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A series of important changes occurring in Spanish America in the 18th century is often associated with dynastic changes in Spain—the replacement of the Habsburgs, who had ruled Spain since the early 16th century, by a branch of the French Bourbons in 1700. Little altered in the Spanish territories until more than 50 years later, however, especially during the reign of Charles III (1759–88). Internal evolution and worldwide developments were doubtless more important in bringing about the new phenomena than the policy of a particular dynasty or ruler.
Economy and society
Demographic growth picked up sharply after about the mid-18th century in all areas about which information is available and in all sectors of the population. At the same time, economic activity increased in bulk, and prices rose steadily instead of fluctuating as they had been doing for centuries. Silver production, which was still at the base of the export economy of the old central areas, increased sharply, especially in Mexico, and so did the scale of operations and the input of capital, with strong participation by merchant-financiers. At the same time, local textile production had grown in size and economic importance, as demand rose in its market—humble Hispanized people in the city and countryside.
The large merchants had continued the process of localization to the point where only their birth was foreign; large firms tended to pass from a Spanish immigrant owner to his immigrant nephew. In every other way—marriage, investment, and residence pattern—the merchants were part of the local milieu, and, since export-import commerce was so important to the economy, they had risen to the top on the local scene; the wealthiest of them owned strings of haciendas in addition to their commercial and mining interests, and they acquired titles of high nobility.
Racial and cultural fusion had advanced so far that the categorization embodied in the ethnic hierarchy could no longer capture it. Labels proliferated to designate complex mixtures, but the new terms sat lightly on those so labeled and often had no legal status. In everyday life, people who were able to function within a Hispanic context were often not labeled at all; many others changed almost at will from one category to another. One reaction to the excessive categorization was simplification, with only three categories—Spaniards, castas, and Indians—and often only two—Indians and others. The people of mixed descent were now so fully acculturated and so deeply embedded in local Hispanic society that they were qualified for and began to compete for nearly all positions except the very highest. There was, naturally, a reaction on the part of those most highly placed. With mulattoes entering the universities in numbers, ordinances began to declare that they were not eligible. With the children of wealthy Spaniards, humbler and racially mixed Spaniards, and castas all intermarrying widely, government and the church began to resist, declaring marriages between those differently labeled to be illegal and reinforcing the authority of parents in disallowing matches.
Such reactions did little to change the basic reality: the intermediate groups had grown and were continuing to grow to the extent that they could no longer be confined to their traditional intermediary functions. There were too many of them for all to become majordomos and artisans, and, in any case, many people called Indians by now could speak Spanish and handle tasks very well themselves for which intermediaries had previously been required. Since the people in the middle were no longer at a premium, their remuneration often decreased. If some pressed on into the higher strata, others were reduced to positions traditionally belonging to Indians, such as permanent labourer. In many areas the mixed groups were pouring into indigenous settlements at such a rate as to disrupt them and change their character.
Transformation of the east coast
Well into the 18th century, the perception that Mexico and Peru formed the centre and all the rest the periphery was still valid. By the last decades of the century, however, things were moving quickly in a different direction, favouring the Atlantic seaboard. European demand for tropical crops and even for temperate products, especially hides, increased substantially. At the same time, ships grew larger and faster. As a result, transatlantic shipment of bulk products became more viable, and trade routes shifted.
Argentina
The Río de La Plata region had been very much on the edges of the Latin American world since the conquest. The first founding of Buenos Aires in the early 16th century had failed, the survivors having taken refuge in the lands of the semisedentary Guaraní of Paraguay. The most developed area was the northwest interior, closest to the Potosí mining region, which supplied the mines with various products. Paraguay remained in relative isolation and poverty, participating in the money economy by sending its yerba maté (a tealike beverage) toward Peru. Buenos Aires was eventually refounded but remained a tiny, struggling port. The plains were inhabited by wild cattle (descendants of domestic animals introduced into the region earlier), nonsedentary Indians, and some highly localized mestizos later to be called gauchos.
Starting in the 1770s, improved transatlantic navigation, combined with liberalization of the imperial trading system, transformed the region. Buenos Aires began to be able to compete with the older route through Panama and Peru in importing European goods for the mining region and exporting silver. The immigration of merchants and others increased. Taking advantage of the opportunity, the crown created the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata based in Buenos Aires (1776), including the Potosí mining region, which was taken from Peru. Buenos Aires became a capital with all the institutions associated with Lima or Mexico City. The city’s population, including a substantial number of Africans because of its location on a slave route and its new wealth, grew explosively, and it began to exercise dominance over the interior, reversing the older scheme.
Yet Buenos Aires was not quite like Lima or Mexico City; it showed its newness, and traces of peripherality remained. The merchants of Buenos Aires had the same Spanish origins as their counterparts in Mexico City, but they were more closely tied to Spain, much like central-area merchants in the conquest period. They were more dominant locally, for there were no long-established families to compete with, and they came close to monopolizing the capital’s municipal council. But they were far less wealthy than the largest Mexico City merchants, established no noble titles, and owned few or no rural estates. Indeed, there were no estates to buy: haciendas existed in the older northwestern region, but on the plains or pampas around Buenos Aires estate development had hardly begun. The hide export industry that now began to become prominent rested at first mainly on hunting wild animals; the merchants who exported hides were still secondary to those importing merchandise and exporting silver. Only in the last years before independence did merchants and others finally begin to build up estates and raise cattle in the more customary manner.
Venezuela
With its Caribbean coast, Venezuela had long been in a relatively favourable position in regard to potential availability of markets. By the 17th century the Caracas region was exporting cacao to Mexico, where most of the market for that product was then located, enabling it to begin buying African slaves for labour. As Europe joined the market and absorbed larger quantities of cacao by the late 18th century, Caracas became an urban centre comparable in size and institutionalization to Buenos Aires (though without a viceroy), and it had a better-developed hinterland of secondary settlements. The population along the coast was mainly European, African, and mixtures thereof. The situation, then, bore some similarity to that in Brazil.
The Caribbean islands
The Spaniards from the first had concentrated on the Greater Antilles, leaving the smaller islands virtually unoccupied. As developments passed the Spanish Caribbean by, even portions of the larger islands were left under-occupied. Thus, in the course of the 17th century, the French and English, aided by buccaneers of their respective nationalities, were able to take over the small islands, Jamaica, and the western end of Hispaniola to grow tropical crops, above all sugar, for themselves. The societies that grew up there were not exactly Latin American in the usual sense; though in a way comparable to the society of northeastern Brazil, they were different in that the African slave population vastly outnumbered the Europeans, who were not only very few but also not well rooted, retaining intimate connections with the home countries. By the late 18th century the non-Spanish Caribbean islands had replaced Brazil as the world’s greatest sugar producers.
The Spanish Caribbean islands (primarily Cuba and Puerto Rico) did not participate in the sugar boom, which was predicated on the notion of self-supply by the northern European nations. The population was more balanced between European and African than in the French and English possessions. In the second half of the 18th century the Cuban economy grew rapidly on the basis of tobacco export and provisioning of fleets and Spanish Caribbean ports. Only after the slave revolt in French Haiti in 1791, with great loss of French production, did Cuba begin to move in the direction of large-scale sugar export.