The Sharing of the Profits of the Carrera de Indias: The Actors of the Hispanic Colonial Trade and Their Monopolistic Practices in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The Carrera de Indias, considered as a set of circuits connecting Hispanic America to world markets, does not appear as a “monopoly” reserved solely for the Spanish merchants of Cadiz, but rather as a complex commercial system, structured into three autonomous segments, each of them dominated by a mercantile corporation, more or less formalized. In the central part, which linked the two shores of the Atlantic, the merchants registered in the Consulado of the Indies of Cadiz (cargadores) obviously dominated the market. However, these were in turn dominated by the merchants from the consulates of Mexico and Lima in the inland trade (comercio de tierra adentro), which linked the great American ports and fairs with the markets of the interior of the continent, and by the foreign merchants of Cadiz, structured into “nations,” in the exchanges that linked the Andalusian port with the rest of Europe and the world. Thus, the beneficiaries of the Spanish colonial trade in the second half of the eighteenth century were neither only cargadores, nor foreign “smugglers” enjoying the weakness of the Spanish empire as the historiography of the Carrera de Indias has traditionally postulated, but those three groups of traders.

After highlighting this singular structure of colonial trade in the Spanish Atlantic, we will consider the different institutional and relational factors that could explain it. Obviously, it is because the different groups of actors involved in these exchanges had a specific social, relational, cultural, and institutional capital that they had a comparative advantage over their rivals in certain segments of the Carrera de Indias circuits, and that they were able to obtain the dominant position that we observe.

1. Introduction

The perception of the Carrera de Indias that has dominated historiography until recently is twofold: in general, it has been presented as a commercial system regulated by a “monopoly” that reserved the exclusivity of trade in the Hispanic Atlantic, and the benefits derived from it, to Spanish merchants authorized by the Consulado of Seville (and then of Cadiz from the eighteenth century onward), and at the same time as a totally ineffective organization because its rules were constantly broken due to the high degree of corruption and smuggling that characterized it. This last idea, which to a certain extent was first advanced in Anglophone historiography, ended up being admitted and shared by the main Spanish historians of the Carrera de Indias in the last decades until it now constitutes little discussed historical evidence.¹ However, several recent papers, as well as unpublished research we have recently defended, lead us to dispute this view of things and to affirm that the Carrera de Indias was not a “monopoly” granted by the cown to a privileged mercantile corporation, and from which other merchant communities excluded from those privileges benefited, but rather a set of three interconnected commercial circuits, each one dominated by a group of merchants with its own political and juridical identity.² In the same way, such an approach leads us to consider that the benefits of the Carrera de Indias were not monopolized by a single privileged group, or on the contrary by foreign smugglers, but were shared among three groups of actors who each enjoyed a privileged position in a given geographical area: while the Spanish merchants registered in the Consulado of Cadiz (cargadores) maintained a prominent role in navigation and transatlantic exchanges, the merchants of the American Consulados dominated the inland trade in America (comercio de tierra adentro), and the foreign mercantile colonies of Cadiz carried out most of the trade between Andalusia and the rest of Europe (and the world). Describing this tripartite configuration and explaining it, highlighting the institutional and social factors that each mercantile group mobilized to dominate a segment of the Hispanic Atlantic, will be the two main objectives of this article.

Our point of view is based on two assumptions that need to be clarified. The first is that Hispanic Atlantic trade should no longer be considered solely from the point of view of bilateral trade between the major privileged ports of Andalusia, which were the “bridgeheads” of this trade in Europe, and their counterparts in America. This was the approach adopted at the time by Pierre and Huguette Chaunu, and later by those who continued their famous study: Lutgardo García Fuentes, Antonio García-Baquero Gónzalez, and John Fisher.³ Nevertheless, this analytical scheme, which was already questioned in the 1980s, has ceased to be defended by historians in recent decades. The main reason has a lot to do with the current process of globalization that is inducing an unprecedented international trading system all over the planet, which is based essentially on the articulation of commodity chains that integrate producers and consumers from different continents.⁴ Indeed, this contemporary scheme invites us to reconsider our view of the circuits of the Hispanic colonial trade, because the products that circulated in the Carrera de Indias were not produced or consumed in the major ports through which they transited but were part of much broader trade chains involving many more actors than the Andalusian cargadores. Today, our knowledge of “American Europe,” refering to the beautiful expression used by Michel Morineau to designate all the European provinces that worked and produced for America,⁵ as well as that of “European America,” has greatly progressed, and also our understanding of the global character of the Carrera de Indias. This has led to a profound revision of our knowledge of the commercial actors involved in these circuits and of the distribution of the commercial benefits derived from them. The traditional opposition between the privileged cargadores and the foreign smugglers has been replaced by a much more complex approach that includes, on the American side, the merchants of the great Consulados and their different agents: the traveling merchants and muleteers who traveled the American roads to sell the “goods of Castile,” or the crown officers (corregidores and alcaldes mayores) and miners who all played a prominent commercial role in the southern or northern provinces of New Spain.⁶ On the European side, the silk merchants-manufacturers from Lyon, for example, the Catalan wine exporters, or the Hamburg traders and their respective agents in Cadiz also deserve to be considered among the mercantile actors who benefited most, directly or indirectly, from the Carrera de Indias.⁷

