Edge of crisis

Barbara H. Stein and Stanley J. Stein , Edge of crisis: war and trade in the Spanish Atlantic, 1789–1808 ( Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 2009 . Pp . xii + 623 . ISBN 9780801890468 Hbk. £40/$77 ) For a long time Stanley Stein, emeritus professor at Princeton, was best known for his The colonial heritage of Latin America; essays on economic dependence in perspective (1970), which contributed to the exceptional success of dependency theory as the dominant paradigm in the field of Latin American history at the time. Yet it was followed by a long relative silence, which ended abruptly about a decade ago, when he and his late wife Barbara Stein came back with a succession of volumes on the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic: Trade, silver and war (2000), Apogee of empire (2003), and now Edge of crisis. A fourth volume is promised in the preface to the current one. Like the earlier two volumes, Edge of crisis is based on, and often makes accessible for the first time, a breathtaking amount of primary source research that the authors collected over a lifetime. Also, like the earlier volumes, it does without much of the recent historiography. The result is a dense and detailed account of two decades of highly complicated history in the Spanish Atlantic, primarily written from a political history point of view. For economic historians the banishment of some very interesting statistical material to the endnotes is frustrating. Tables appear in piecemeal fashion in the notes and are rarely discussed in the text proper. However, for the patient reader there is a very valuable mine of information here. Edge of crisis deals with the last 20 years before the implosion of the Spanish Empire began in the mainland colonies as a direct reaction to the invasion of the metropolis through Napoleon's armies in 1808. The interpretative framework remains true to the Steins' roots, that is, colonial dependency makes a late grand stance. The point of departure is an exploitative relationship between peninsular Spain and its American possessions, here represented by New Spain (Mexico), that had its foundation in just one commodity: silver. The authors thus go back to a traditional view of the Spanish Empire that was at its core designed to extract the fabulous wealth of the New World to the metropolis. Hence, they have to grapple with the problem that this grand narrative has always encountered: why did Spain not succeed? The answer offered here comes in various steps. First, the authors have revised late eighteenth-century published and unpublished debates about how to mend Spain's poor economic performance. Their conclusion is that contemporaries analysed the problems with great insight and developed adequate proposals for reform. Alas, the ‘wealth of analysis’ was outdone by a ‘poverty of execution’. Throughout the volume, Stein and Stein trace in great detail why certain policies were not implemented, who was in favour, who against. The immediate economic and otherwise interests of the parties involved are examined on the base of a remarkable body of primary research and painstakingly careful work. In Stein and Stein's view the failure to implement reform was almost always explained by some ad hoc collision of interest between groups that were aligned around common geographical background in Spain, no matter whether their businesses were mainly active in the peninsula or in the Americas. Any attempt to open up the supposedly exploitative commercial relationship was blocked by these conflicts that pitched ‘Basques’ against ‘Montañeses’ (Cantabrians) in New Spain, for example. Thus, Spain's economy reverted to its supposed ‘default’ once again, that is, a ‘closed’ monopoly system of trade between peninsula and colonies, designed to enrich the royal treasury and its cronies in Cadiz. The second argument is that by the late eighteenth century, New Spain had become a ‘sub-metropolis’. Spain exploited New Spain through the closed trading system, and New Spain exploited the Spanish Caribbean. Indeed, at times the authors refer to an ‘inverted colonial compact’ (p. 46) that left New Spain with more power than Madrid. Yet, nevertheless, Stein and Stein argue that colonial bureaucrats persistently executed Madrid's orders despite their evident local power, and against better knowledge. Why they would apparently do so remains unclear. Here the tension between the dependentista framework and the empirical work undertaken by the authors becomes very pronounced. On hundreds of pages the authors give example after example of the agency of the Consulados (merchant guilds) of Mexico City and Veracruz, the miners' guilds, and various strong networks of merchants, miners, agricultural interests, and colonial administrators. They also describe in fascinating detail Spain's trade with the American territories, which—as they point out—had not been a ‘closed’ trading system for much of the eighteenth century thanks to special conditions for Buenos Aires, single ships that were allowed to travel outside convoys, and other licences. In fact, Spain's organization of the Americas trades was of course economically speaking never a true monopoly like the English or Dutch East India Companies. It reflected an older organizational form that gave trading privileges to a group of merchants who competed among themselves on individual accounts. It was a very unstable oligopoly, whose power of exclusion—the essential precondition of monopoly—was always delimited by the incentive for members to serve as (paid) proxy for outsiders. That contemporaries called it monopodio should not confuse us; though the Steins are of course in good company in this confusion, since an embarrassing number of grown-up economists have referred to the Spanish Carrera de Indias as a monopoly. Paradoxically, then, this is a fascinating tale of the abolition of a monopoly that never was. Stein and Stein's own story seems to be breaking out of the straitjacket of dependency theory all the time. One of the great merits of this book is to show how old-fashioned, careful archival research tends to challenge bad models, even if this is clearly not what the authors intended. Edge of crisis is no easy read. It sometimes feels as if it were written in a rush. There are repetitions and small mistakes. A scholar writing up a lifetime of research deserves admiration for the work, and indulgence on these formalities; that Johns Hopkins Press did not remedy such quirks is less forgivable

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