This article examines the fiscal transformation of Spain's trade with Spanish America during the 17th century. It analyses the taxation of trade combined with the evolution of the Hispanic Monarchy's long-term domestic debt. To this end, the author looks at the almojarifazgo de Indias (main customs duty), its juro (annuity) obligations and the evolution of the transatlantic trade. He argues that the fall in customs revenue and the increasing non-payment of the juros issued against the almojarifazgo were neither a consequence of the alleged crisis of the Carrera de Indias nor of the higher incidence of fraud. The Crown was not interested in exerting greater fiscal pressure on the trade or fighting fraud at the customs houses of Seville and Cadiz as the increased tax revenue would have gone entirely to service the unpaid juros. Instead, the fiscal burden shifted towards extraordinary contributions that were free of juro obligations.

This article provides aggregate data on credit flows in Santafé de Bogotá, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (present-day Colombia, Ecuador and western Venezuela). By perusing a thorough report submitted to Bourbon authorities on notarial transactions, which included both ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical loans in the city, the article estimates the volume and size of lending activity while exploring how distinct types of credit interacted and shaped the business milieu of the region. It argues that by the late 1770s, Catholic Church lending had ceased to be the main source of investable funds in the region, with merchants and other non-ecclesiastical investors injecting growing funds into sectors traditionally avoided by ecclesiastical lenders such as commerce, mining and manufacturing. Network analysis suggests that merchants became brokers between different credit sources, alleviating information asymmetries and opening the credit market to borrowers with collateral and institutional restrictions willing to pay higher interest rates. Finally, by focusing on New Granada, the largest gold producer of the Spanish Empire, the article identifies some distinctive credit patterns that are different from those developed in silver-driven economies such as New Spain and Peru. Thus, the article provides new paths to study Latin American financial history.

During the first wave of globalization, Argentina was among the most internationally integrated economies, experiencing a rising trend in trade openness and a tremendous increase in labor due to migration. In this paper, we empirically show the central role immigration had in boosting exports and imports in the years 1870–1913 by considering Argentine bilateral trade and migration from eight European countries (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and United Kingdom). We use a migration-augmented gravity model to estimate the contribution of the massive inflows of Europeans, and we find that the main pro-trade effect was on imports: a percent 10% increase in migrants from a particular country would increase imports by up to 8% from that same country. We do not find the same effect on exports. The disproportionate decrease in transportation rather than communication costs may explain why the latter are relatively more decisive for exports than for imports. To overcome the problem of reverse causality and endogeneity, we use migration flows to the US from the eight European countries as an instrumental variable. In so doing, we aim at capturing the same push (but not Argentine pull) factors inducing European out-migration.

This paper applies modern economic theory to the ownership of enslaved men and women in the labour market context of Santiago, Chile from 1773 to 1810. We calculate the internal rate of return for slaves by gender and age as a way to understand the economic justification of slavery in an urban scenario where free labour was also readily available. Based on archival sources documenting the selling prices for slaves, prevailing wages for free labourers, maintenance costs and life expectancy, we argue that the ownership of enslaved men and women was a consistently profitable activity.

This article explores the development of railway nationalism and «railway imperialism» within Colombian politics during the early 20th century. It uses the experience of the hitherto unstudied Great Northern Central Railway of Colombia British «free-standing company» as a lens to evaluate the way in which these political currents impacted railway development in the Colombian department of Santander. It argues that the rise of railway nationalism intertwined with regionalism and personal interests represents an important and unacknowledged factor in the collapse of the British company, as well as the overall lack of railway expansion and subsequent economic decline in the department.

This paper analyses the role of Mompox in New Granada's interregional trade during the late colonial period. It focuses on the value, structure and destination of exports of domestic goods from Mompox to markets on the Atlantic and the Andes. By unearthing unexplored sources, this paper provides evidence that will help to understand, indirectly, some issues such as the nature and timing of economic growth, the degree of regional specialisation and, above all, the role of inland ports in the economic geography of the viceroyalty. The paper contends, first, that the region experienced a boom–bust cycle during the late colonial period. The export of domestic goods doubled between 1770 and 1800 but subsequently collapsed during the 1802-1809 years. Second, evidence suggests that the region experienced a process of market deepening and widening. Trade flows, then, played a larger role in shaping the economic history of the region than previously thought.