This view of the greater complexity of the commercial circuits of the Hispanic Atlantic was asserted at a time when the perception of the institutional structure of the Carrera de Indias itself was also deeply reconsidered. The works of historians involved in the social history of institutions led us to overcome the opposition between legal and illegal trade to adopt a more systemic view, considering that Atlantic trade necessarily relied, in both cases, on a close coordination between the mercantile actors and the political actors that held sovereign authority. In this new view of things, the “monopoly” no longer appears as a monolithic reality, set in stone, but as the result of a perpetual negotiation that linked the different actors involved in trade.⁸ The Consulados of Seville, Cadiz, Barcelona, Lima, or Mexico are no longer considered as mere beneficiaries of “privileges” or “monopolies” granted by the crown, but as instruments used by the mercantile groups of these cities to restrict access to certain markets to their competitors, and thus maintain the profitability of commercial circuits characterized by a high degree of commercial uncertainty.⁹ This view of things suggests we go beyond the idea that there were “privileged” traders on the one hand, who benefited from a monopoly, and foreigners on the other, who were excluded, and to consider that each trading corporation developed its own institutional strategy to benefit from a comparative advantage in a given market segment.

Last, another important element to consider has been the simultaneous development of institutional analyses in the field of long-distance trade studies in the pre-industrial era.¹⁰ These works contributed to promote the notion of informal institutions to refer to the set of networks, coalitions, and practices not formalized in positive law that contributed to the creation of regularity and stability in the circuits of long-distance trade, together with the formal institutions. Although this reality is now generally accepted, current historiography still questions the articulation between formal and informal institutions and tries to determine which of them played a truly decisive role in the economic performance of each group of actors observed. Our study may not be able to settle the question of the effectiveness of institutions, but it takes us beyond it by demonstrating that the commercial successes were always based on a subtle combination of the formal and the informal, sometimes combining them, sometimes inextricably intertwining them. This observation makes it possible, for example, to understand how the merchants of the Consulado of Mexico were able to continue to dominate the inland trade in New Spain and the cargadores of Cadiz the transatlantic trade, even though the Spanish Crown had deployed a broad program of reforms aimed at depriving these two corporations of their institutional privileges (the free trade reforms implemented from 1765 onward). It also allows us to understand how foreign merchants in Cadiz were able to monopolize almost all trade between Cadiz and the rest of the world without benefiting from any clearly identified institutional advantage.

2. The Three Segments of Hispanic Atlantic Trade

When we consider all the commercial circuits linked to the Carrera de Indias on both sides of the Atlantic, we see that they were organized into three separate segments, each of which was dominated by a group of traders with a specific legal identity and a representative institution (more or less formalized). Thus, the shippers registered in the Consulado of Cadiz reigned over the Carrera de Indias itself (that connected Cadiz and the American fairs or ports); the European merchants settled in the Andalusian port and organized in “nations” carried out almost all the trade between Cadiz and the rest of Europe and the world; and the so-called “Creole” merchants, registered in the Consulados of Mexico and Lima, reserved for themselves the inland trade that took place between the fairs (or the ports) and the domestic markets of the continent. Monographic studies now provide enough evidence to describe this tripartite structure and the low porosity (although not zero) of each one of these segments.

The study of the merchants’ commercial correspondence provides the best illustration of the overall functioning of the system: it reveals that each merchant maintained extremely dense and diversified epistolary links in the space dominated by his mercantile group, while he had very irrelevant, episodic, or even nonexistent relations with the members who dominated the other two segments. This unique configuration is especially clear, for example, in the case of the cargador Juan Vincente Marticorena, who established his business in Cadiz in 1780, after having made several trips to America as a flotista (supercargo). As demonstrated by Victoria Martínez del Cerro González, from the Marticorena private archives, in the following years, he developed an intense commercial activity focused exclusively on the Carrera de Indias.¹¹ This is clearly reflected in the very regular commercial correspondence he maintained with partners residing in all the main places that structured Spanish colonial trade. In the viceroyalty of New Spain and in the Caribbean, he had correspondents in Havana, Veracruz, Guatemala, and Mexico; in South America, his correspondents were in Lima and Buenos Aires; and, finally, he also had a dozen correspondents in the main Spanish ports authorized to participate in colonial trade (San Sebastian, Bilbao, Malaga, and Seville in the first place) and in Madrid. On the other hand, he did not maintain any epistolary relationship with the merchants who lived outside the Spanish empire, nor with those who were established in the continental American provinces. Moreover, we note that almost all his correspondents installed in the American ports were his “relatives or fellow countrymen” who came, like him, from the Basque provinces of the Iberian Peninsula.¹² The case of Marticorena is not unique. The correspondence of the Navarrese cargador Miguel de Iribarren, who also settled in the colonial trade in Cadiz around the same time, after a first experience as supercargo, shows exactly the same network configuration: most of the commercial letters he wrote were addressed to his agents, sent as flotistas in the Carrera de Indias, or to his local contacts established in Havana, Veracruz or Jalapa, and also to his procurators residing in Madrid (or rather, who followed the wanderings of the Spanish court in the various royal residences located in the vicinity of Madrid).¹³ On the other hand, Miguel de Iribarren maintained practically no correspondence, until the 1790s, with exporters of silks from Lyon, clothes from Silesia or British hardware—all products that he regularly loaded in his shipments to the Indies—because he obtained these products directly from foreign merchants based in Cadiz and did not seek to establish direct relations with the producing regions.¹⁴ Thus, the cargadores of Cadiz took advantage of their individual experience and their personal knowledge with the merchants of America (who were almost always originally from the same metropolitan provinces as themselves) to create close mercantile networks between the two sides of the Atlantic and to operate in the Carrera de Indias.

