Enlightening the Plantation System: Bureaucratic Proposals for Agricultural Modernization, Diversification, and Free Labor in Puerto Rico, c. 1846–52

As a result of the independence struggles in Central and South America, by the late 1820s Puerto Rico and Cuba became Spain's sole colonies in the Americas. From this point forward, metropolitan attention focused on the Spanish Antilles, whose agricultural economies became tightly tied to agro-industrial development and trade in the peninsula, contributing to the emergence of what has come to be known as Spain's Second Empire. The mass production of sugar exports by an agricultural sector largely dominated by slave-based plantations was at the forefront of the agrarian boom that both islands experienced during this period. By the 1840s, however, domestic and international forces, such as ecological pressures, fluctuations in the price of tropical commodities, and the abolition of the slave trade, threatened its stability and long-term viability. This paper examines a series of enlightened proposals initiated by the Iberian colonial bureaucracy to pave the way for what they believed to be Puerto Rico's imminent transformation into an agriculturally diversified, free labor economy.