Between the years 1805 and 1809, the Spanish Metropolitan Government secured an estimated total of between 10,500,000 and 12,750,000 pesos by the appropriation of the capital and sale of landed properties belonging to Pious Foundations and Chantries. The present article deals with (i) the nature and functions of these Foundations; (ii) why Spain was forced to order their appropriation; (iii) the course of the implementation of the appropriation, known as the ‘Consolidación de vales reales’; (iv) the persons and institutions affected, and adjacent incomes of the Ramo de Consolidación; (v) the effects in New Spain. Secondary sources concede the importance of the appropriation, but rarely offer more than rudimentary details. Through the use of primary sources, the present article attempts to remedy in a small measure that dearth of information.

For 300 years, from the beginning of the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade—the forced migration of Africans to work as slaves on the plantations and in the mines of British, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean—was carried on legally, and on an everincreasing scale, by the merchants of most Western European countries and their colonial counterparts, aided and abetted by African middlemen. On. 25 March 1807, however, after a lengthy struggle, inside and outside Parliament, it was declared illegal for British subjects (and at this point during the Napoleonic Wars at least half the trade was in British hands) to trade in slaves after 1 May 1808. During the previous twenty years there had been a marked growth of intellectual and moral revulsion against the trade (and, in particular, the horrors of the ‘middle passage’) and changing economic conditions, which to some extent reduced the importance to the British economy of the West Indian colonies for whom the trade was a major lifeline and created new interest groups unconnected with and even hostile to them, facilitated its abolition.

When Dwight Morrow's appointment as Ambassador to Mexico was announced in September 1927, a Mexican newspaper commented: ‘After Morrow come the marines.’ To some contemporary observers this may have seemed to present a logical progression of events, but in reality the Morrow appointment was a distinct move in the opposite direction. Top level Mexican officials knew this since they had been involved for several years in negotiations with Thomas W. Lamont of the International Committee of Bankers on Mexico. Lamont and Morrow were colleagues in J. P. Morgan & Co. and close friends. Lamont regularly supplied Morrow with information about the activities of the International Committee, and during 1926 Morrow began to work closely with Lamont on the Mexican question.

In almost all the developing countries ‘planning’ has become the open sesame to an industrial future. Private enterprise, it has been argued, is either incapable or unwilling to provide the investment necessary to develop the world, and therefore the task must be carried out by the state, acting through a wide variety of ministries, nationalized corporations, and ‘mixed’ businesses in which the state is the main shareholder. But making a plan is not the same thing as carrying it out, as most of the nations of the Third World have discovered to their cost. A new and highly sophisticated administrative structure will be necessary to carry out the national plan, and the existing government systems, which are mostly based on foundations laid when the responsibilities of the central government were very much smaller, are mostly inadequate. This dilemma can be seen most obviously in the case of Brazil, where a strenuous and partially successful effort has been made to reform the administration and to fit it for its new tasks. What lessons can be learnt from the successes and failures of the administrative reform in Brazil?