This article explores the impact of Asian goods in the Rio de la Plata area through the navigation course of two frigates of the Royal Company of Phillipines, forced by the maritime conflict between the Spanish and British Empires, dock in the Southern estuary. Examining the value and traits of the shipment and the details of the ‘comercio de pacotilla’, this study analyzes the distribution of the goods from China, Philippines and in particular, India, in the port basin, the hinterland of the Viceroyalty, and its connections to the Alto Peruvian space, the trans-Andean region, and the Littoral way to Paraguay. This episode enables an understanding of the distribution of goods, as well as a more detailed recognition of the actors of this traffic and a renewed evaluation of the role of the company in the global market of Asian goods.

The article analyses the development of the coffee export business of the British company Edward Johnston & Co. in the years 1840-1880. Established in 1842 in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the firm's senior partner was the English merchant Edward Johnston. The departure of partners and the crisis of 1847 made Edward Johnston reorganise the firm in Brazil. In the 1850s, the company established itself as a family business based in Liverpool and then in London in the 1860s. The expansion of the coffee market in the United States made Edward Johnston create a network of firms which consolidated the company as a major exporter of Brazilian coffee by the late 1870s.

This article deals with the trade of local merchandise in Santiago's district (Corregimiento) from 1773 to 1778, based on tributary sources. It contributes to the debate on the organization of the colonial internal market. The main traded merchandise, which represented about 80% of Chilean exports, came from the cattle exploitation that was developed in the haciendas around Santiago, whose cattle stocks were complemented from neighboring provinces in the Andes. The largest destination of this trade, in which big merchants acted together with a thousand minor merchants, were the retail channels and the artisan sectors supplying the population of Santiago. The impulse of this demand on the domestic market was so dynamic that it shows a degree of regional autonomy higher than what it is traditionally assumed for the Chilean economy in the late colonial period.

This article seeks to analyze the cocoa circuits during the final years of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the transition towards independence and the beginning of the world cocoa crisis in 1820. Added to the traditional circuits of Guayaquil and Maracaibo linked with Pamplona, the article identifies circuits that were speculated to exist in the southwest of New Granada, but because they did not move large volumes, they were not considered for production statistics. These small productions supplied the domestic market, also exported or integrated into circuits from other places that had better interactions in international markets. It is not a microhistory of cocoa in remote regions, it is the history of a cocoa overshadowed by the visibility of others.

This article discusses the available sources of information on the value and volume of Peru’s exports and estimates the current value of exports, the index of export prices and the quantum of exports using a wide variety of sources. By relying on several sources, I estimate the first complete series of the current value of exports for Peru for 1830-1930. Importantly, I adjust other studies’ estimates by taking into account the deficiencies of foreign sources and by distinguishing between exports of specie and of minerals. The estimations show that exports experienced substantial growth in the 1850s and 1860s, during the Guano Era. Exports stagnated in the 1870s and dropped during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) before recovering in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially during World War I.

This research note discusses the accuracy of the main sources used to study the foreign sector during the export-led growth process in Chile. Chilean foreign trade statistics are available for the period under analysis (1850-1930) and offered a good overview of products exported and imported. Bilateral trade data are also available providing information of exports and imports by origin and destiny. Although more research is needed on trade prices, we conclude that Chilean statistics are reliable and provide a way for understanding the export-led growth in Chile and the trade performance of the Chilean partners.

This essay aims to introduce an issue of the RHE-JILAEH dedicated to the reconstruction of historical trade statistics of Latin American countries. It comments on the early perceptions of the quality and utility of historical trade statistics and on the way in which more recent analyses have overcome the distrust that prevailed until the last third of the 20th century. It then summarises the different criteria and methodologies that have been used to assess the accuracy and reliability of trade statistics in order to make them useful for the purpose of reconstructing new, more complete and precise trade series or re-estimating those available. The introduction ends with a brief description of the contents of this volume.

