Structure and Profitability of Royal Finance in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1790
HE SPANISH AMERICAN EMPIRE was the most bureaucratic and sophisticated royal government operating in eighteenth-century America. The complexity of its intelvention in the daily economic, social and political life of its citizens was reflected in the number of paid royal officials in the judicial, administrative, military and religious hierarchies. To maintain this bureaucracy, the Crown developed a complex system of taxation on colonial production, commerce and population. It also established state monopolies (tobacco products, playing cards, mercury, stamped paper, etc.) for further extraction of funds from its subjects. The tax structure was administered by a large number of paid royal treasury officials, supplemented by private tax farmers. The resulting proliferation of royal treasury account records is extraordinary, constituting a vely rich but little used source of documentation on the economic life of the colonies. Historians have, of course, looked into these sources. But in the historiography of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, with which this study is particularly concerned, there have been few systematic and detailed analyses based on these records.1 It is the aim of the present essay to begin an exploration of the most general of these