The configuration of the networks of the so-called American traders is very different from a geographical point of view, but is quite similar in its structure.¹⁵ The example of Francisco Ignacio de Yraeta, whose several correspondence books we have been able to consult systematically, is very significant in this respect.¹⁶ In 1791, while his company reached its greatest influence, three quarters of his correspondents resided in the Viceroyalty of New Spain itself, in forty-two different locations, and they received 90 percent of the letters he sent.¹⁷ The 120 letters sent outside New Spain were distributed as follows: 27 letters were sent to Guayaquil, capital of cocoa, a product with which Yraeta traded a lot in New Spain; 19 letters were sent to Cadiz and 10 to Havana, two essential ports of the Carrera de Indias; 33 letters were sent to Madrid, the capital of the empire, where all merchants of a certain importance were obliged to maintain agents; and, finally, of the remaining 31 letters, 19 were sent to the Basque provinces from which he originated and deal mainly with family matters with no real commercial dimension. Yraeta's commercial networks were, therefore, clearly focused on the inland trade of New Spain and, to a lesser extent, on the three routes that connected the viceroyalty with the rest of the world (the Acapulco-Manila, Acapulco-Guayaquil, and Veracruz-Habana-Cadiz axes). Beyond Manila and Cadiz, however, he had almost no commercial relations, which could be a problem: for example, when Francisco de Yraeta had to bring relief to his Jesuit brother-in-law who had been expelled from New Spain in 1767 and found refuge in Bologna (Italy), he had great difficulty in finding merchants to take charge of the transfer of the funds he wanted to send him.¹⁸

The structures of the commercial networks of the foreign houses of Cadiz did not differ fundamentally from those of the Andalusian or American merchants either. The three French houses of Cadiz, Jugla Solier, and Rivet and Delaville, for example, maintained extremely close and diversified commercial relations in the 1780s with all the main European commercial centers: Paris, Madrid, Genoa, London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Lyon, and Marseilles in the first place.¹⁹ They also maintained correspondence with the regions from which they received goods directly, such as Silesia (linens), northern France (woolen sheets), or from an isolated village in central France such as Thiers for example (knives). They also retained preferential links with the regions from which they came, but without any exclusiveness.²⁰ The Gilly-Fornier house, studied in Robert Chamboredon's thesis, has the same configuration.²¹ On the other hand, none of these houses ever maintained a continuous epistolary relationship with America, despite the fact that most of the products they imported to Cadiz were destined for that continent and the silver and cochineal they received in exchange always came from it. Obviously, many foreigners had traded directly with America in the first half of the century, through the famous testaferros (strawmen) of Cadiz. But this practice probably declined in the last third of the century, and we hardly found any traces of it in the epistolary collections of the 1780s.²² The main reason seems to have been the cost/benefit calculation of the foreign merchants in Cadiz: it was simply better to sell the imported goods directly to the cargadores in Cádiz than to ship and sell them in the Indies, which always involved long and risky payment terms.²³ It should be noted that when we change the point of view and look at it from the perspective of European exporters of manufactured goods, the picture we get is exactly the same: The Roux company in Marseilles, like the Magon company in Saint-Malo, the Rey company in Lyon, or the Greffulhe Montz bank in Paris, maintained almost all their commercial relations with the foreign traders in Cadiz and almost never directly with the Hispanic merchants.

Approaches based on aggregate data also allow us to generalize the idea that foreign merchants from Cadiz were almost absent from the Hispanic Atlantic, while Spaniards were equally scarce in the trade that took place between Cadiz and the rest of Europe. This is indisputably proven by the studies based on bill of exchange protests drawn up in Cadiz against French merchants in 1793,²⁴ or from a sample of one hundred powers of attorney granted in Lyon.²⁵ The work carried out by Xabier Lamikiz on the correspondence seized by the British Navy from the Spanish ship the Perla, captured in 1779 while sailing between Lima and Cadiz, fully confirms the general observation: Most of the letters written by the merchants of the Consulado of Lima were destined for the cities of Madrid and Cadiz and almost all were written in Spanish and addressed to Spanish merchants.²⁶

