Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A late 18th-century view of the skyline of Buenos Aires and the estuary of the River Plate,
where cargo ships anchored to be emptied and loaded by small craft. The city was designated
as the major Atlantic port of the Spanish colonial empire in the Southern Cone.
(Fernando
Brambila, 1794, courtesy Emece Editores)
always considered the American empire their proprietary source of
state revenues.
As for social inequities, commercial growth failed to lead to equality
of economic opportunity and the democratization of the social order.
The antagonism between the Hispanic and the indigenous cultures con-
tinued unabated. Under the circumstances, the white gentry accorded
neither respect nor opportunity to poor nonwhites. The increasing
size of a slave underclass within the Hispanic society also hardened
social discrimination, and mestizos and mulattoes, who descended
from native or African ancestors, suffered sharply. Even among the
privileged white class, there was discrimination, since the newly arrived
merchants and bureaucrats used their European birth and contacts to
discriminate against the interests of Creoles born in the Americas.
Eventually, the royal government began a series of administra-
tive changes called the Bourbon Reforms that were intended to solve
the problems of colonial defense and tax evasion; social inequalities
remained untouched. The reforms legalized and expanded Spanish
commerce at Buenos Aires; in fact, the Crown established a new vice-
royalty within the Río de la Plata and made the port the administrative
capital of this emerging region. Bolstered by fear of clerical power in
the colonies, the government also expelled the influential Jesuit order
and confiscated its extensive properties. As we shall see, these reforms
