an ordenanza general de intendentes corregidores in 1749, the intendancy there promised to uproot urban oligarchs who monopolized municipal office, misappropriated public funds, and as oligopolists manipulated the supply and price of basic foodstuffs. Besides being charged with fiscal and administrative functions, Spain’s intendants were directed to encourage agricultural production, introduce manufacture, and cooperate with local developmental societies.⁴ Only after long delay was the intendancy introduced to the colonies, initially (1765-82) to the peripheral and non-Indian colonies, subsequently to Peru (1784) and New Spain (1786). After about 1750, the indigenous population of these colonies was growing rapidly—New Spain’s doubled between 1740 and 1810—and proponents of the intendancy conceived of Indians as producers and consumers in the Spanish transatlantic economy, with potential for absorbing a rising volume of imports from Spain. At this point policy makers confronted the abusive practices of corregidores, alcaldes mayores, and their merchant backers in the colonies, who, as a group, monopolized the profitable distribution of goods to native peoples. Just as the policy of comercio libre⁵ was designed to expand trade within the Spanish imperial trading system, so at the micro or regional level the intendancy in the colonies was to shift from monopoly to competition among merchants. Comercio libre would have the added dimension of comercio libre interior. But to do this, local officials would have to receive salaries to substitute for the repartimiento de mercancías. Repartimiento versus salaries as remuneration to local administrators remained a critical and controversial issue both in Peru and New Spain from the 1780s onward. Among other things, it stimulated attempts either to suspend the intendancy system after 1789, or to make it more effective down to the beginning of colonial upheaval in 1810.

It is possible to outline the principal features of the system of repartimiento de mercancías as José de Gálvez encountered it after centuries of Spanish colonialism: these included slightly more than 200 local administrative posts in the major viceroyalties, 143 in New Spain, including Guadalajara, and 83 in Peru. Manuscript catalogs that circulated among “aspirants to colonial posts” detailed, among other items, the “trades” of alcaldías mayores and corregimientos so that one might choose “an opening in the Indies that will provide plenty of pesos.”⁶ New Spain’s most coveted alcaldías mayores were in those provinces, Mexico, Puebla, Michoacán, and especially Oaxaca, where Indian population was sizable. It remains unclear whether initial appointments at Madrid were purchased or obtained by favors, bribes, or clientelism through the Consejo de Indias; however, once in hand, appointments became negotiable.⁷ Viceroys were permitted to distribute some appointments among family and clientele. Incumbents held them between two and five years, when they were replaced by those on waiting lists.

Newly designated appointees had to finance their trip to Cadiz; support themselves while awaiting shipping; purchase personal belongings and other items; and pay passage to Veracruz or a more southerly port. Once arrived at Mexico City or Lima, appointees were obliged to find bondsmen (fiadores) to guarantee their financial responsibility. Often, appointees had to pay one-half their expected first year’s income (media anata), despite the fact that they enjoyed no fixed salary. At this point, if not earlier, appointees made contact with well-capitalized merchants, usually peninsula-born almaceneros, or large-scale importers, to act as bondsmen (who as aviadores financed previous outlays and furnished merchandise and capital for the commercial and credit operations in alcaldías mayores).⁸ At Lima, for example, the financing of local officials (here, corregidores) “provided the main line of business . . . with the interior.”⁹ Small wonder that in the eighteenth century merchants appointed as lieutenants (tenientes) their own dependents to operate tiendas in provincial jurisdictions and to dispense local justice.

Critical to the functioning of repartimiento on the colonial frontiers of Spanish commençai capitalism was the dual role of alcaldes mayores and corregidores as administrators and revenue collectors, broadly empowered as local justices (justicias). As justicias they coerced Indians to accept credit, buy goods and animals, and to repay by installment or face imprisonment. The combined role of judge and merchant led to extraordinary license and profiteering in collusion with Mexico City and Lima backers.¹⁰ Lima’s merchants, it was noted in 1800, “made considerable profit by underwriting corregidores at an interest rate of 40 or 50 percent” by forcing upon “miserable Indians . . . velvets . . . linens, baizes of Castile, fine beaver hats, mirrors, playing cards, gilded paper (papel dorado), and so forth, at 150 to 200 percent over prices regularly charged at shops.” Indians who complained were jailed since corregidores “recognized no God nor Law except money.”¹¹ As for New Spain, a leading cleric observed in 1799 that alcaldes mayores “acted not so much as judges but as merchants, empowered with an exclusive privilege and the power to enforce it, in order to monopolize trade in their zone and extract from it in five years from 30,000 to 200,000 pesos.”¹² Such “leeches on the body politic of the Americas” were protected by “distance and knowing how to cover up misbehavior in their juicio de residencia” and because “they protected themselves by maintaining agents in capital cities.”¹¹