Compared to the very compartmentalized and legally homogeneous structure that characterizes the networks of merchants engaged in long-distance trade in each one of the three segments of the Hispanic Atlantic, the structure of the transactions in the commercial centers that connected these different segments (Cadiz for the connections between the Carrera de Indias and Europe and the Jalapa/Veracruz and Portobelo/Lima for the connections between the Carrera de Indias and America) appears, on the contrary, much more open and intercultural. In Cadiz, foreign merchants and cargadores maintained close and diversified commercial relations, as can be seen, for example, in the records of the city's brokers for the year 1796,²⁷ or in the study of payment circuits based on the protests collected in provincial archives. Likewise, at the Jalapa fair, the Andalusian flotistas, who accompanied the expeditions of “goods from Castile,” met the agents of the merchants of Mexico, who brought silver and cochineal.²⁸ In these cities and fairs, transactions are similar to what we might call “market” relations (in the sense that everyone could trade with everyone else), to distinguish them from “network” or “agency” relations, which characterize commercial relations established at long-distance. In short, these different analyses of the commercial circuits within the Hispanic Atlantic can be schematized by the following figure, which distinguishes very clearly the three segments that structure this trade and the different nodes that link them (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The three segments of the Hispanic Atlantic trade in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Obviously, this graphic representation is a schema, which stylizes the data, and suffers from a lack of nuances of which we are fully aware. But, on the one hand, we are convinced that the proposed generalization, even if imperfect, can be useful for a better understanding of the commercial system of the Carrera de Indias and, on the other hand, it seems that the two main criticisms that this schema might raisc—the simplification of reality and the minimization of historical change—do not stand up to a detailed critical examination.

It is evident that the commercial reality was more complex than our figure shows. There were other important trade routes that linked the different American regions with each other or with other regions of the world. We think, for example, of the cocoa and galleon routes that linked Guayaquil and Manila to Acapulco, which were so important, as we know, in the commercial activity of a man like Francisco Ignacio de Yraeta for example.²⁹ But, we voluntarily set aside their study to focus here on the analysis of the Atlantic routes of the Carrera de Indias—a terrain already broad enough for our contribution. However, all the literature we have read on the Pacific seems to support, rather than invalidate, the conclusions we will reach later. Of course, there were also alternative routes in the Atlantic itself, as well as those notoriously used by smugglers, that transited through well identified nodes (such as Curaçao, Jamaica, or the Sacramento colony). But the qualitative and quantitative data we have on these routes also lead us to minimize their impact on the overall structure of the Carrera de Indias. While they may have had some importance in the peripheral provinces of the empire (such as the Rio de la Plata, for example), their role remained very relative in the central provinces of New Spain and Peru. The very detailed study we have about the trade that linked the free ports of the British West Indies and the Spanish empire reveals that this trade was of little importance in volume in the second half of the eighteenth century, and involved products of little relevance (the Spaniards carrying mules rather than silver or cochineal) and did not imply a massive penetration of foreigners in the empire, since it was the Hispanic captains who came to the free ports and not the other way round.³⁰ Finally, it is sure that all the actors did not conform exactly to the schema drawn. We note, however, that in most cases the exceptions confirm the general pattern. For example, at the end of the 1790s, the Cadiz company Iribarren and Schondalh developed its commercial activity both in America and in Northern Europe, where it directly supplied itself with Silesian fabrics that it then re-exported across the Atlantic. However, this company presents a very particular case, since it associated a Spanish merchant (Iribarren) and a merchant of Germanic origin (Schondalh), a very rare association in Cadiz.³¹ Similarly, if the Spanish company Roque Aguado was able to develop direct relations with French exporters, it was because it had been appointed administrator in the bankruptcy of the firm Fornier Frères and thus got the opportunity to establish regular correspondence with several of theirs suppliers.³² The case of the house of Francisco de la Sierra, studied by Jeremy Baskes, is more intriguing because, in 1781 and 1784, it maintained close and simultaneous commercial relations both in the Hispanic Atlantic (with correspondents in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Havana, Lima, and Veracruz), as well as in the great commercial cities of Europe (Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Genoa, Hamburg, London, Marseilles, and Ostend). Instead, he conformed to the general pattern in that he had almost no correspondents established in the continental American trade (he sent only 7 letters to Mexico City, out of a total of 1,225, and none in other provinces of Mexico, Peru, New Granada, or Rio de la Plata).³³

