Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

El tabaco y la esclavitud en la rearticulación imperial ibérica (s. XV–XX)

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-8178303

1527-1900

Alex Borucki,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

This edited volume examines how tobacco commercialization and taxation contributed to support the Iberian Atlantic monarchies, particularly focusing on how the early modern Spanish and Portuguese crowns and bureaucracies benefited from the tobacco monopoly. While the core chapters examine the estanco (royal tobacco monopoly) and the impact of this institution in the financial history of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, other contributions include reflections on Atlantic history, on pictorial representation of tobacco consumption, and, in the last section, on slavery.This volume showcases tobacco as a significant part of the local financing of empires, given that the taxing of tobacco generated resources in different Spanish colonies. Most of the chapters on Spain and Spanish America examine to some extent the Real Hacienda, which makes the essay of Michel Bertrand on this institution in New Spain a good fit for this volume. Bertrand points out that systematic reforms of the Real Hacienda (a prime agent for the tobacco monopoly) could be seen since the late seventeenth century, and thus historians should consider a kind of longue durée, beyond the emphasis on the Bourbon reforms, when analyzing these colonial institutions.While the estanco was established in 1717 in Spain, a direct administration only developed in 1760, during the era of the Bourbon reforms. María Montserrat Gárate Ojanguren charts the eighteenth-century expansion of the network of local administration offices of the tobacco monopoly, which illustrates the capillarity of the Spanish colonial state. These offices generated revenue for the local sections of the Real Hacienda, providing resources (particularly for defense and war) in distant locations of the empire without the need, costs, and dangers of transferring silver and other means of payment. Estancos were located strategically where they could produce revenue and contribute to cover local royal finances and, with the exception of the Cuban case, overcome the deficits of metropolitan Iberian offices during wartime.The early nineteenth-century collapse of the Spanish monarchy brought changes to the estanco but also continuity. Eduardo Galván Rodríguez analyzes the very lengthy parliamentary debates of the Cortes of Cádiz and the Trienio Liberal about deregulating the tobacco monopoly. His conclusions reflect the limits of nineteenth-century liberalism and, ultimately, to what extent Spanish liberals chose the tobacco monopoly rather than deregulation, as they needed the resources from the estanco for war expenses. Santiago de Luxán Meléndez examines the restructuring of the tobacco monopoly in Spain by focusing on the proposals for tobacco cultivation made during and following these debates. Among these plans, the bureaucrats of the former Mexican colonial estanco, after they returned to Spain, considered this system for application in harvest and commercialization in the Iberian Peninsula. This chapter links many distinct but connected spaces: nineteenth-century Cuba, liberal Spain, the old and extinct mainland Spanish empire, and the new and only insular post-1825 Spanish empire. In doing so, the chapter also examines the changing understandings of Spain from the Old Regime to a liberal nation.The contributions of João de Figueiroa-Rego, Margarida Vaz do Rego Machado, Susana Münch Miranda, and Leonor Freire Costa and João Paulo Salvado show that tobacco taxes also played a role in the Portuguese royal finances. Perhaps the most important difference with the Spanish case was that the Portuguese tobacco monopoly did not apply to Brazil, the main producer of tobacco within the Portuguese Atlantic. Brazilian demands to get outside the monopoly were successful. Yet tobacco commercialization was significant for the Portuguese Atlantic system, including the slave trade. Another difference with the Spanish case, in which a network of direct taxation offices developed in Iberia and the Americas, was the role of tax farming in the Portuguese tobacco monopoly, which made it resemble the French system. It is surprising to discover that the tobacco monopoly generated nearly 20 percent of the revenue of the Portuguese monarchy in the eighteenth century and, at the same time, produced large profits for tax farmers.Apart from taxes and finances, María de los Reyes Hernández Socorro and Santiago de Luxán Meléndez examine seventeenth-century Flemish paintings portraying smoking. Reflections on merchant networks and transimperial connections emerge in the chapter of João de Figueiroa-Rego, who focuses on the eighteenth-century networks of tobacco commercialization connecting the Iberian Peninsula with the Americas, and in the contribution of Jean Stubbs, who links Havana tobacco, los habanos, with British Jamaica, Dutch Indonesia, and the United States in the nineteenth century.The section on slavery does not focus on labor in tobacco plantations or the role of this crop in the slave trade; thus, this section is somewhat unrelated to tobacco or smoking. These contributions comprise a historiographical analysis of slavery in the Iberian empires (by Oscar Bergasa Perdomo), a methodological essay on microhistory (by Vicent Sanz Rozalén and Michael Zeuske), a case study on sodomy in the Canary Islands (by Ana Viña Brito), and a chapter on abolitionism during the reign of Isabel II (by José María de Luxán Meléndez).