Conclusions: The Financial Collapse of Viceroyalty and Monarchy

Summary

The fiscal and financial crisis of New Spain's colonial administration after 1810 was not a singular event. It was part of a much broader debacle. The finances of other Spanish American viceroyalties were also crumbling, slowly but surely. As a result of the wars of independence (1810–1825), the Spanish empire progressively disintegrated into a multitude of fragments, eventually to reconstitute in an extraordinary mosaic of new and distinct nations. At the same time, the heart of the old monarchy, Spain itself, suffered military defeat and confronted the deepest bankruptcy. There was thus a striking symbiosis in the prolonged collapse of colonial regime and metropolis. This would appear to be a frequent lesson of the downfall of imperial states through much of history, ancient and modern.

This study has called attention to the interlocking relationship between imperial wars and the incessant fiscal and financial exactions of the metropolitan state from its richest Spanish American colony during the half century spanning the decades 1760–1810. Even though these contributions to the Crown were sustained and large, they only could delay the final debacle. In the end, all financial expedients were vain. The silver obtained from New Spain through taxes, donativos, numerous loans, and the Consolidation Fund was absorbed by military expenditures and by the service on domestic and foreign debts taken by the Spanish government to pay for the international wars in which the Crown engaged almost incessantly. By 1810, the governments of both viceroyalty and monarchy were bankrupt.