On the other hand, we argue that the historical dynamics of this period, despite the profound institutional reforms that renewed the Carrera de Indias (suspension of the system of the Fleets and Galleons in 1739, restoration of the Fleets in 1754, introduction of free trade reforms from 1765, and creation of new Consulados in the 1790s), did not substantially change the general configuration of Spanish colonial commerce. As the cases of the Iribarren and Schondhal, Aguado and Guruceta, and Francisco de la Sierra houses show, as well as the case of the Spanish houses that settled in London in that period,³⁴ it is possible that more merchants from the Peninsula emancipated themselves from the intermediation of foreigners to establish direct commercial relations with their suppliers and clients established in Europe. However, the very long resistance of the foreign mercantile colonies of Cadiz, even up to the first decade of the nineteenth century, testifies that they had retained their leading role in the exchanges that linked Andalusia to the rest of Europe.³⁵ In the same way, if the flotistas from Cádiz established themselves more and more in the Mexican trade from the 1750s onward, to sell directly to American consumers the “goods of Castile” they brought, they could not really compete with the merchants of Mexico. José Joaquín Real Díaz, who studied their position, emphasized the difficulties they faced in collecting payment of their sales on credit.³⁶ Therefore, selling in increasingly competitive and fragmented American markets was more difficult for the peninsular merchants, while the merchants of Lima and Mexico, who had the best connections with the interior of the continent and the greatest financial capacities, were able to resist their new competitors.³⁷ In addition, in the 1780s, there were still legal obstacles that restricted the introduction of the flotistas in the American inland trade, such as the payment of the double alcabala (internal tax), which they were required to pay in order to transfer their merchandise in Mexico.³⁸ In the same way, American merchants continued to face various obstacles in receiving commercial orders for the account of third parties.³⁹ If we look beyond, we will see, once again, that the intriguing phenomenon is the resilience of the tripartite system we have described, despite the Bourbon reforms, and not its collapse. This is obvious for the unique position that Cadiz continued to occupy in the Carrera de Indias long after colonial trade had been opened to new authorized ports: Fisher's figures leave little doubt about it and the formerly unpublished data we recently edited on the matter fully confirm it.⁴⁰ The question raised by these figures should not be why did the Bourbon reforms change the Carrera de Indias, but rather, why did they not change the pattern of trade more? The works of Xabier Lamikiz and Pedro Herrero Sánchez precisely document how the merchants of Lima and Mexico also adapted to the Bourbon reforms (the suppression of the Panama route and the Portobelo fair in 1739, in the first case, the suppression of the Jalapa fair and the creation of the consulates of Veracruz and Guadalajara after 1778, in the second).⁴¹ What Lamikiz explains is that the new and more competitive trading conditions induced by the reforms helped to strengthen the position of the traders of Lima vis-à-vis their metropolitan competitors, who could not sell their products to retailers and traders from the interior of Peru, as they used to do to the wholesalers who came to the Portobelo fair. In the same way, the merchants of Mexico resisted the competition of the Consulado of Veracruz thanks to the strength of the credit networks they had in the provinces of New Spain—a reality that fully confirms the study we made of Yraeta's correspondence.

There is no denying here, as is well known, that the new economic dynamics introduced by the free trade reforms have caused, at the individual level, growing difficulties for the actors of the Carrera de Indias (bankruptcies, declining profit margins, and perhaps, trade exits). This was an obvious consequence of a framework that had become more competitive. But, at the meso-analytical level of the groups of actors, we note that the insiders, the cargadores such as the Creole merchants or the foreign traders of Cadiz, managed to maintain their preponderance in the segment they dominated, against their competitors. We can explain this resistance by analyzing what constituted their main strength: their ability to mobilize both institutional support and the significant social capital at their disposal.

3. Institutional and Social Factors in the Configuration of Commercial Circuits and Mercantile Networks

Once the tripartite organization that structured the Hispanic Atlantic trade highlighted the factors should be considered that determined this unique configuration. Traditionally, historians have highlighted institutional factors to explain the organization of trade in the Atlantic area, emphasizing the strength of the mercantilist logics in the colonial era: the imperial monarchies involved in this area (Spain, Portugal, France, and the United Kingdom in the first place), by reserving trade with their colonies to their subjects, would have favored this segmentation of commercial circuits. However, this interpretation is not entirely satisfactory. If it allows us to understand why the cargadores enjoyed an evident preponderance within the Carrera de Indias (and the shippers of Bordeaux in the trade with the French West Indies, for example), it does not allow us to understand why the cargadores were excluded from the inland trade in America, nor why they themselves did not distribute the colonial commodities in Europe—two commercial circuits in which they suffered no real legal discrimination. It should be noted that the traders from Bordeaux or Nantes did not behave differently since, in the same way, they left the trade of redistributing sugar and coffee from Santo Domingo to northern Europe in the hands of others—in this case, Norse merchants and captains. Nor do mercantilist regulations explain why Cadiz maintained an overwhelming dominance in the Indies trade over other Spanish ports, even after the free trade reforms of 1765 and 1778,⁴² or why the colonial trade of Bordeaux, Nantes, and Marseilles also remained prosperous after the adoption of the “Exclusif mitigé” in 1767, which also opened serious cracks in the rules of the French monopoly.⁴³ On the other hand, the vast literature on the phenomena of fraud, smuggling and corruption in the Spanish Atlantic reminds us that in the context of the time it was not enough to enunciate laws excluding or restricting trade for them to be effective.

Interpretations that emphasize social factors to explain the success or failure of different groups of economic agents—such as their endowment of economic, social, and cultural capital—are also not entirely convincing. The early works of García-Baquero González showed that the Cádiz cargadores were as wealthy, if not wealthier, than their European peers,⁴⁴ and the fortune left at his death by Francisco de Yraeta suggests that the Creole merchants were no less wealthy.⁴⁵ More recent works on the cultural and relational capital mobilized by European traders also shows that Spaniards were not inferior to their counterparts from the rest of the continent: They used the same tools as others to make their payments, secure their exchanges, or prospect new partners in the European trade.⁴⁶ The cases of the companies Iribarren and Schondhal, Francisco de la Sierra or Roque Aguado mentioned above show that Cadiz merchants, when they wanted to establish direct relations with their suppliers and clients beyond the Pyrenees, they succeeded. Similarly, the study about the correspondent networks linking the French merchants of Cadiz with their European partners refutes any overly schematic culturalist or anthropological analysis: it is true that they tended to choose their distant correspondents within their family or their religious or linguistic group, but this preference is not exclusive and systematic studies carried out on the correspondence of the Fornier, Rivet, or Jugla Solier houses reveal that these houses traded with both Catholics and Protestants, and with both French and Italian, German and British.⁴⁷ Under these conditions, it does not seem prudent to attribute the preponderance enjoyed by each group of traders in the segment it dominates to simple phenomena of cultural, family, or religious affinity.

