Arcila Farías has been at the forefront of the history of colonial Venezuela for years. His best-known books, Economía colonial de Venezuela (1946) and El régimen de la encomienda en Venezuela (1967), have withstood many of the tests of time. Always based on meticulous archival work, Arcila Farías’s best scholarship is characterized by a willingness to synthesize and to offer interpretations founded on his careful research. This most recent study, however, simply makes a systematic presentation of the data. Although apparently as meticulous as always, it also contains a significant oversight that places the validity of much of the work in doubt.
Hacienda y comercio offers a compendium of numerical data taken from the Caracas royal treasury. Everything contained in this source for the first half of the seventeenth century has been categorized, summed, and presented in tabular and graphic form. As the book’s title indicates, both general exchequer and commercial data are examined. Arcila Farías has traced, year by year, the revenue collected for composición de tierras, from taxes on slave imports, from the media anata, from the almojarifazgo de entrada y salida, and from more than two dozen other categories. Similarly, on the debit side of the royal ledger, expenditures are tracked for some 20 items, including governors’ salaries, ecclesiastical and military salaries, defense costs, and funds remitted to Spain. Arcila Farías’s central interest is trade, and he has compiled and counted by quinquennium every export item recorded, from exotics like guayucos and sangre de drago to wheat and cacao. An extensive appendix lists the record of every ship (ship name and type, name of master or captain, ports of origin and destination, and cargo) that entered and left La Guaira from 1601 to 1650.
Yet Hacienda y comercio, despite the painstaking research on which it is based, suffers from a serious flaw. As Arcila Farías himself has pointed out elsewhere, during many of the years covered by this book Caracas vecinos were exempt from the export almojarifazgo tax. (furiously, this exemption is not taken into account here. Since exports made by vecinos (presumably the greater part of total exports) are frequently not recorded in the royal ledgers, the Real Hacienda is an unreliable source for a global analysis of Caracas commerce. Thus, while there is much of value pertaining to the seventeenth-century Caracas exchequer in this volume, the summaries of trade data and the comparisons and conclusions based on those data cannot be trusted.
