Famine, Prosperity, and Power: Rethinking the “Crisis of Sovereignty” in Caracas, 1796–1811

During the Age of Revolution, economic crisis and political insecurity pushed the white planter oligarchy of Caracas to pursue commercial liberalization and economic reform.  When grain resources grew scarce after 1797, colonial officials and local elites intervened in the market: they legalized free trade with foreigners; ordered inspections of rural grain silos and plantations; scoured neighboring villages for corn; sold state-owned food reserves at discount; scrutinized urban grocers and regatones; and, engaged directly in the trans-Atlantic wholesale trade in cooperation with state-sanctioned merchants.  However, effective implementation of economic reform proved difficult.  This paper will explore the political and economic ramifications of economic crisis in late-Colonial Caracas and examine how real and alleged grain shortages fomented conflict among colonial Venezuelan interest groups and tested the relations between colony and metropole.

In an age of war, slave rebellion, revolution, and drought, food insecurity was not only a social and economic problem but also a challenge of governance.  Repeated grain shortages exposed the social cleavages within Venezuela and also stressed the widening fault lines between local and imperial leaders over economic policy and political authority.  To regulate and alter the colonial economy from within the Spanish Empire in the late-colonial era proved no easy task.  If a far-off monarch and colonial administrators could not effectively supply and provision their loyal subjects, how could they possibly guarantee and promote their future health, prosperity, and welfare?  As colonial leaders grappled with Spain’s political “crisis of sovereignty” after 1808, they also began a quest for economic sovereignty.  On the eve of Venezuela’s April 1810 juntista movement, the Caracas elite was already searching for a different kind of independence; they wanted to purchase food and goods “at comfortable and equitable prices” and be freed from the “scarcities and harm of foreign dependency.”