To explain globally the trade organization observed in the Hispanic Atlantic, it is therefore necessary to change the scale of analysis and get as close as possible to the procedures that the actors implemented concretely in their trading practices to observe how they articulated the social and institutional logics to build privileged trade relations with certain partners or, on the contrary, to exclude competitors from access to certain markets. This last aspect is the one that has been best studied by historiography, which has had the opportunity to demonstrate, on several occasions, that the Hispanic consulados did not receive exorbitant privileges from the Spanish crown, but rather participated fully in their elaboration. This was the case of the Consulado de Cargadores a Indias, created in Seville in 1543, before being transferred to Cadiz in 1717. The works dedicated to it have shown that the initial prerogatives of the consulado were exclusively two, since the crown only granted the institution the privilege of political representation and the arbitration of commercial disputes arising in the trade of the Indies.⁴⁸ However, on this basis, the institution did not cease to expand the scope of its prerogatives thereafter, in particular at the expense of the Casa de la Contratación, and more precisely through the exchange of donations that it offered to the crown in exchange for new privileges.⁴⁹ This bargaining power led the Consulado de Cargadores de Cádiz to undertake several battles in the middle of the eighteenth century to exclude from the practice of commercial consignment in the Carrera de Indias both the children of foreigners born in Cádiz (the “jenízaros”) and the merchants established in the American markets.⁵⁰ Historians who have studied these arduous legal battles have insisted on the defeat of the consulado in these two cases, but this reading seems to us to be erroneous, because access to the commercial consignment remained very complicated for both sides. The case of the Béhic brothers, two jenízaros of French origin, for example, is very significant because the consulado refused to register them since they remained associated with their father and the latter continued to attend the assemblies of the “French nation.”⁵¹ Thus, if the jenízaros had obtained the right to trade with the Indies in 1743, in order to benefit from this permission they had to openly break all their commercial ties with foreigners. The commercial system in the Hispanic Atlantic was quite fluid and open, but to a certain extent: it easily allowed the change of legal status to actors who requested it—letting foreigners naturalize in Cadiz or flotistas settle in America—but was much less permissive with actors who tried to operate simultaneously in two market segments. In the same way, if it is true that American merchants could invest their funds in the Carrera de Indias without further difficulties,⁵² as we have already seen, until the end of the eighteenth century, they had to face many obstacles to obtain recognition of their right to be appointed as commissioners of the interests of third parties. It is highly probable, moreover, that the Consulado of Cadiz used its jurisdictional capacity to favor its members in lawsuits against other Spanish merchants who were not registered—because we have to remember that no legal provision prevented merchants from Barcelona, Burgos, or Bilbao from taking interests in the shipments sent to the Indies. This is at least what a first analysis of the data collected in the inventory of the 287 appeal files processed in Madrid by the Council of the Indies between 1767 and 1806 suggests.⁵³

It is also evident that the privileges enjoyed by the merchants of the consulado were only effective thanks to the careful vigilance exercised by the institution, which was always careful to exclude outsiders who wished to penetrate the Carrera de Indias. We are aware of the great lawsuits already mentioned that the institution carried out to exclude the jenízaros from its ranks or to prevent Creole merchants from being consignees of merchandise in the Carrera de Indias. However, it is particularly interesting to note that this permanent lobbying by the consulado was also carried out on a smaller scale. Thus, Miguel de Iribarren, for example, when consulted as a member of the consulado about the introduction of Peruvian wines in the ports of the Mexican Pacific coast, was strongly opposed with the argument that these wines would sooner or later reach the tables of the elites of Mexico City, where they would compete with the Andalusian and Catalan wines introduced by the shippers from Cadiz.⁵⁴ The struggle to build and defend a monopolistic commercial position was an incessant combat that involved all the actors in the city of Cadiz.