It proved impossible to modify repartimiento before the last half of the century because administrative reorganization affected a nexus of interests, power, influence, and profit to which many had become accustomed. As Viceroy Croix wrote the bishop of Puebla in 1768, apropos a plan to terminate repartimiento, “It would be enough merely to suggest the idea to rouse the opposition of all those who thrive on the current anarchy and general disorder.”¹⁴ While most Spaniards with direct colonial experience recognized the exploitative nature of repartimiento as salary substitute, others were satisfied by such obfuscations as that offered by the dean of the Audiencia de México, Baltasar Ladrón de Guevara, who in 1794 viewed repartimiento as “only contracts for sales on credit providing moderate returns and beneficial to society in general.”¹⁵ The combination of vested interests coupled with conscious rationalization of abuse was furthered by a conspiracy of silence: while Indian pueblos feared district officers, the “disbelievers in Spain” rejected reality “although cabinet officers knew better.”¹⁶ Furthermore, ministers considered the critical reports from the American colonies as purely in-house materials circulated in manuscript to conceal from “foreigners our situation, government, and defenses” in the colonies.¹⁷ Spanish lexicologists editing the Real Academia’s Diccionario collaborated in the conspiracy by defining repartimiento as “what is done by lottery in Indian towns to furnish a proportion of residents required for public works.”¹⁸ If Madrid authorities knew of such administrative abuses, is it true that “the Court of Madrid . . . lacked courage to control such malfeasance?”¹⁹ To answer this, one must recognize the continued interaction in colonial policy making and execution between those associated with traditional commercial monopolies and those who envisioned an expanded and more open system. Gerónimo de Uztáriz and José Campillo, influential bureaucrats of Philip V’s administration, drew upon their understanding of colonial conditions to recommend policy changes. Reflecting no doubt on his five-year experience in New Spain, Campillo perceived the importance of New Spain’s “Indians, the sole object upon which the establishment of the new system ought to concentrate” as well as the inhumanity of those controlling them. Obviously he had in mind repartimiento de mercancías when he mentioned “the alcaldes . . . accustomed to tyrannize Indians.” He saw the need to complement New Spain’s mining sector; here Indians could play a key role as small landholders producing agricultural exportables to the metropolis, as consumers of Spain’s agricultural and would-be manufactured goods, and as contributors to colonial revenues through sales taxes. As Campillo encapsulated his policy, it was to “expand trade as much as possible and turn Indians to useful pursuits.”²⁰ And for these changes it would be necessary to have general surveys (visitas generales) of the American colonies to collect first-hand data on the human condition of the peoples. It is significant that the critical reports of Campillo and Antonio de Ulloa, prepared in the 1730s and 1740s, remained in manuscript for decades: Campillo’s work was published only in the first months of Charles IV’s reign (1789), while the Noticias secretas’ first edition surfaced in England in 1826, testimony to the fear of antagonizing vested interests enmeshed in repartimiento. Nonetheless, Madrid officials were aware of conditions in Peru and their relation to the Indian uprising in Jauja, led by Juan Santos Atahualpa, which erupted in 1742 and was directed against the corregidores.²¹ An understandably shocked Madrid bureaucracy solicited new field reports, which, predictably, produced contradictory opinions. From churchmen in Peru came demands for the liberation of Indians from corregidores’ extortions; in 1748, from New Spain’s viceroy, the first Conde de Revillagigedo, came recognition of alcaldes mayores’ tactics with his opinion that Indians needed credit advances, since “without cash they will never be able to buy an ox, mule . . . or even their cheap, coarse clothing”; and from the former president of Guatemala (José de Araujo) came praise for repartimiento of “money or goods to supply residents,” a practice he found maintained “ever since the conquest, and one that would continue without remedy despite prohibitive laws.” Both Revillagigedo and Araujo recommended continued but controlled repartimiento, with alcaldes mayores allowed to trade in competition with merchants (repartidores) under a “special series of regulations” and with prices posted to detail each article’s “prime cost, interest, and other expenditures to justify profits.” Local priests could monitor the commercial activities of local administrators.²²

Rural unrest still smouldering in central Peru after the Jauja disturbance, and Revillagigedo’s recommendation for a modified repartimiento, along with the metropolitan government’s drive to capture tax revenue, may account for the royal cédula of June 15, 1751. Issued during the ministry of Campillo’s successor, the Marqués de Ensenada, the cédula officially legalized corregidores’ repartimiento, ordered the formation of special juntas in the major colonies to establish a maximum sales volume in each district, along with official unit prices, and required alcaldes mayores to pay into the treasury a 4 percent sales tax.²³ Apparently no maxima or price lists were ever formulated for New Spain; the Peruvian total or arancel prepared by 1756 stipulated a five-year total of about 5.5 million pesos, with an estimated tax yield to the government of slightly over 200,000 pesos, a highly optimistic estimate.²⁴

Formulation of the Peruvian arancel for the legalization of corregidores’ commercial activities in collaboration with Lima’s merchant establishment terminated the first effort to control repartimiento. There is no evidence indicating alleviation of Peruvian corregidores’ exploitation.²⁵ In New Spain increased sale of alcaldías mayores blocked formation of an arancel. On the other hand, a cédula of 1758 prohibited appointment of tenientes, an attempt to sever the ties between alcalde and merchant.²⁶ But in 1760, Viceroy Amarillas in Mexico City had no illusion that the measure would affect secret deals. With the accession of Charles III, however, appeared a fresh group of bureaucrats, led by the Marqués de Esquilache, committed anew to implementing the model of Bourbon reform. Esquilache resurrected Campillo’s recommendation for a general inspection and he commissioned José de Gálvez, who arrived in New Spain in mid-1765, thus initiating the second major effort to modify the colonial distribution system at its base, a phase culminating in New Spain’s ordenanza de intendentes (1786), issued almost two decades after Gálvez’s first proposal.

On the same day in 1765 and just before he sailed, Gálvez received two sets of complementary instructions. The first raised the general proposition “whether it will be useful . . . to establish one or more intendancies in New Spain,” while the second, provided by the Consejo de Indias, explicitly required that he “inform himself . . . whether they have permitted the alcaldes mayores and governors to distribute to the Indians more merchandise and goods than they can or ought to accept, charging them higher prices for such goods than have been permitted in accordance with the latest royal orders.”²⁷ Gálvez, who had formulated his impressions of the American colonial situation before his appointment, soon advised First Minister Grimaldi of the population of Spain’s most populous colony and of its evident and growing capacity to absorb imports; lack of imports from the metropolis had, he lamented, stimulated local production.²⁸ To Gálvez it became immediately evident that at least 50 percent of Indian tribute was pocketed by alcaldes mayores and that widespread malfeasance might be controlled by an intendancy system. Only elimination of repartimiento would render “truly free the trade of the interior.” These are some of the recommendations advanced in Gálvez’s proposal for intendancies in New Spain, which he submitted jointly with Viceroy Croix to Madrid authorities in January 1768. With respect to modifications in local administration, the plan recommended that intendants (not viceroys) appoint subdelegados to replace corregidores or alcaldes mayores, who would fill out their term of office before replacement. Repartimiento was outlawed, and in its stead subdelegados would receive 5 percent of the head tax collection, while the indios gobernadores, those responsible for the actual collection in pueblos, would receive 1 percent as remuneration.²⁹

