Inter-Colonial Trade and the Hapsburg Commercial System

Abstract

CURRENT HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ITS LIMITATIONS As we have seen in Chapter 4, in the discussion of trans-Atlantic trade in the Hapsburg period, and as we shall confirm in Chapters 8–9, when we examine the trading developments of the eighteenth century, historians of commercial relations between Spain and Spanish America now have a reasonably comprehensive macrolevel understanding of the general trading patterns of the entire colonial period. Indeed, it might almost be argued that they have a better grasp of the issue than did the Spanish crown and its officials, even in the relatively efficient eighteenth century, for it is clear to any twentieth-century historian who has undertaken research on Spain's colonial trade with America that the vast majority of the tens of thousands of shipping registers, which provide the documentary raw material for modern scholarship, went straight to the archives of the colonial period without being scrutinised by ministers and their subordinates, as did even the annual summaries prepared by customs officials in some ports. However, despite the abundance of virgin documentation in the archives of Spain and America, historians of trade do have to try to come to terms with a number of rather intractable problems, including the impossibility of measuring with any degree of accuracy the all-pervasive but elusive contraband activity of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which, by its very nature, was not clearly documented.