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The export merchants
The Caracas Company had handled the bulk of the province's commercial activities for over fifty years by the time it was formally abolished in 1784. Only contraband and the New Spain cacao trade had remained in the hands of merchants independent of the company. The relatively sudden demise of the monopoly therefore left a vacuum in the mercantile structure which was only gradually filled during the next decade or so. The distortions caused by the company's departure were real and painful. In 1783 the Intendant, Saavedra, described the deficiencies then current in bleak though not entirely hopeless terms:
‘The Country [Caracas] is poor and consumes little… and no one [no merchant] can be found who can carry [finance] a [ship] load of 30,000 pesos. As commerce until now has been in one hand there are no runners, agents … warehouses, and other conveniences which [however] time will provide. A commerce sub-divided among many hands [traders] will make these provinces flower.’
The development of the competitive commercial structure hoped for by Saavedra was exactly what occurred in the following years. The evolution was a rocky one, and at times it must have seemed to contemporaries that it would never materialize. As late as 1787 there were serious complaints by both royal officials and agriculturalists against the new mercantile establishment which was replacing the Caracas Company. In the first place, the monopoly's ghost lingered on in the form of the Filipinas Company, which exercised a right to carry a high proportion of the province's exports to Spain.
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