Gálvez’s proposal, however, encountered a new political ambience in Madrid, where Esquiladle had been removed by a coup d’état by privileged groups opposing his reforms. The proposal was quickly presented by then Minister of the Indies Julián de Arriaga—no supporter of innovation—for comment to a small ad hoc Madrid junta, which included such ministerial luminaries as Prime Minister Ricardo Wall, Hacienda’s Miguel de Múzquiz, the Conde de Aranda, the Marqués de Grimaldi, and the Marqués de San Juan de Piedras Albas, the aged president of the Consejo de Indias. Their comments came within weeks; none questioned reports of district officers’ illegal and extortionist commercial and credit operations. Only Piedras Albas expressed cautious disapproval in a response that is almost a caricature of negative, turgid verbosity: Galvez’s proposal was an “extraordinary innovation . . . never imagined or thought of,” which threatened “a method followed . . . in those vast dominions since their Conquest . . . confirmed and approved by repeated laws, ordinances, and royal cédulas.” Piedras Albas, who must have been aware of the Consejo’s low reputation among Charles Ill’s bureaucratic elite, would not explicitly reject Gálvez’s proposal (“there are reasons . . . that persuade me not to take a firm position either pro or con”); instead he sought to delay action by stretching out consultation with the “Consejo under my charge, listening to its fiscales, and following discussion, verification, and argument.”³⁰

Despite the virtual unanimity of ministerial opinion in 1768, the proposal for intendancies in New Spain remained stalled. Gálvez was only too aware of what Navarro García has properly termed the “ties of interest and connivance” linking Mexico City merchant-oligarchs to the Consejo de Indias and other metropolitan groups who minimized his proposals as “fireworks, wondrous to behold . . . but without . . . inner content or substance.”³¹ He could not overlook the critical eye of Croix’s successor as New Spain’s viceroy, Bucareli y Ursúa, who as captain-general of Cuba had urged that Cuba’s experiment with an intendancy be terminated. Asked his opinion about Gálvez’s proposed intendancy system for New Spain, Bucareli delayed replying for two years (1773-74), only to advise Madrid that New Spain’s conditions “did not permit changing its system of government.” All that the “máquina” required was selection of better personnel less “burdened with obligations and the need to meet them and to have enough to be able to return home, since necessity forces many to evil.”³²

Behind the judgment of bureaucrats linked by family, interest, or career to the imperial system lay the conviction that overseas colonies could not be properly administered given both the nature of the ruled and the rulers—indios and corregidores—and sheer distance. Cynical, realist, or conservative, the bureaucratic mentality may best be culled from the letters of the experienced colonial and naval officer, Antonio de Ulloa, written at Veracruz, to his colleague Viceroy Bucareli. By September 1776, Ulloa had heard of the intendancy project, which promised to change “completely the way of governing to one in which the Treasury plays the major role” by shifting to intendants selection of local administrators. This “new organization,” Ulloa predicted, would prove fruitless. Indian subjects demonstrated only “stupidity and uncouthness,” while local bureaucrats enjoyed “liberties . . . different from those enjoyed in Europe” and like all men “are not without the desire for self-enrichment when their means of achieving it are greater than those of others.” Once before he had advised Minister Grimaldi, he recalled, of the intendancy system’s flaws; his policy deemphasized mining and instead concentrated upon “development of the Indians,” freeing them from tribute payments and substituting “the tax under another name in repartimientos.”³³ Old colonial hands could not “cut out” merchants from the colonial system.

Immobility of bureaucracy and business interests stymied Gálvez’s proposal, which passed from bureaucrat to bureaucrat, accepted in theory, in practice shelved. Once Gálvez became minister of Indies in 1776, however, he immediately transferred José Antonio de Areche from New Spain to South America to undertake a general inspection of Peru, Chile, and La Plata and investigate abuse of repartimiento. In Peru Areche confronted such strong opposition that he was replaced by Jorge Escobedo.³⁴ Two years later Gálvez formulated another intendancy plan, which he submitted for critique to a junta composed of consejeros de Indias Francisco Leandro de Viana (Conde de Tepa, recently returned from New Spain and the Philippines), Pedro Muñoz de la Torre (lacking colonial experience, apparently linked to the Cadiz community), Francisco Xavier Machado (former secretary to Gálvez in New Spain), and Antonio Porlier (former oidor of Charcas), whose meetings were held secretly.³⁵ Aside from Gálvez’s personal commitment to his administrative innovation, he may well have been motivated by Indian unrest in the Andes throughout the 1770s. In August 1780, Areche recommended to him that repartimiento be immediately ended and corregidores’ salaries appropriately raised as the only way to “introduce free trade.”³⁶ One may conclude that during the thirty years after the cédula of 1751 legalized and controlled repartimiento, the net effect—certainly in Peru— was even greater use of repartimiento. Legalization of the widespread practice of repartimiento had produced the opposite of expectation: more ruthless exploitation of Indians. Only a profound shock and the threat of more revolt could overcome the inertia of the Spanish colonial administration; that shock materialized in late 1780 with the Indian rebellion of Tupac Amarú, which engulfed the central Andes. This movement was aimed at the removal of corregidores and, to use Tupac Amaru’s own words, “that their repartimientos should end.” No sooner did Lima hear of the uprising than Viceroy Agustín de Jáuregui abolished repartimiento (December 1780). Small wonder that Gálvez wrote Viceroy Croix in Lima in 1783 that Indians came into contact only with “tyrants, corregidores, and curas [like them].”³⁷

But by 1782 Gálvez had managed to establish the intendancy in the Río de la Plata; it was applied to Peru shortly thereafter, in 1784, and to New Spain in 1786, two decades after he had arrived as visitador general. Years ago, Gálvez’s biographer noted the inordinate delay, but offered no explanation for it other than “obstacles we have not sufficient records to show.” Clearly too many interests resisted Gálvez’s thrust toward putting district officials on straight salary, interests so strong that Gálvez’s obituary in the Gaceta de Madrid, which listed his achievements, omitted reference to the intendancy system for which he was principally responsible.³⁸

Eighteen years after Gálvez offered a plan for intendancies in New Spain, ten years after he was appointed minister of the Indies, six years after the massive Indian uprising of Tupac Amarú began in the central Andes, and two years after Peru received its ordinance, on December 4, 1786, Gálvez finally managed to push through his long-cherished ordinance for New Spain. Within months he was dead; yet about the time the ordinance for New Spain materialized, Peru’s Viceroy Croix, who had presumably co-authored Gálvez’s first plan, was recommending to Madrid that the Peruvian ordinance be modified to permit what had been expressly prohibited, a prohibition repeated in New Spain’s ordinance: repartimiento de mercancías.