This paper aims to evaluate the accuracy of official Bolivian foreign trade statistics. Results show large discrepancies between Bolivian records and those of its main trade partners during the First World War. Whereas the gap decreased thereafter, it stayed particularly high in the case of exports. This seems to be explained by mistakes in the geographical assignment by the trade partners rather than by an overvaluation of official Bolivian figures. This suggests that landlockness may have had a significant negative effect on the accuracy of trade statistics from the, a priori, more reliable countries. The study also helps to revisit the debate concerning the effect that tin exploitation had on the rest of the Bolivian economy during the first half of the 20th century.

This article presents, for the first time, a continuous series of value of Honduran exports and imports for the period 1880-1930, extending the series previously available from Notten (2012). The new series were constructed based on the official statistics of the main trading partners of Honduras (United States, Great Britain, Germany and France) corrected from Honduran and complementary sources. The correction criteria applied are based on the results of a previous reliability validation exercise. The data obtained allow to delimit a new chronology of the foreign trade of Honduras where the “export age” began before the banana export boom that took place between 1903 and 1930.

In 1821 Mexico achieved its independence from Spain. What happened in the following 50 years has become a field of dispute for economic historians. The lack of reliable quantitative information in many fields of economic activity has led to contrasting interpretations, none of which has been accepted as definitive. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the yearly values of Mexico’s foreign trade in that period, with the purpose of providing elements to start filling this significant gap in Mexico’s historiography. It relies on official trade statistics and consular reports from Mexico’s main trading partners. It provides new series of imports and (commodity and specie) exports, and a provisional view of the balance of trade for most of the 1821-1870 period.

Historiography has payed less attention to imports than exports from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I. On the one hand, this is explained by the crucial and more visible part that exports played in fostering economic growth. On the other, the reason why imports have been less studied is the high level of disaggregation of the data available. In this paper, we analyse the official Argentine statistics as the main source for a reconstruction of imports. Then, we recalculate the balance of trade using our corrected export series. Additionally, we propose a research agenda based on gaps in the specialised literature and the possibilities given by the use of the official statistics.

To date, research on the economic history of Brazil during the 19th century has relied on official foreign trade statistics, the accuracy of which has repeatedly been put into question. This paper provides insights into the accuracy of the official series by examining the accuracy of the export and import series for Brazil during the 19th century. We re-estimate the official import series using trading partner sources, and find that the official series was marginally under-valued during certain periods of the 19th century. Furthermore, we provide new upper- and lower-bound estimates of the export series by testing different assumptions regarding the size of the cost, insurance and freight to free on board factor adjustments. Finally, we introduce a new import price index for the period 1827-1913.

The objective of this article is to reappraise both the accuracy of the official export statistics and the narrative of Brazilian export growth during the period immediately following independence. We undertake an accuracy test of the official values of Brazilian export statistics and find evidence of considerable under-valuation. Once corrected, during the post-independence decades (1821–50) Brazil's current exports represented a larger share of its economy and its constant growth is found to be more dynamic than any other period of the nineteenth century. We posit that this dynamism was related to an exogenous institutional shock in the form of British West Indies slave emancipation that afforded Brazil a competitive advantage.

This paper provides the first survey of slave prices for Santiago de Chile, c. 1773-1822. It also establishes the main determinants of slave prices during this period. We gathered and analysed over 3,800 sale operations. Our series confirm the usual inverted U-shape when prices are plotted against age, and that age was a very important determinant of slave prices. We also found that: female slaves were systematically priced over male slaves, quite contrary to what happened in most other markets; the prime age of Santiago slaves was 16-34, a younger range than for most other places; male slave prices moved in the same direction as real wages of unskilled workers; and the impact of the free womb law on market prices in 1811 was dramatic.