Recent Trends in the Study of Spanish American Colonial Public Finance

Abstract

Fiscal history has become one of the most active new fields of research on colonial Spanish America. This trend has resulted from a number of recent breakthroughs, most notably the reconstruction of colonial treasury records and the appearance of the first revisionist studies based on the new data. These works are challenging traditional views, particularly the general understanding of the colonial economic experience and the evolution of imperial ties. Indeed, the fiscal series now being made available, if properly supported by qualitative research and regional studies, may affect seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historiography as notably as the demographic works of the Berkeley school affected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historiography.

Fiscal Transfers between Buenos Aires and the Viceregal Interior at the End of the Colonial Period: Fall of the Situado and the Relation with the Regional Royal Treasuries (1800–1810)

“…Current historiography has widely discussed views on the taxation of the Spanish Empire in America based on research that considers the negotiated nature of the American tax system between the monarchy and local elites. Researchers in the 1980s argued that the mere extraction of fiscal resources was a rather limited benefit of colonialism for the Spanish Empire (Klein and Barbier 1988). 2 More recently, studies of Hispanic American imperial taxation have stressed the redistributive character of the imperial fiscal system, which favored reducing costs for maintenance of the American colonies 3 .…”

“…At the end of the year, a final libro mayor was produced that organized all accounts into income and expenditure categories in yearly totals. At the end of this detailed libro mayor came a one-page relación jurada, tanteo, or carta-cuenta, which was sent to the next higher authority and ultimately to Spain” (Klein and Barbier 1988, 42).…”

“… 7 Klein and Barbier (1988, 43) stated in reference to these discussions: “It reminds all scholars of the necessity of using the annual summary figures in a provisional and cautious manner. The lesson seems to be that the annual statements are a crude, but faithful, measure of the colonial fiscal situation.…”