From an administrative viewpoint, New Spain’s ordinance reordered the former alcaldías mayores under a series of intendancies. The new units covered territorial jurisdictions too large to be administered closely.³⁹ In place of alcaldías mayores appeared a new jurisdiction, the partido, administered by intendant-appointed subdelegados empowered to appoint their tenientes. In effect, new local administrators, subdelegados, administered districts about the size of former alcaldías mayores, but were responsible to intendants, not to viceroys and audiencias. Alcaldes would be permitted to finish their terms of office. There were no abrupt dismissals.⁴⁰

Scholarly attention to the adminstrative elements has obscured, however, Gálvez’s effort to reduce the commercial constraints and perquisites local administrators had long manipulated for personal profit. In article 11, to prevent judicial coercion in personal business operations, a corregidor or his intermediaries (interpósitas personas) could neither “purchase farmland, nor property in his district during his term of office, nor barter, trade nor engross in it, nor . . . import cattle.” In article 12, subdelegados were cautioned not to “furnish Indians, Spaniards, mestizos, and other castas, goods, or any cattle . . . with the understanding that henceforth Indians and my other vassals consequently enjoy the liberty to trade wherever and with whomsoever they wish to supply their needs. ” Probably in expectation of the spread into partidos of numerous small stores (pulperías) hitherto discouraged by alcaldes mayores, their proprietors were now required to pay a license fee and sales taxes in advance. It is testimony to the care with which New Spain’s ordenanzas were drafted, as well as to the effort to incorporate Indian producers into the export economy, that article 61 specifically recommended that Indian cochineal growers “may trade with it freely in New Spain or forward it to Spain on their own account.” For intendants two classes or categories were created, one receiving an annual salary (sueldo) of 7,000 pesos, the other 6,000.⁴¹

Despite the ordinance issued for Peru and New Spain, tribute rates remained unchanged, local administrators received no salaries and continued to manipulate the repartimiento, while Madrid’s bureaucracy shuttled the question of repartimiento between the standpat Consejo de Indias and its increasingly insubordinate and reform-minded Contaduría General. By omitting from the ordinance adequate salaries, to be drawn on colonial revenues, while publicly prohibiting repartimiento de mercancías, the Madrid government sharpened the always latent contradictions between public policy and private business practice. In Peru, where complaints about continued repartimiento filtered to Lima, Visitador General Jorge de Escobedo y Alarcón proposed in 1784 first, that Lima’s consulado assume complete responsibility for financing and managing the viceroyalty’s repartimientos, and, second, that corregidores receive adequate salaries from tribute and follow a career ladder with salary increments. Predictably, the Lima consulado’s almaceneros rejected responsibility for a repartimiento that promised little profit and power to coerce, while Lima’s Junta Superior de Real Hacienda withheld comment on salaries, “since the aforementioned plan cannot be located.” Escobedo had earlier insisted to Gálvez upon the importance of adequate salaries, “but the secretary never followed it up.”⁴²

In light of the post-1784 Peruvian situation, it was a commission by extraordinary omission that in New Spain’s ordinance no salary was established for subdelegados except for the provision (article 132) that “for the collection, shipment, and delivery of tribute that alcaldes ordinarios and subdelegados . . . are to undertake . . . I order that they be assigned 6 per cent,” 1 percent to tribute collectors (gobernadores or alcaldes de indios) and the balance to subdelegados. And although article 137 proposed to increase tribute the better to support the subdelegados by taxing heretofore Indian half-tributaries (mainly bachelors and widowers) at the full rate of 16 reales, Viceroy Manuel Antonio Flores and the Audiencia suspended this article, remanding the matter to Madrid for clarification. At the same time Flores suspended article 137, he also suspended “until His Majesty decides otherwise” articles 11, 12, and 129, which in effect forbade the intromission of alcaldes into local economic activities.⁴³ After all, Flores, well-connected to the almaceneros of Mexico City, Veracruz, and Cadiz, stressed the theme of Indian poverty, predicted that Indians would abandon residence and workplace, raised the specter of civil disorder, and reported hearing “subdued laments foretelling the colony’s doom” (presumably from merchant friends).⁴⁴ He urged his successor, Revillagigedo, to recommend to Madrid a return to alcaldes mayores and repartimiento. There is no doubt that Flores was responsible for the “state of anarchy and confusion” Revillagigedo found when he arrived in late 1789 and was immediately subjected to merchants’ complaints—as Revillagigedo caustically commented—“in which there abounded ominous references to disquiet and irreparable losses affecting Commerce, Mining, the Royal Treasury, and the proper governing of the People.”⁴⁵

In framing Revillagigedo’s instructions, reform-minded Minister Antonio Valdés knew that the intendancy system was in crisis as a result of continued repartimiento. In 1786 Peru’s Viceroy Croix had advised him to scrap the ordinances, return to corregimiento administration, reinstate repartimiento; Croix’s successor, Gil y Lemos, supported him; and Valdés knew of Flores’s opinion.⁴⁶ Valdés therefore instructed Revillagigedo to clarify the issue of repartimiento in New Spain. Immediately on taking office in December of 1789, Revillagigedo circulated to his eleven intendants a request for status reports on repartimiento. The result was indeed instructive: five opposed repartimiento, one offered no recommendation, five supported a controlled repartimiento. This sharply divided opinion led Revillagigedo to “reconcile prohibition of repartimiento with the means of insuring a fit living for delegados.”⁴⁷ He issued two contradictory circular orders on the same day (November 25, 1790); the first insisted on enforcement of prohibitions against repartimiento, the second (issued secretly) permitted repartimiento with restraint. As Revillagigedo’s successor, the Marqués de Branciforte, put it baldly in 1797, Revillagigedo had issued “one public order insisting upon prohibition of repartimiento and another secret one to dissimulate and even allow repartimiento to be made without usury or harm to Indians and other poor Vassals.” The Consejo de Indias approved Revillagigedo’s action, at the same time permitting complaints about repartimiento to be channeled not to the immediate superiors of subdelegados, the intendants, but to the viceroy, who would enjoy “private jurisdiction over cases arising from repartimientos.”⁴⁸

