Contrabando y redes de negocios

This book deals with a crucial topic for understanding trade dynamics structured as illegal in some overseas economic circuits of the Spanish Empire. It is also a broad history that integrates several small stories in which smuggling unquestionably figures as the main social fact. Contrabando y redes de negocios joins a recent generation of books, including those by Jesse Cromwell (2018), Juan José Ponce Vázquez (2020), and Jennifer Wolff (2022), that conceptualize and interpret illegal trade not as an exclusively economic phenomenon but as a globally rooted facet of humanity or a practice of profit and survival in the ancien régime.Smuggling in the Spanish Empire, which entailed illegal and, in some cases, covert transactions as well as the most sophisticated bureaucratic corruption in the West Indies, reveals other social and economic issues. In the eight chapters of this book, the term “direct trade” is analyzed to show the diverse singularities that existed over 200 years within the same legal system. The vast viceroyalties of the Western Hemisphere, as well as the transpacific link that united New Spain and Peru with the Philippine archipelago, constitute the vast setting in which the exciting and often outstanding arguments of the authors who collaborated in the edited collection are developed. It would have been ideal if this collection also included chapters on Tierra Firme, Florida, and Brazil during the Iberian Union.Although the Atlantic world is a spatial reference inseparable from the Spanish Empire, in this edited collection the Pacific Ocean is also analyzed, from a comparative perspective, as a space of commercial exchanges aligned with imperial interests and as a frontier of trade disputes entirely dependent on the voyages undertaken by the Manila galleon. Since illegality was protected by official corruption, these nautical voyages between the Philippines and Acapulco also affected Realejo, Sonsonate, and Callao, which were decisive for integrating the Spanish American circuits into the global economy. Viceroys, oidores, and, in the case of Mexico City, members of the Consulado de Comerciantes were no strangers to the monetary benefits that arose from tax evasion, which simultaneously expressed a particular form of disloyalty to the king.On closer inspection, especially of the thicket of primary sources, smuggling was a business just as intricate (and perhaps more so) than its legal counterpart. In each chapter, regardless of the particular polychromatic microstories contained therein, this way of obtaining and accumulating money and power is shown to be a kaleidoscope of political relationships, individual ambitions expressed through letters or account records, information trafficking, and administrative detours sustained by personal loyalties, compadrazgos, and kinship. These circumstances also implied the possibility of immense profits for foreign merchants lurking off the coasts of Spanish America (the Spanish Main in particular) and, logically, for ecclesiastical bodies such as the Society of Jesus, whose members actively participated in the illicit global dynamics that would stimulate the growth of market economies. For example, in a remote imperial frontier such as the California peninsula in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Jesuits were decisive agents of trade and commerce, much of it considered illicit.The smuggling business grew stronger during the varied and numerous periods of war in which the Spanish Empire was involved. In fact, in several chapters of this book, the background of the Age of Revolutions—with all the international upheavals emerging at this time from the Atlantic world and the arrival of one new player, initially in the mercantile circuits of the Greater Caribbean, in the game of imperial Atlantic nation-states, the United States of America—serves to demonstrate how illegal business became the most effective means of trade, given the metropolitan incapacity to supply the inland markets of several South American provinces, where constantly circulating silver continued to make the Andean markets an attractive niche for fraudulent businesses that ended up transcending the local spheres by connecting with Atlantic port cities such as Buenos Aires or Montevideo.All the chapters offer syntheses of much more extensive and detailed histories. Given that smugglers often worked to cover their tracks, each author makes judicious use of remarkable primary sources, a methodological trait of the book as a whole. Although smuggling is the central theme of this collection, the agitated lives of the protagonists discussed therein—like that of the fascinating don Jacinto de Castro—provide, when set in their respective social contexts, a clear way of understanding not only the larger operations of markets deemed contraband but, above all, the maintenance and preservation of an entire empire despite the incalculable costs incurred due to the disobedience expressed through illicit trade

Art · Humanities · Political science · Historical Studies in Latin America · Historical Studies on Spain · History and Politics in Latin America