The studies carried out on the consulados of Mexico and Lima describe exactly the same reality on the American markets: there too, these two corporations were extremely active in keeping away all outsiders likely to compete with their members, whether English agents of the Sea South Company in the first half of the eighteenth century or the flotistas of Cadiz, who wanted to penetrate beyond the Jalapa fair in the second half of the century.⁵⁵ The instruments used to keep out the undesirables were exactly the same as in Cadiz: the members of the consulados obtained support by making donations to the viceroys and maintaining close social ties with them.⁵⁶ As for the foreign merchants of Cadiz, they did not remain inactive either. Although there was no institutional mechanism to guarantee them exclusive or even privileged access to the European trade of Cadiz, they could rely on the unconditional support of their governments, all of which were equally animated by the Colbert's theories. This support took the form of the appointment of consular and diplomatic personnel based in Madrid or Andalusia. The French ambassadors appointed in Madrid received official instructions to give the best protection to French merchants in Cadiz,⁵⁷ and Boyetet, the “Agent général de la Marine” (a sort of general Consul), who had himself been a merchant in Cádiz before being appointed to Madrid, worked to obtain silver extraction licenses from the court, which he then passed on to his former “friends.” The latter warmly offered their thanks in their private correspondence with him.⁵⁸

All these examples show, therefore, the close intertwining of institutional and social logics in the commercial preeminence that the actors obtained in certain segments of the Atlantic system and, on the contrary, their very backward position in others. A close examination of the commercial correspondence reveals the same reality, but from a different observatory: Again, it is the inextricable combination of social and institutional factors that allowed the outsiders to be excluded and the insiders to be favored.

To illustrate this, we will first study the letters that Francisco de Paula de Iribarren, son of Miguel de Iribarren, sent to two of his late father's correspondents in Havana in 1802 and 1805, on both occasions to coordinate transatlantic financial operations. In both cases, the Cadiz merchant found himself in the situation of writing for the first time to his deceased father's correspondents. But, as we have highlighted in other works devoted to the analysis of those “first contacts,”⁵⁹ Francisco de Iribarren did not hesitate to deal directly with new commercial operations from his first exchange with his correspondent. As can be seen in the following case, after presenting himself, Francisco de Iribarren directly established a payment transaction with him without even having asked his authorization beforehand:

“Dear Sir. By the recommendation of my father Mr. Miguel de Iribarren I take the liberty of addressing to you the enclosed libranza [bill of exchange] of 600 ps ft given by Mr. Miguel Brickdale, neighbor of Jerez de la Frontera, to my order and charge of Mr. Enrique Eusebio de Amorrosta, having endorsed it in favor of you so that you may do me the pleasure of arranging its collection and remittance in silver in the first occasion for my account and to be delivered absent to my power of attorney. It also accompanies the letter of advice for Amorrosta.

Please excuse me for any inconvenience and acknowledge me as your most attentive and reliable servant. QSMB.”⁶⁰

In this case, Francisco de Iribarren announced to his new correspondent that he was giving him a bill of exchange and asked him to cash it and give him the amount as if they had always been correspondents, using the same terms that European merchants used among themselves in these cases. To correctly understand this operation, three other elements must be taken into consideration. First, it should be noted that he introduced his request remembering his late father (which we can consider as a recommendation). Furthermore, he reiterated his request a month later in a second letter identical to the first (which was typical of transatlantic trade where the circulation of letters was more uncertain than in Europe).⁶¹ Last, his letter was accompanied with a copy of the letter of advice, addressed to the drawee to inform him of the issuance of the libranza against him—a practice required by the 1737 Bilbao ordinances regulating commercial law in the Spanish empire.⁶² In this case, the establishment of this new commercial relationship between two merchants who had never seen or met each other was then based on a combination of social factors (Francisco de Iribarren presented himself as the son of Miguel de Iribarren) and institutional factors, since several legal and customary mechanisms were mobilized to secure this first transaction between the two new partners (the use of the legally defined tool of the libranza, the sending of a duplicate and the use of a letter of advice). In the following case, Francisco de Iribarren informed his father's correspondents (Moreo and Vergarra of Havana) that the libranza they had endorsed to the deceased was protested by his drawees in Cadiz “for lack of the advice required by the letter, saying [these latter] have express order from the drawer not to accept without this circumstance and that they verified it as soon as they received the advice.”⁶³ Although, in this case, the documentation illustrates a failure in the chain of payments, the conclusions that can be drawn are similar to those of the previous example: it can be seen that the personal or friendly relations that existed between the two sides of the Atlantic were not sufficient to ensure the circuit of payments; for the system to work, there must also have been practices codified in law or custom that protected the actors from certain bad practice—in this case, the risk of the bill of exchange being forged, since the debtors only declared themselves willing to honor their debt on condition that they could check the information contained within the letter of advice.

These two letters show us, if we read between the lines, the type of advantages that the cargadores enjoyed over foreign merchants to trade in the Carrera de Indias: the latter not only could not rely on the social networks that Francisco de Iribarren inherited at the beginning of his career, but, acting outside the legal framework, could not benefit from the legal protections enjoyed by those who acted within the framework of legality. We found the same characteristics in all the samples of correspondence that we have observed in the Carrera de Indias, such as in the inland trade in America or in the European trade of Cadiz. Thus, while Miguel de Iribarren used to entrust his commercial interests to his closest relatives who traveled with his merchandises to America, he also had to reckon with the legal framework of the laws. When his brother, who had embarked in 1776 as his consignee, died during the voyage, the interests entrusted to him could not be referred to Cayetano Dufresne, as Iribarren had planned, since the documents carried by the deceased did not formally designate Dufresne as the “second” or “third” consignee.⁶⁴ Iribarren's correspondent anticipated that the dispute would give rise to an appeal to the viceroy, arriving in Veracruz, and hoped that the latter would respect the Royal Order of 1750 that prohibited American merchants from being consignees of goods belonging to third parties.

