Economic historians have placed commercialization at the centre of Europe’s early modern capitalism, emphasizing the importance of domestic and international trade, shipbuilding and concomitant manufactures, the financial sector, and urbanization. As the Iberian polities extended geographically to Africa, Asia and the Americas during the early modern period, trade, whether domestic, international or colonial, had a critical effect upon economic development. However, the economic impact of colonial expansion was uneven across Iberia. Iberia commercial exchange associated with the overseas empires produced surprisingly few backward and forward linkages in the European national economies. The question this chapter seeks to address is thus to what extent and how Iberian trade, especially colonial trade, supported or hindered economic development in the early modern period.

Introduction

The eighteenth century witnessed a significant growth in the commercial exchanges between the European metropolises and their American dominions. One crucial feature that helped trade to expand was the increasing flow of commercial information across the Atlantic. However, this development has been studied primarily in the context of the British Atlantic, where the commercial press played a major role, as John McCusker and others have shown in great detail. In stark contrast, the flow of information that made Spain's trade with its American colonies possible remains for the most part shrouded in mystery. There are three main reasons for this: first, a Spanish commercial press did not appear until very late in the century, and even then it offered very little information on prices; second, very few early modern private business records have survived in Spain and Spanish America; and, third, historians working on the Spanish colonial trade do not seem to have shown much interest in studying the mechanisms of underlying price formation and information flow.

By using a cache of confiscated letters and documents belonging to Spanish merchant ships intercepted by the British navy in the eighteenth century, this chapter tries to answer important questions about the flow of commercial information across the Spanish Atlantic, such as: how much did Spanish merchants trading with America know about prices in the colonies?