The expansion of trade between New Spain and Europe, the Caribbean, and North America in the second half of the eighteenth century, aided by some of the Bourbon economic reforms, began to transform the ramshackle seasonal pesthole of Veracruz into a trading city. Transportation to the interior improved, corporate groups built public and religious facilities, and the beginnings of an urban and port infrastructure appeared. Sensing opportunity, a small stream of young male montañeses from the Santander region began to arrive after 1750, pulling sons, nephews, brothers, and fathers after them as apprentices as soon as they became established. They were the first of a group of 230 to 300 large and middle-sized merchants in the port of Veracruz during a period of growing prosperity (1770 to 1800 or 1810) and subsequent disintegration (1810 to 1829) who are the subject of this book.
Veracruz won a consulado, or merchant guild, in 1795; apart from a few foreigners and local and official notables, the montañes merchants ran it and the city cabildo throughout the period. The consulado provided prestige, institutional support, credit, and a public voice. Jackie Booker believes that while the consulado was a self-interested group, its activities did, to some extent, promote public good and development.
The author depicts a traditional class riding the last boom of Spanish reformed mercantilism. Although eager to exploit any upsurge in production or prices—such as those in cochineal and sugar—these merchants tended to avoid specialization in any product. Their traditional approach is nowhere better illustrated than in their associational and credit behavior. Not only did they follow family members to America, but then they married criollas from prestigious families and thereby linked clans. Dowries brought some capital to these upwardly mobile merchants, as did church and consulado loans; but most credit was obtained from, and partnerships formed with, extended family members, or with paisanos from the Spanish region of origin. (Credit and credit mechanisms were vital because of the drain of coinage to Spain, the lack of banks, and the delays and inefficiencies of communication.) Most merchants stuck to wholesale trading and often operated as agents of larger outside houses. Relations with the authorities were troubled, but after an initial period of difficulties, cooperation with the Consulado of Mexico City was satisfactory.
This merchant group was destroyed by events it could not affect. It survived the consolidación fairly well, probably paying less than half of what it owed as principal; but it could not avoid the wars of independence, the destruction of the Cádiz-Mexico City link, and creole chauvinism and expulsions. More generally, these merchants could not adapt to the onset of capitalism and the influx of inexpensive foreign goods.
The text has too much recapitulation and a peculiar reliance, in places, on general textbooks for evidence, but on the whole this book is a successful portrait of the rise and decline of a peripheral colonial merchant class.
