This book describes the fiscal policies of both the royalist and republican regimes in Venezuela during the epoch of independence. The author emphasizes the contending factions’ quest for fiscal control, “the whole set of activities designed by the state to collect, regulate, and distribute revenue in order to facilitate its political and military goals” (p. 225). The book is divided into three parts. The first discusses the serious social and economic problems caused by the war and the principal figures involved in the struggle for control of the treasury system during the conflict. The second analyzes fiscal policies in the newly freed republic. The third outlines the continuity and changes in fiscal administration, the rampant corruption and methods to control it, and the persistence of colonial practices into the early republican epoch.
Fiscal problems in Venezuela, it appears, were no different from those in other Hispanic colonies that broke away from the mother country. Venezuela had its renegade provinces, such as Maracaibo, that would not give financial or political support to the administration in Caracas. At the same time, royalist or independista armies needed funds at a time when revenues had fallen off dramatically, including income from the formerly lucrative tobacco monopoly. The bitter struggle between the military and civilians for governmental control, particularly over the public fisc, presaged similar problems during the early national period.
Fiscal problems besetting Venezuela affected both royalist and republican regimes. With war raging, administration, naturally perhaps, became militarized, with warmaking being the top priority for the limited public funds available in a Venezuelan economy fallen on hard times. Neither royalists nor republicans could eliminate corruption. Treasury officials rendered false accounts, recklessly printed paper money, failed to present their ledgers for audit, pocketed treasury reserves, used public funds for fiestas, created unnecessary new treasury offices for their partisans, and otherwise administered the treasury to serve their own interests. Well-intended reforms such as requiring annual budgets and establishing stable, honest fiscal administration usually failed. Once independence was finally achieved, there was more continuity than might be supposed between the old real hacienda and the new tesorería general; in addition, the same problems that had arisen during the wars of independence persisted.
On balance this is an informative book dealing with an important subject, although at times one wishes for more quantitative evidence on the impact of the conflict on revenues taken in by the various cajas reales or cajas nacionales. Perhaps, though, the historian of Venezuela will find the book most valuable for its documentation—a plethora of long quotations by contemporary observers who graphically described Venezuela during the independence epoch.