Repartimiento was no new matter to Revillagigedo. Forty years before, when viceroy of New Spain, his father (the first conde) had detailed to Madrid the collusive exploitation by local administrators and merchant repartidores in the form of a high volume of forced sales at inflated prices; he had then recommended removing repartimiento from alcaldes mayores, opening their districts to competition among many repartidores, according to an arancel adapted to each district, with items priced by “experienced and knowledgeable persons” to provide a legitimate profit. In this sense, the first Revillagigedo initiated the process of legitimizing repartimiento in New Spain.⁴⁹ In 1774 his son at Madrid had expressed the opinion that because inhabitants in the American colonies bore a higher per capita tax burden than those in the metropolis and, moreover, had to import goods at arbitrarily inflated prices, there were but two categories of colonial profiteers: first the “class of merchants . . . who establish shops there . . . leeches bloated with the sweat of those natives” and, second, the “class of royal placemen . . . corregidores and alcaldes mayores who are so many more merchants.”⁵⁰

Aware of pressure from vested interests in both colonies and metropolitan Spain to recall the ordinances or at least to rewrite key articles, Revillagigedo sent off to Madrid between July 1790 and July 1791 a series of ten letters, which the Consejo de Indias filed with the growing collection of materials on subdelegaciones and intendancies.⁵¹ Revillagigedo felt that a controlled repartimiento of the type his father had proposed in 1748, and which Madrid tried to enact in 1751 with quantities, prices, and types of goods detailed, was ineffective “because of invincible difficulties” and because “personal ends could overcome reason.” He argued, however, that it was too soon to reject changes introduced with intendants and subdelegados as Croix and Flores proposed; Revillagigedo judged that at the district level, corregidores, alcaldes mayores, and their merchant suppliers (“locusts of the colony”) had connived to frustrate the “important establishment of intendancies” by spreading rumors of an imminent return to the repartimiento system. This discouraged many willing would-be traders from operating in the local districts. Moreover, the new merchants did not understand that under new regulations they did not have to limit sales to Indians to cash transactions, but could legally extend credit in amounts above 5 pesos.⁵² Of course, he observed, Indians could not dispense with repartimiento, which many merchants were ready to offer once assured that subdelegados and their agents would not retaliate against them or their Indian debtors. As in the issue of comercio libre, Revillagigedo saw advantages in increasing the number of merchants, the quantity and variety of goods, and price competition; therefore, prohibition against subdelegados’ participation in repartimiento must stand. Sensitive to the link between tribute and repartimiento, he urged fixed salaries for alcaldes (“men truly poor and subject to considerable losses”) unable to maintain themselves with the 5 percent of local tribute collection. So, to compensate subdelegados for loss of repartimiento income, he recommended adequate fixed salaries drawn from revised tribute schedules, eliminating the exempt status of bachelors and widowers, and comprising all male Indians, free Blacks, mulattoes, and “the other tributary castes” between 18 and 50 at the capitation rate of 16 reales. Finally, Revillagigedo hoped to see established a career ladder to provide stability and status for subdelegados: they would serve five-year periods in expectation of successive appointment to other districts at rising salaries. Presumably to control their selection, intendants supervised by viceroys would appoint subdelegados.⁵³

It now appears that Revillagigedo’s viewpoint, contradicting that of Croix, saved the ordinances from recall, that in fact “Just the plain reading of these two contradictory opinions reveals the knowledge, learning, and impartiality that Revillagigedo displayed, and the vulgarism, lack of ideas and of solid evaluation with which Croix produced his viewpoint, shot through with contradictions and mere generalizations.” Yet Revillagigedo’s views sparked no full-scale review and plan of reorganization. The Consejo de Indias’s contador general, aging Francisco Xavier Machado, delayed preparation of such a review on the grounds of inadequate information; his replacements in 1794, Conde de Casa Valencia and Pedro Aparici, although far more critical of colonial administration than Machado, could not proceed with the materials on repartimiento that kept coming from Peru and Mexico without orders from the Consejo de Indias—and those never came.⁵⁴

Such administrative indecision heartened those supporting the status quo in New Spain. Its Junta Superior de Real Hacienda opposed formulation of a salary scale; frank reports from the intendants of Yucatán and Guanajuato confirmed widespread continuation of repartimiento in their partidos, while from Mexico’s Intendant Bernardo Bonavía and a fiscal of the Audiencia, Francisco Xavier Borbón, came recommendations that “supply or trade on credit” be continued.⁵⁵

Those intendants opposed to repartimiento, ruffled by the attitude of Intendant Jacobo Ugarte y Loyola of Guadalajara, who termed prohibition of repartimiento “the unwarranted inhibition that the Viceroy Re- villagigedo had placed upon Intendants,” noted that the order of May 1791 required complainants against subdelegados’ abuse of office to carry their cases all the way to Mexico City. Is it surprising that a veteran colonial officer, as well-rooted in New Spain as was Lorenzo Hernández de Alba, rationalized repartimiento by drawing upon his view of Indians as consumers? They were, he argued, incapable of buying “for cash anything worth more than 2 reales; no one will ever loan them a larger sum except through repartimiento, without which—he added tellingly—“local districts will never receive stimulus from the large sums spread around by alcaldes mayores.”⁵⁶

In fact, full-scale review of the ordinances and their operation remained stalled from 1792 until late 1800.⁵⁷ That was a particularly critical moment: key ministerial figures such as Francisco de Saavedra, Mariano Luis Urquijo, and Miguel Antonio Soler, who were experienced in commercial affairs and cognizant of the commercial and financial importance of the colonies, wrestled with financial problems. The government’s annual deficit was large, and it was growing because of the wars against France (1792-95) and England (begun in 1797). Metropolitan revenues alone were totally inadequate, and an English blockade had virtually isolated Spain from its colonies’ trade and revenues for three years. Prime Minister Urquijo and Hacienda Minister Soler, both members of long-established commercial families of Vizcaya and Majorca respectively, envisioned the potential gains from trade with the colonies in postwar years. Elimination of repartimiento would lead to fuller development of the Indian market. This may explain why Soler demanded in November 1800 that the president of the Consejo de Indias, Antonio Domingo Porlier, either produce formal recommendations about the entire intendancy system or release to him the file of accumulated materials.⁵⁸ Within seven weeks, and probably to Soler’s astonishment, there materialized the comprehensive, and in many ways extraordinary, summary and recommendations prepared by veteran bureaucrats, Francisco de Valencia (Conde de Casa Valencia) and Pedro Aparici, both contadores generales under the Consejo de Indias.⁵⁹

The presence of knowledgeable bureaucrats Casa Valencia and Aparici suggests that even within the Consejo de Indias, and notably its Contaduría General, there existed activist, independent-minded officials. They symbolize the degree to which by the end of the eighteenth century the Spanish government had managed to establish career channels for personnel of suitable birth and proven talent to handle colonial issues. To be sure, both were dedicated to the preservation of Spanish imperialism in America; but to them preservation required a new view and new techniques for handling the colonial population.

