This panel revisits the topic of hunger and poverty in Spanish America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was an era of economic reorientation, war, ambitious reforms, and rebellions. These transformations affected people’s lives at the most basic level, the access to food, in multiple and contradictory ways.

In the most densely populated regions, the population began to recover after the demographic collapse that occurred during the conquest. Likewise, trade and economic activity expanded in new mining and export-agriculture areas, allowing large accumulation of wealth. The Bourbon reforms enhanced these developments with policiesthat rewired colonial control and the accumulation of wealth. At the same time, however, sizable segments of the population lived in misery, with large-scale hunger and poverty-related disease outbreaks becoming more prevalent in several regions of Spanish America.

This panel seeks to examine this contradictory development between economic expansion and reformism on the one hand, and living at the risk of starvation on the other. We do so by complementing discourse and economic analysis, featuring different regions, such as the Andes, Mexico and the River Plate regions, and treating this “long eighteenth century” as a cohesive period.

We come to these topics following long historiographical traditions, but also with a renewed interest that originates inthe conjunction of the COVID pandemic and global climate change that brought back to us the sense of dread and uncertainty that was so pervasive in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The panel features three presentations with original research, a commentary from a specialist on colonial welfare institutions, and dialogue between panelists and the audience.

Mónica Ricketts analyzes the economic and political reformist discourse of the eighteenth century, with a focus on the Andes but more largely on the Spanish empire as a whole. The paper presents a paradox: reformist discourse largely deals with commerce, taxation and efficiencies in the economy, but it is silent about hunger and poverty. Despite the high place that political and religious thought put on the food supply policies, this omission calls into question deeply entrenched colonial notions about the economic policies in the late colonial era.

Switching focus to New Spain (Mexico), Amílcar Challú proposes that an economy that ran on animal power (mules) largely competed with the demand that humans had for food. Adeclining agricultural productivity, increased specialization, and climate disasters created a perfect storm that resulted in chronic hunger and episodic widespread famine.

Finally, Julio Djenderedjian, Juan Luis Martirén and María Inés Moraes discuss how the dynamics of economic growth and export specialization interacted in a substantially different way in the land- and cattle-abundant River Plate region. Despite epidemic events and occasional droughts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the population enjoyed good access to food and higher living standards in comparative perspective. However, by the 1820s the equilibrium entered in crisis as exports of salted beef entered in the scene, along with other changes in the economy.