Apogee of Empire by Stanley J. Stein & Barbara H. Stein

Author:Stanley J. Stein & Barbara H. Stein [Stein, Stanley J. & Stein, Barbara H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780801881565
Publisher: JohnsHopkinsUP
Published: 2003-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

The Tribunal de Minería

The immediate origins of what became New Spain’s mining tribunal were the industry’s capital shortages as well as cost-reduction imperatives. These, it may be argued, were aspects of the boom-and-bust cycle—perennial problems of any large-scale enterprise. Yet this apparently static perspective on New Spain’s major economic sector obscures factors making the last seventy-five years of colonial rule in New Spain both novel and crisis-prone, such as the surge in output that began with the extraordinary development of Guanajuato’s “Valenciana” and Zacatecas’s “Veta Grande” mines, both requiring large-scale investment in infrastructure—including timbering, drainage, and whims. In this sense, New Spain’s silver-mining sector in Gálvez’s time was entering a new phase, the apogee of more than two centuries of activity. Another factor was the more general, nebulous, but nonetheless real pressure of private and public peninsular interests to offer the metropole and the growing numbers of emigrants from the montañas de Santander and the Basque regions greater opportunity in wealth-producing sectors of Spain’s colonial possessions, notably (but not exclusively) in New Spain. In this connection, at least four interest groups were not hard to define: Creole mine owners and their Mexico City almacenero backers, local silver refiners hoping to circumvent Mexico City’s commercial oligopolists, Cadiz flotistas pressing to enter mining as rescatadores, and recent immigrants from Spain’s Cantabrian provinces.

It was Gálvez’s successive roles as visitador general to New Spain, consejero of the Consejo de Indias, and then colonial secretary that led him to respond to private and public interest peninsular groups vitally involved in the economy of New Spain. Six years there had sensitized him to mine owners’ problems. When he returned to Madrid, soon to become colonial secretary and seeming arbiter of colonial policy and its implementation, he kept in contact through former staff members in Mexico, including Joaquin Velázquez de León, a Creole who had served under him on his northern expedition. He could also rely on civil servants with substantial colonial service who occupied key positions in Madrid’s high bureaucracy, among them Landázuri; Francisco Machado, who had also served under Gálvez in New Spain and later became a viceregal secretary before being recalled to Madrid; and Antonio Porlier, ex-oidor of the Audiencias of Charcas and Lima.62 Gálvez’s problem was not whether but how the state might intervene in the colonial mining sector in order to provide capital equitably, a judicial system attuned to mine owners’ rather than almaceneros’ issues, and technical assistance, all the while circumventing the almaceneros of the Mexico City consulado and the Creole oidores of the Audiencia, notably Francisco Xavier Gamboa. In other words, how to block Gamboa’s proposed general supply company, likely to be dominated by the (largely peninsular) commercial oligarchs of the colonial capital; and to provide a degree of autonomy to mining districts precisely when a new wave of bonanza-seekers from Spain’s northern provinces were penetrating those districts.

Gálvez probably drafted the royal cédula (warrant) of November 1773 directing Viceroy Bucareli to choose a committee drawn from the key colonial bureaucracies,

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