More generally, we can highlight in his correspondence other advantages that benefited Miguel de Iribarren, such as his perfect mastery of the language used in the letters exchanged with the flotistas sent to America—what we will call the jargon of the American fairs.⁶⁵ We also highlight the way in which Iribarren corresponded with several “friends” simultaneously in the same place, in order to be able to check the information they sent him.⁶⁶ This makes it easier to understand why it was important to have previous experience as a flotista and to be well introduced to close networks of correspondents in order to establish oneself as a cargador in Cadiz with any chance of success. Things were the same in Mexico's inland trade. Here, too, Francisco de Yraeta based his activity on broad networks of correspondents—which always included several trusted correspondents in the main marketplaces—⁶⁷ on a close knowledge of the commercial customs and habits of each place and on the protection that the legal framework of the “laws of the Indies” could offer him in case of litigation with his partners.⁶⁸ Somehow, this was also the way things worked in the trade between Cadiz and the French ports. The Roux house in Marseilles, for example, always maintained a dozen correspondents simultaneously in the Andalusian port, as well as in the Levant, to check the information that each of them transmitted.⁶⁹ The practice of the silver trade also required the mastery of specific jargon—in the Cadiz trade, the letters spoke of “limons blancs” [white grains?] to designate the coins that were taken out of Cadiz—⁷⁰ a high-level diplomatic protection (as we have seen with regard to the support provided by the “Agent général de la Marine” in Madrid) and the existence of legal recourses. Thus, the French consul established in the port could, if necessary, transmit a judicial assignment before the French courts to the French merchants in the area, summon a national or verify his accounts books at the request of his correspondents residing in France.⁷¹ If merchants from France did business with their compatriots in Cadiz, it was not only because they were “cousins” or “friends,” but also because there was an institutional framework that encouraged them to do so.

4. Conclusions

The commercial profits of the Carrera de Indias did not benefit only the cargadores of Cadiz, nor the sole actors of the great mercantilist powers, as has often been asserted, but were shared, more or less equally, among three categories of actors: the Andalusian cargadores (and to some extent Catalans, who have not been mentioned here), the foreign merchants from Cadiz, and the merchants from the American consulados. Each of these three groups enjoyed commercial supremacy in its geographic area and it seems appropriate to speak of a monopolistic position to describe it. This pattern that organized trade in the Hispanic Atlantic lasted until the end of the colonial era, despite the profound reforms that the Bourbons developed in the last third of the eighteenth century, and, to a certain extent, remained in force until the American independences—when it was profoundly transformed by the intrusion of foreign traders into both the transatlantic trade and American inland commerce. This tripartite structure of trade in the Hispanic Atlantic has much to do with the institutional configuration that regulated this space, since each group could rely on powerful institutional support to defend its interests close to the Spanish Crown. If we follow the analysis proposed by Jeremy Baskes, we can consider that legal protections were, to some extent, a prerequisite for making commercial profits in the uncertain framework of the Carrera de Indias. But the social and cultural factors that characterized each of these three groups and that determined his agency in the commercial circuits were also very important in this configuration.

Explaining why cargadores preferred to rely on other cargadores, New Spanish merchants on their peers, and French merchants in France on their compatriots in Cadiz, is not a simple issue. It was not only a question of national, cultural, confessional, or family affinities, but above all because the identity of the actors also determined the legal framework in which each trader operated, which largely depended on the political and legal identity that had been assigned to him or under which he had chosen to operate. What determined the commercial value of a merchant and his agency in the commercial circuits was not, therefore, the strict individual endowment of capital—financial, cultural, or social—that each had inherited or acquired by merit, but also the political status under which he operated: in the commercial circuits of the Hispanic Atlantic, it was not the same to be a French merchant from Cadiz, a merchant registered with the Consulado of Mexico, or a subject of the King of Spain. These identities determined a combination of social and institutional factors that ultimately explain the comparative advantages that each individual could enjoy in one or another of the segments of the circuits observed. Thus, in addition to the financial, cultural, or social capital of each, success or failure in the Hispanic Atlantic circuits also depended on the institutional capital that each could enjoy by virtue of its political and legal identity. Our study does not allow us to rank these different factors but reveals that they were so intertwined that a formal factorial analysis would be almost impossible.

What now remains is to question the uniqueness of this system. Although we still lack studies allowing formal comparisons, it seems that the trade linking the West Indies with the ports of Northern Europe through the hubs of Bordeaux and Liverpool, or that linking Western Europe with the Levant by Marseilles and Livorno, was structured in exactly the same way as that observed in the Hispanic Atlantic, and that the factors explaining such structuring were of exactly the same nature. Here again, the political identity of the actors appears as a determining factor of the positions they could occupy in the commercial system. A quick survey of the primary literature on the Échelles of Levant, the French colonial Exclusif, or the British Navigation Acts proves it without any difficulty.⁷² Neither, things must be very different in the commercial circuits of today's globalization, but such a demonstration would require a very complex comparative study beyond our possibilities. So, the idea will remain here as a simple intuition.