LAUSR

lar eased the gravitation of other Europeans to Spanish American coasts. The 1767 Free Ports Act opened Britain’s monopoly in the Caribbean; the American Revolution saw a boom in US shipping around Cape Horn, and the French Wars disrupted Europe’s colonial trade; Spain licensed neutral shipping to and from Spanish America – fostering a greater intermediation of its commerce by ‘foreign’ merchants. Piecemeal commercial legislation in Madrid did not pull British, US and Portuguese shipping (especially after the Court’s move to Rio de Janeiro in 1808) over the Atlantic and the Pacific; it just reduced intermediation costs. Commerce was never ‘closed’ – even trade at Cádiz was never fully controlled by Spaniards – as reflected in the problems of estimating ‘illegal’ trade mentioned in some chapters. Foreign shipping made commerce more direct and more available via bypassing local privileged merchants, who, in collusion with royal officials, controlled the access to consumers inland – and silver exports, more importantly – in each of the ports or large cities. More direct and more frequent, rather than freer, access to exchange silver for imported consumer goods – Asian or European – improved the purchasing power of silver money and changed relative prices between tradeable and non-tradeable goods. It thus fostered the production of other export commodities in regions poorly endowed with metals, altering the leverage of local elites and colonial authorities and making commerce and politics more competitive and open. Naturally, old and new economic interests clashed over legitimacy issues when Spanish governance crumbled; indeed, regional divergence had started well before Independence. Any qualification of the outcomes of such transformations in the commerce and politics of Spanish America should take stock of the valuable empirical information presented here.