Saturday, January 5, 2019: 8:50 AM
Salon 3 (Palmer House Hilton)
Ideas of prosperity and abundance underwent a revolution in their own right in the late eighteenth century River Plate-Andean region. This paper shows that these concepts were made increasingly tangible thanks to increased access to economic information. Bourbon reformers, in an effort to take stock of economic life, reached out to local magistrates and sent scientists and cartographers across the Spanish Americas to collect copious information on a diversity of productive sectors. As a result, Crown officials had more information at their fingertips to analyze the potential for economic prosperity, and selectively choose where to invest safeguarded imperial capital. Accountants and treasuries merged profits from agricultural production with silver extraction, helping reshape the very idea of wealth. Furthermore, with the explosion of the newspaper across the Spanish Americas during these years, printing presses chugged out findings and figures. As this paper will demonstrate, some of the very same actors at the frontline of rearranging the economy were also the empire’s most avid public writers. Three examples will elucidate this point: José Ignacio de Lequanda, accountant of the Real Aduana de Lima, and avid contributor to the Mercurio Peruano; Eugenio Larruga, former archivist for the archive of the Real Junta de Comercio, Moneda y Minas, and co-founder of the Correo mercantil de España y sus Indias; and Manuel Belgrano and Hipólito Vieytes, influential voices within the newly established Consulate of Buenos Aires and founders of the Seminario de Agricultura, Industria y Comercio. The practices and innovations in accounting for wealth will be analyzed here, with particular attention to how these actors imagined the potential of spreading this data. This study contributes to our conception of the interconnected fabric of the Atlantic world in a dynamic yet precarious moment that would reframe the possibilities of colonial economic regions.