‘It was the unforeseen discovery of America which changed the agricultural map of the world…the only crops common to both the Old and New Worlds were cotton, coconuts and some gourds’, with the dog as the only shared domestic animal.^[17] The list of borrowings from the Indies is formidable—maize, potatoes ‘Irish’ and sweet, tobacco, rubber, cassava, groundnuts, capsicums, tomatoes, pineapples, cacao, coca, and cinchona (whence quinine); but these are offset by wheat and other cereals, rice, sugar, the silk mulberry, the olive and the vine; later, eucalypts. The Americas were rich in dyestuffs, but their cochineal is matched by indigo (añil), and while Eurasia sent to America horses, cows, sheep, goats, pigs, poultry, it received in return only the turkey and, for what it is worth, the guinea-pig. This great work of intercontinental cross-fertilisation was carried out mainly by Spaniards and Portuguese, and largely in the first century of Ibero-America.^[18]

In New Spain the economy of the humid south was largely agricultural: little of its output entered Pacific trade, despite Cortes's efforts to supply the Panamanian victuallers of Peruvian entradas with the wheat, biscuit, pork, sugar and cheese piling up on his Oaxaca estates. Initially indeed there was a brisk one-way traffic south in livestock and planting materials, but once Peru was stocked Mexican imports were soon cut out, last of all sugar.^[19] There is, however, an important if negative Pacific connection in that a flourishing silk industry, half a century old, was nearly ruined when the Union with Portugal carried with it the final abandonment of the idea that Manila was to be a great spice mart, while the opening of the return route enabled her to become the channel for Chinese silks. Between 1579 and 1593 the Mexican price of raw silk fell by 80 per cent, flat against the general inflation of the time; the Chinese product was exactly competitive with the Mexican, being either of very high quality, which could stand round-world transport costs, or very cheap lines ‘with which they clothe the galley-slaves at Manila’. The fall of the Mexican industry was a decline, not a sudden collapse, and the causes were complex. Rearing and reeling were confined to Indians, weaving to Spanish artisans, and for some uses Mexican yarn was preferable to Chinese. Falling numbers in the work force for a labour-intensive industry (especially in the great epidemic of 1576–7) and forced production quotas, with minimal returns to the Indian producers, led them to abandon or sabotage the rearing side. But, initially at least, the finishing side actually benefited from cheaper yarn and enforced specialisation in finer lines.- 182 -However, the falling-off in local raw silk and continuing Chinese competition undermined the Mexican industry, and the suppression (1634) of all legal trade to Peru was simply the coup de grâce to a moribund craft. There was still a trifling Indian production, for home use or the most local markets; but attempts at revival in the last decades of Bourbon rule were futile.^[20] The main item in overseas trade on the Pacific side of New Spain became cochineal from Michoacan.

The more arid north, New Galicia, was the main provider of the motor force for New Spain's macroeconomic activity: silver mining. The mines provided a market for tropical foodstuffs such as sugar and, where grain farming was not possible near at hand, for wheat, maize, and flour. The north was also the great stock-rearing zone: ‘cattle more than men’ competed with the Chichimecas for the land. It is difficult for us today to realise, and impossible to overstress, the importance then of cattle, sheep, and goats, not only for food (including jerked and cured meats for camps and ships), saddlery, and footgear, but also for a multitude of uses now served by metal, glass, or plastics. Leather goods included cordage and lassos; shields or targes, caps and helmets, cuirasses or buff coats, breeches for the soldiery; bookbindings; boxes and containers of all sorts—skins for bŕandy, pouches for cacao, flasks to transport the all-important mercury of Huancavelica. Eventually American hides were to displace those from Mediterranean sources in Spain itself. Lard was essential for cooking in the many places where olive oil was not easily procurable; tallow for soap-making, but above all for the mines, where there was an insatiable appetite for it for lighting and lubrication. In sum, it may not be much of an exaggeration to say with Perez: ‘Beyond all doubt, the greatest triumph of economic colonisation consisted in the acclimatisation and astonishing proliferation of European livestock’.^[21]

More important than Mexican export through the South Sea ports was the import of cacao from Soconusco and Sonsonate (in Guatemala and Salvador), usually shipped from Acajutla to Guatulco; this trade was very flourishing until monoculture led to utter exhaustion of the soil—and of the Indian work force. The onset of this crisis coincided with Cavendish's ravages off the coast (1587: he burned some 300 tons of cacao), and the major centre of production shifted far south to Guayaquil, which was exporting by 1610. Guatemala turned to indigo (añil), exported to both New Spain and Peru for the textile obrajes. Beyond Sonsonate, the connections of Nicaragua and Costa Rica were essentially with Panama rather than New Spain, and did not amount to much, except for the shipbuilding of Realejo; though Costa Rica, with few people and a considerable food output (including European fruits from the hills) supplied provisions and, most importantly, mules to the Isthmus.^[22]

