The Old Regime’s Last Stand: Resisting the Bourbon Reforms in Spanish American Mints

Beginning in the late 1720s and extending into the 1770s, reformers from Spain’s Bourbon administration targeted mints in Spanish America for modernization. In order to reduce fraud and increase control over the mining industry and its profits, the Crown ordered an overhaul of the mints’ buildings, administration, and labor. At the top level, this meant a “nationalization” of the mints by removing control from the privately-purchased treasurer offices and naming superintendents to direct the mints on behalf of the Crown. This essay analyzes the decades-long protests and litigation launched by the dispossessed treasurers of the mints in Mexico City, Lima, and Potosí. In the context of Bourbon professionalization and centralization, these men and their families defended their privileges, incomes, and the Old Regime.

Studies of the Bourbon Reforms have recently helped us see them in continuity with the late Hapsburg administration, examined their effects on tributary populations, and explored the role of key reformers within the imperial and administrative circuits of the Spanish Empire. Scholars have identified tensions from the Bourbon Reforms as stirrings of the eventual independence movements, but we still lack studies that centers those who resisted and that take seriously resisters’ goals and projects. Mint treasurers were socioeconomic elites who were integrated into both imperial and local networks of trade and sociability. This essay takes seriously their individual aims and views of the imperial system and questions what the varying degrees of success in their claims can tell us about tensions in the late empire and the connections between reforms and independence movements.