Seville and the Atlantic: Cycles In Spanish Colonial Trade

Abstract

Seville et l'Atlantiquel fills a good fifteen-inch bookshelf. The eleven volumes weigh twenty-five pounds, unbound; the text, tables, charts, plates, and maps add up to 7,328 pages; and the list price is equivalent to $i09. These figures (which will be larger when Volume VIII.i bis appears) furnish an indexcertainly not the most important-of the formidable achievement of the two French scholars. The boundaries of their research span three centuries and two oceans. Les Philippines et le Pacific des IbWriques appeared in ix6o, and three volumes of Cadiz et l'Atlantique, i651-1800, are promised for the near future. It would be difficult, at least in the field of economic history, to cite a better example of Gallic indefatigability. Except for the collaboration of Jacques Bertin, Guy Arbellot, and Marie-Claude Lapeyre on graphical construction, Seville et l'Atlantique is the work of M. and Mme. Chaunu. They are joint authors of the Partie statistique (Volumes I-VII); M. Chaunu wrote the Partie interpretative (Volume VIII). The statistics refer to the 17,967 voyages of Spanish ships which sailed the Atlantic in I504-i650. Reviewing previous attempts to quantify the history of colonial trade, the Chaunus point to records, particularly the Libros de registro, which earlier researchers have ignored or merely skimmed. None is spared their rebuke for neglecting the records available for constructing comprehensive and continuous statistical series. The pertinent documents, thanks to the numerous bureaucracy employed to regulate every aspect of Spanish colonial affairs, are preserved in the fabulous Archive of the Indies in Seville. Over the years fire, water, and theft have taken their toll of valuable records; and the many lacunae in the published tables, particularly for the sixteenth century, attest to the disappearance of manuscripts which undoubtedly existed. Nevertheless, the Chaunus have uncovered a mass of data which supersedes by a wide margin the yield obtained by other historians who have made quantitative studies of Spanish trade. Conceivably, someone may wish to return to the archives to verify a detail or search for a stray figure to fill a gap. It is utterly inconceivable that anyone will tread the same paths as the Chaunus in hopes of getting significantly different results. It would be a waste of resources to attempt it. By any reasonable standard, this is a definitive piece of fact-gathering and statistical summarization. Volume I describes minutely the archival sources and the procedures em-