Pedro Aparici, the older of the two, was the son of a Catalan, Josef Inocencio Aparici, who had been accountant of the Infinite Cardenal, later secretario del rey, and author of a Promptuario . . . del valor de todas las monedas usuales (1741). Pedro Aparici was born at Madrid in 1738, entered the bureaucracy of the Consejo de Indias in 1765, when Esquiladle was reorganizing the Contaduría General, then ascended to the rank of oficial mayor (1784), director of Hacienda y Comercio de Indias for North America (1790), then contador general of the Consejo de Indias’s Contaduría General (1794). In the last capacity he was highly critical of the accounting system of the empire’s two major commercial corporative bodies, the consulados of Mexico and Cadiz, and especially of the handling of funds (avería) entrusted to them. His wife, María de Prado y Berdeja, was the daughter of a merchant originally from Santander, García de Prado, author of a manual of duties levied on trade with the colonies, published at Cadiz in 1762.⁶⁰ A talented and trusted employee of the Consejo de Indias, he had access to the many noncirculating reports in the Consejo’s archives; he is known to have had his own copy of Ulloa’s closely guarded Noticias secretas. When still oficial segundo (1783), he was accepted into the order of Charles III.

Casa Valencia’s career parallels that of Aparici in most respects. He was, however, a native of Popayán in the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, where his father served as treasurer in its Casa de Moneda. On the staff of the Contaduría General of the Consejo de Indias in 1776, he, too, rose to become with Aparici director of Hacienda y Comercio de Indias and in 1794 one of the two contadores generales. His status was, if anything, confirmed in 1787 by entry into the order of Charles III, followed by receipt of the title of Conde de Casa Valencia two years later.⁶¹ Aparici, Casa Valencia, Revillagigedo the younger, and Escobedo shared qualities of social antecedents and bureaucratic success—qualities that made possible critical stances on major colonial issues without risk of personal retribution.

The structure and function of the Spanish bureaucracy, the parallel and confluent careers of the contadores generales, and, one must assume, Soler’s understanding of and contact with the Madrid bureaucratic elite must have left few doubts about the end product of the informe that Casa Valencia and Aparici were requested to draft. Soler’s peremptory note to Porlier may reflect knowledge of the contadores’ work in progress and general orientation as well as Soler’s impatience at the way the Consejo de Indias had bottled up a definitive report for a decade. Given the sheer volume of letters, manuscript reports, evaluations, and recommendations that accompanied the contadores’ informe of 571 paragraphs in 231 folios (completed within about seven weeks), there is a tenable inference that Casa Valencia, Aparici, and assistants had long been analyzing materials on subdelegaciones and repartimiento flowing to Madrid from Peru and especially from New Spain, and formulating an approach and strategy of presentation. When necessary, they could easily test data and interpretation by interrogating Madrid’s colony of creoles and retired colonial officials, including former Viceroy Revillagigedo during the four years (1795-99) before his death. In Revillagigedo they could find a kindred spirit dedicated to the preservation of the Spanish imperial system, paternalistic and humanitarian in supporting colonialist tutelage of America’s Indians, yet strong-willed enough to separate from the empire’s survival the narrowly focused, self-interested networks of colonial mercantile-bureaucratic groups. It was Revillagigedo who had overruled the merchants of Mexico and their bureaucratic spokesmen on crucial and complementary issues of comercio libre and repartimiento, and who had even proposed the elimination of the influential Mexico City consulado.

The informe’s comprehensive title highlights the options: maintenance of intendancies or their reform; reversion to the former system of repartimiento, or a modified repartimiento; and, last, what kind of economic liberty Indians should enjoy. The focus was primarily upon how most effectively to stimulate commercial growth at the colonial district level. The presentation is logically bureaucratic: first, Croix’s drastic criticism (1786) of the intendancy system of Buenos Aires and Peru, which urged corregidores’ participation in “repartimiento of clothing, mules, and other useful items”; second, a historical review of the reasons for the attack upon repartimiento and the multiple functions of corregidores; third, a section summarizing bureaucratic reports on the shortcomings of the intendancy system in Peru and New Spain; fourth, a section on Revillagigedo’s recommendations; and finally, a section containing the contadores generales’ recommendations. This informe is a model eighteenth-century Spanish bureaucratic position paper in organization, historical perspective, alternation of paraphrasing and direct quotation of primary sources, and overall lucidity and consistency of argument. Its parti pris, however, is barely concealed; throughout there is a manichaean contrast between what are presented as spokesmen for traditional (Croix) and innovative (Revillagigedo) solutions.

