The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Formation and Crisis, 1567-1767. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1993 by Frank Safford

The title suggests that this fine monograph is an essay in the social history of elite families in colonial Venezuela. It is that, but it is also more. The author sets his study of the elites firmly in their economic base, which for many of them was the cultivation and exportation of cacao. So at one level the book is a study of the cacao economy. At another level it is a study of the relationship between colonial elites and the Spanish state. The book is constructed in two chronological sections (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), each with several topically-organized chapters. But it is most briefly summarized under the categories of cacao, the Spanish state, and elite families.

According to Ferry, early Venezuelan exports of cacao to Mexico in the seventeenth century mostly exploited native (i.e. wild) trees. The harvesting of existing trees made rapid expansion of exports possible and paid for the importation of African slaves needed for new plantings. Portuguese traders, who sold slaves to the Venezuelan planters and bought their cacao for sale in Mexico, were vital to the trade. Venezuelan exports of cacao to Mexico declined ca. 1647-77 because of blighted crops, competition from lowland Ecuador, the persecution of Portuguese merchants by the Mexican Inquisition, and the contemporary decline of Mexican silver mining. During the seventeenth century most Venezuelan cacao was produced on the coast west of Caracas. During the eighteenth century cacao production again increased as an area of new cultivation emerged in the Tuy river valley, south and east of Caracas, with the aid of increased importations of slaves brought by the British South Sea Company (1715-1739). While the earlier plantations of the northern coast were mostly controlled by elite families, many smaller producers, including some former African slaves, were active in the Tuy.

In his analysis of the seventeenth-century cacao trade, Ferry takes up a theme drawn from Eric Van Young: that the elite entrepreneurs were "economically capitalist yet socially seigneurial." Actually, to judge from Ferry's account, they might be considered pre- or proto-capitalist: he says they did not understand the role of competition from Guayaquil in undermining their trade with Mexico (blaming instead only the blight and other acts of nature); their accounting practices were disorderly and did not distinguish between investments and family expenditures; and, to judge from the records he used, they were little concerned with maximizing profit. (The records were probably atypical in that they were of the estates of heirs in their minority, under the care of executors.) The evidence of pre-capitalist mentalities is one of the more interesting aspects of the book, particularly given the tendency of many historians since the 1950s to see rather more capitalist behavior in Latin American elites.

The actions of the colonial state come particularly into play in Ferry's analysis of the eighteenth century. In 1739 the Spanish crown terminated the English slave asiento, with the result that slave importations declined drastically, throwing cacao production again into decline. Cacao exports also were hampered by the Basque-owned Guipuzcoana Company, which increasingly restricted Venezuelan exports to Mexico in an effort to capture cacao for company exports to Spain. Company constriction of the cacao trade in 1749 provoked a rebellion of small producers in the Tuy valley, which apparently had the covert sympathy of at least some of the Caracas elite. Ferry sees in the post-rebellion repressive measures, including the growth of military forces and heavier-handed administration, the origins of the Spanish Bourbon reforms in America. Actually, as various Bourbon reforms occurred sporadically during the eighteenth century, it is pointless to affirm that one or the other burst was the "beginning." The more important feature embedded in Ferry's account (but unnoticed by him) is its implicit refutation, or at least modification, of John Leddy Phelan's notion of the rules of the game under the Spanish state. Phelan in The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (1978) argued that there were well understood, though unwritten, rules for negotiation between protesting subjects and the Spanish monarchical state. In Ferry's account there is much repression and little negotiation, and everyone seems to have believed that the rules of the game operated only in favor of royal authority.

In his treatment of elite families, Ferry emphasizes the persistence and stability of elite families, despite the tendency of Spanish inheritance laws to favor the dispersal of fortunes. He also stresses the importance of class differences between elites and plebeians, contrary to Stephanie Blank's analysis depicting vertical social integration through patron-client relations in Venezuela. Most elite households were nuclear, rather than extended, if only because children often married after the deaths of one or both parents. Because mothers were likely to outlive fathers, Ferry believes mothers were more important in directing the marriages of children. Ferry finds that during the decline of the cacao economy after 1740, children were more likely to marry after the deaths of their parents. He surmises from this that they actually were delaying marriage until they could come into their inheritances, which may have been true in some cases but is not the only possible inference from the data.