Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700-1789 - Hardcover

Until 1700, Spain was the dominant European imperialist power, both as an empire builder and as a leading trading economy, with vast and dependable markets in the New World. But throughout the eighteenth century, Spanish merchants and ministers found themselves in a desperate struggle to retain their own colonial markets. Geoffrey J. Walker's thorough and original study investigates the reasons for the decline of S;pain as a mercantile power in this crucial period and the way it adjusted to the economic changes that resulted - by instituting a policy of free trade. Walker depicts the hostility of Spain's European rivals and their use of slave trade to gain a foothold in the Spanish empire. But most surprisingly, he finds that it was the empire's Iberian-born or Spanish-descended subjects residing in the colonies - the businessmen of Lima and Mexico City - who dealt the harshest blow to Spanish mercantilism by stubbornly refusing to cooperate commercially with Spain except on terms that they tacitly dictated. By using new material from archives in Spain, Latin America, and Great Britain, Walker is able to describe in a way never before possible the voyage of every Spanish transatlantic fleet and the conduct of the subsequent trade fair in Spanish America.