Casa Valencia and Aparici were outstanding eighteenth-century bureaucrats who conceived of the American colonies as consumers of Spanish and European products and as producers of raw materials and precious metals for export to the metropolis. They advanced recommendations consonant with their imperial vision. The American natives should be supplied by merchants competing for their trade with cash, credit, or goods since otherwise Indians would not participate; subdelegados were to be prohibited from participation in repartimiento lest they re-create the former monopolistic structure; instead, they would be assigned fixed salaries graduated by subdelegación and drawn on general colonial funds. No longer would they be subject to either payment of media anata or juicio de residencia; and they would hold office only on good conduct, including among their responsibilities the establishment of primary schools to instruct in Spanish, reading, writing, and Christian doctrine— education and evangelization financed from Indian pueblos’ community funds. The colonialist vision of tutelage had no place for state-financed welfare or uplift. Soler’s impatience had forced the Consejo de Indias to loosen restraints imposed upon its Contaduría General, which is not to say that the Consejo abandoned its customary tactics of procedural delay. Silvestre Collar of the Consejo received the informe dated December 30, 1800, and the Consejo then asked for opinions from New Spain and Peru. In early March, Ramón de Posada, for New Spain, warmly approved the recommendations, while almost two more months elapsed before Peru’s fiscal ambiguously supported him.⁶² Only in December 1801, however, did the Consejo approve the informe’s recommendations while forwarding three separate opinions. Antonio Domingo Porlier (son of a former consejero de Indias and now presidente of the Consejo de Indias) and José Antonio de Urizar (former oidor of the Audiencias of Santo Domingo and Mexico) dissented on grounds of excessive concentration of power in intendants, a contention Escobedo termed motivated by “wretched and self-serving interest.” Nonetheless, the ministry at last could select a junta to draft new ordenanzas; the ministry’s intentions were evident in the new junta’s members—Casa Valencia, Aparici, Tomás Alvarez de Acevedo, Escobedo—and in the designation of Escobedo as principal draftsman.

Escobedo was ending years of colonial service in Peru as consejero of Indias in Madrid. Born into a titled Andalusian family, he had studied law at Salamanca’s graduate Colegio Mayor de Cuenca, and in 1776 was posted to Peru as oidor in the Audiencia of Charcas. In recognition of his performance in filling important political and economic posts at Potosí and in organizing security forces against insurgent Indians under Tupac Amarú in 1780, he replaced Areche as visitador general (1782-85) and was made honorary member of the Consejo de Indias. Years of service in Peru’s main mining zone, notorious for labor drafts, repartimientos, and lax financial administration, impressed upon him the need of reform. After evaluating at Gálvez’s request the ordinance of intendants for Buenos Aires, he was prepared to draft one for Peru. It is not surprising that Escobedo became both intendant of Lima and superintendant for the intendancy of Peru in 1784. In that year he submitted a proposal to “solve” the problem of repartimiento there, recommending fixed salaries for subdelegados and “assistance” (socorros) for Indians by assigning to the consulado of Lima a highly regulated monopoly for providing basic supplies. A member of the Order of Charles III (1784), Escobedo returned to Madrid four years later and served on the Consejo de Indias from 1792 to 1805.⁶³

Escobedo drafted the general ordinance in four months, from March to July 1802. The ordinance created three categories of subdelegados, with a scale of salaries ranging from 1,200 to 2,200 pesos per annum, empowered to appoint tenientes “just as corregidores used to.” There were, of course, repeated injunctions against any repartimiento of “goods and wares from Spain or the Indies.” Since no salary was allocated to tenientes, however, it is not clear how they would avoid involvement in trade.⁶⁴ As it turned out, these provisions were never applied, for hardly had the new ordinance been printed and distributed than it was repealed, ostensibly by the intervention of the military. On January 3, 1804, the general staffs of the Artillery and Engineering Corps resolved that sections of the new code conflicted with their own recently issued regulations. Manuel de Godoy, under whose auspices the military codes had been revised, instructed then Minister of War José Antonio Caballero to draft a royal order to Soler. On January 11, Soler laconically informed the Consejo’s president, Porlier, that the new ordinance was ineffective and was to be withdrawn from circulation—an announcement immediately sent to America.⁶⁵

The antecedents of this abrupt reversal of policy are obscure. As with other frustrated reforms of the period, the attempt to conciliate conflicting interests left flaws in the final document. It is not likely, however, that the casuistic handling of repartimiento alone warranted such drastic repudiation of the whole ordinance. To the military, a far more important defect was probably the clear subordination of intendants to viceroys and audiencias. A critical innovation in the 1803 ordinance made viceroys the superintendents who, in considtation with juntas staffed by traditional officials and oidores, supervised the activity of intendants.⁶⁶ To the military elites who had emerged under Charles III as the chief proponents of reform and critics of old bureaucratic and commercial networks symbolized by consejos, audiencias, and consulados, such dependence must have been unacceptable. To none was it more so than to the artillery corps, self-reputed for competence, esprit, and colonial expertise.⁶⁷

In this light, Escobedo—colegial, former oidor, and now consejero de Indias—may have been seen as protagonist of the old structures dominated by traditional families and interests. The selection of Francisco Manuel de Arce for the key intendancy of Mexico even before publication of the ordinance was doubly significant. His appointment undoubtedly reflected the influence of his brother, Ramón José, like Escobedo a colegial of Cuenca, then wielding great influence at the court of Madrid. Francisco Manuel, along with a third brother, Juan Vicente (since 1802 intendant of Venezuela), had served earlier in New Spain. The response of the military elite, long assigned key posts of the intendancy system, to such appointments could be predicted: they feared return to governance through those family connections, regional affiliations, and private interests that had perennially blocked Spain’s development. In the case of Francisco Manuel de Arce, the fear was borne out in 1807 when the intendancy of Mexico became involved in a case of blatant military corruption and repartimiento.⁶⁸

This approach now raises a question about Escobedo’s assignment to frame the general ordinance, instead of either or both of the contadores generales. It also suggests a possible answer. There were his years at Salamanca’s Colegio Mayor de Cuenca, where, with kin and kith from Andalusia, he opposed efforts to destroy the residences (hospedarias) that served as nurseries of networks from which bureaucrats were drawn;⁶⁹ his loyal service in Peru where he collaborated with Benito Mata Linares (another colegial) in suppressing the Tupac Amarú rebellion and with whom he later served on the Consejo de Indias; his willingness to grant Lima’s consulado a formal role in repartimiento—these marked him as a reformer more moderate than Aparici and Casa Valencia and pliant enough to yield to tradition when issues of reform surfaced.

Underlying the vacillation, ambivalence, or sheer impotence of reform-oriented bureaucrats, as well as the tenacity of those supporting the repartimiento system, was the power of New Spain’s commercial elite, with its widespread networks in Spain and America. Associations between bureaucrats and colonial interests are but one feature of structures that linked Spain and New Spain and blocked the peninsula’s economic development. Exploitation of repartimiento’s enclaves exemplifies how family and regional connections—economic, social, political—both competed for and defended limited access to Indian consumers and producers.

Using Hamnett’s material on the cochineal and cotton cloth trade of southern New Spain, one may trace one of many networks linking bureaucrats and business from the lowest regional stratum in New Spain to higher spheres of influence and decision making in Madrid. Matías Gutiérrez de Lanzas, major aviador of Oaxaca, was long a partner of another montañés, Francisco Bustamante y Guerra de la Vega, a merchant at Cadiz who earlier had spent years in New Spain in association with his uncle, Francisco Guerra de la Vega. In the 1790s, Bustamante continued his uncle’s operations at Cadiz under the name of Guerra de la Vega y Sobrinos, and ran his own Bustamante y Compañía. He acquired at least two vessels, trading mainly with Veracruz, where his chief correspondent was Joaquín del Castillo y Bustamante, another montañés, probably a relative (also executor of his estate), and prominent resident of Veracruz. There Bustamante was also represented by an unregistered firm curiously entitled Bustamante y Parientes, apparently handling accounts of a number of small traders in the interior of New Spain. Of these, some can be associated with Oaxaca traders mentioned by Hamnett. Furthermore, at Veracruz both Castillo y Bustamante and Bustamante y Parientes also handled the interests of Bustamante y Guerra de la Vega’s former partner, Matías Gutiérrez de Lanzas, established at Mexico City and deeply involved in the Oaxaca trade.⁷⁰

This network has added significance since it was associated with the family of former Viceroy Manuel Antonio Flores and his sons. Castillo y Bustamante was also agent of one of the viceroy’s sons, José Antonio (Conde de Casa Flores), who in 1795 activated a royal, secretly bestowed “privilege” authorizing the export of 300 tons of produce from Veracruz to neutral ports in America or Europe. Marriage tied Flores’s sons to the Mexico City commercial elite. The conde married the daughter of Gabriel Gutiérrez de Terán and María Josefa González Vertiz; Luis Antonio, the conde’s brother, married the daughter of Francisco Javier Fondevila y Guerra, whose other daughter married Bustamante y Guerra de la Vega. Fondevila y Guerra, another montañés, was cousin of Bustamante y Guerra and son of a Santander merchant who had once been a guarantor of Bustamante y Guerra in business at Cadiz in 1782. Many members of this network entered the Order of Charles III in the 1790s, a requisite to political appointments and career advancement. Thus Fondevila, Order of Charles III (1791), became consejero de Indias in 1793. Others received titles of nobility. Not without significance is the fact that former Viceroy Manuel Antonio Flores, who had attacked salaries for subdelegados and recommended repartimiento, was appointed to the Consejo de Estado in 1792, which in subsequent years devoted many sessions to colonial issues.⁷¹ At the end of the century, the influence of this interlocked montañés group was spreading as the network interwove habilitadores and tenientes de subdelegados, business and bureaucracy, viceregal and commercial families, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Mexico City, Cadiz, Santander, and Madrid.

Failure to remodel the intendancy system and to allocate salaries to local administrators was neither the first nor the last example of flawed and long-blocked reform in the Spanish empire of the eighteenth century. A presumably omnipotent, despotic, yet enlightened, imperial government managed to promulgate an administrative change only after decades of debate; almost two decades passed before the intendancy could be revised, and then the revision was abruptly withdrawn. Enlightened despotism could not eliminate a basic instrument of colonial coercion, repartimiento de mercancías. This seemingly parochial phenomenon raises wider ranging questions.

Normally, government policy is perceived as a function of the state apparatus and divisions over policy as generated by personal idiosyncrasy or administrative factionalism. It may be more accurate to view such divisions in an “ancien régime” polity as cleavages among interest groups in the elite. In the Spanish imperial polity of the eighteenth century one perceives that bureaucrats and merchants coalesced into two principal “factions” or camps in the handling of repartimiento, trade issues, and economic policy. Behind the conservative, standpat, or simply “traditionalist,” groups were those who saw repartimiento as the only effective way to use Indians as consumers and producers and to finance colonial administration. This subterranean economy had survived more than two centuries and had nourished the interpenetration of empire and commerce, bureaucrats and merchants, kith and kin. At the end of the eighteenth century, this group was reinforced by increased outmigration from Cantabria’s microregions of Spaniards prepared to exploit the repartimiento structure. In their view, to permit competition among many intermediaries at the local level in the colonies was to court disaster.

On the other hand, the enlightened or reform-minded colonialists held three considerations vital to the survival of the empire in America. First, structural fragility in the colonies would invite intervention by English forces capable of operations on a global scale. Second, an adequate defense posture required new sources of government revenue. Third, although the peninsular economy was stagnant, indications were that growth and development in the colonial economies were continuing. In fact, proper management there would produce those added revenues which alone promised a solution to repeated financial crisis after 1793 caused by heavy defense outlays. Those sharing these views came from peninsular regions—Majorca, Catalonia, Navarre, Aragon—generally isolated from the political and commercial networks that had dominated the empire until the last half of the eighteenth century; many were officers drawn from the cadres that had passed through the military schools reformed by Aranda, O’Reilly, and Ricardos. Their loyalties were directed to the nation rather than to the microregions of familial roots and they were prepared to excise certain colonial networks for the long-term viability of the colonial system. To them, opening the colonial commercial system at all levels offered the sole promise of avoiding disaster.

In 1804 neither faction proved capable of victory, a classic instance of countervailing interests neutralizing themselves in the metropolis. Implications of the failure of this grass-roots reform should not be minimized. In a wider context, the very mercantile and bureaucratic networks seeking to maintain repartimiento de mercancías opposed comercio libre, forced recall of comercio neutro, and a moderate form of comercio directo in 1810. Metropolitan immobility, however, barely contained the pressures building up in the colonies. Containment collapsed with the French invasion of 1808 and the insurgency in the colonies in 1810. As José Beye Cisneros—who represented Mexico City, but also voiced the sentiments of the colonial bloc in the extraordinary Cortes of 1810—was fond of interjecting when exasperated by the unwillingness of imperial crisis managers to yield to colonial demands for administrative and commercial reform, “This, my friends, has only one remedy, and that is the cura Hidalgo.”⁷²

Author notes