The Isthmus itself was much more important as consumer than as producer: cattle and pearls, fish, a little rice, about sum it up; but of course its activity as a transport node was transcendent, to the great envy of Realejo and other wishfully potential isthmian nodes to the north. The littoral from Panama to the- 183 -Equator was all but valueless, as it still is—mountainous to Buenaventura, plain beyond that, but both tropical jungle. Chaunu devotes three very solid pages to demonstrating the insignificance of Buenaventura, and even the small would-be outlets for the intermont basins around Quito—places like Ancon, Puerto Viejo and Manta, Santa Elena—were little more than places of occasional and often probably reluctant call. Santiago de Guayaquil, however, some 120km up a big complex estuary, had access to great stores of excellent worm-resistant timbers, easily floated down streams which converged on the Rio Guayas itself: with local fibres and with asphalt from Santa Elena for caulking, it became the greatest shipbuilding centre on the whole Pacific littoral. It also became the chief exporter of cacao, some even reaching Spain; and this despite disadvantages—a shoal-crowded river, and a notoriously unpleasant and unhealthy climate.^[23]

Beyond Paita began the desert, stretching from 5° to 30°S, broken only where crossed by widely-spaced wedges of irrigable floodplain. It was in ‘forty or so oases created by the descent of Andean waters to the coasts of Peru’,^[24] and far away to the south in the central valley of Chile, that the most solid, diversified, and enduring agriculture of the Spanish Pacific littoral took root, and for Peru this was as early as the mid-1530s—the planting of the first wheat was ‘an honour claimed by practically every Spanish woman who reached Peru before 1537′.^[25] By the early 1540s Lima, Arequipa, and probably Trujillo were surrounded by what would now be called truck-farming zones, and since they depended on irrigation, many holdings were small enough for intensive cultivation. Pigs were first slaughtered in 1536; wheat-flour mills date from 1539, by 1549 there were four cane-crushing mills, and the import of sugar from Mexico was beginning to be squeezed out; in 1551 came the first vintage.^[26] Many of the larger enterprises, especially for sugar (which was capital-intensive, with big demands also for labour and land), were run by the Jesuits, who provided continuity of management and economic integration of diverse agro-pastoral activities; like other ecclesiastical entrepreneurs, they were greatly strengthened by mortmain.^[27]

Trujillo, the most populous place between Panama and Lima (it had about 300 householders in 1570), was the most important of the northern Valles or oases, and the only one to adopt from the Indians the use of guano as fertiliser. These Valles were basic to the provisioning of Lima and Callao and the latter's shipping; they had a wide range of production: wheat, maize, barley, sugar, tobacco, cotton; pork, pig and goat hams; fruits, vegetables, olives (not introduced until about 1560), wine. The Valles south of Lima were the more important for vineyards; a flourishing export sprang up, especially in wine—so flourishing, in fact, that the home authorities, initially encouraging, tried to restrict or to prohibit altogether new plantings of both olives and vines, fearing, in Thomas Gage's words, that in ‘those parts…certainly had they but wine, [they] needed not any commerce with Spain.’^[28] In 1600 the doctors of Panama denounced Peruvian wine as a source of fevers, and an obliging Cabildo banned its import; but it could be brought in for- 184 -personal use or as ‘unsolicited gifts’, a large loophole, and a royal veto of 1614 had to be repeated several times in the next twenty years. There was also judicial blending of local wine with that of Spain. Then again the Church needed oil and wine for the Sacraments, and surely Divine needs should prevail.… By such shifts colonial enterprise, often severely restricted, was never completely defeated, until at last the Bourbons wisely abandoned any pretence of prohibition.^[29]

This littoral zone of European-style agriculture extended as far south as the piedmont oases of Arequipa and Moquegua; there was then a great gap, over 1000km of desert and high Andes, until the outliers of Spanish culture were reached: the beautiful central valley of Chile from La Serena through Santiago to Concepcion, and beyond that the outpost of Valdivia. Chile, were not a wild frontier, was provincial in the extreme, but it had a very virile population: it is reported that in one week of the year 1580, sixty mestizo children were born in a garrison of 160 men.^[30] As if to compensate for poverty in minerals (except placer gold, soon exhausted, and copper), the climate and terrain in the central valley were like those of the milder and more agreeable parts of the homeland: Chile was dominated by the hacienda, not the mine. The main crops were maize and the vine, with hemp for cordage; wheat was grown from the first, but its export did not become really important until after 1687, when earthquakes and blight had disrupted much Peruvian agriculture. There was also a large export of hides, charqui or jerked meat for mining rations, and tallow for mining candles.^[31] Finally, fishing had been of great importance in pre-conquest Peru; it was menial, and economically trivial enough to be left largely in Indian hands. But there was of course a large market for smoked and dried fish, some of which was exploited by small Spanish ‘companies’, and the Chilean róbalo and dried eels were famous. The enthusiastic Fr Alonso de Ovalle SJ, to whom all prospects in his native land were pleasing, also draws attention to the value of kelp as food and of powdered starfish as a cure for alcoholism.^[32]

Alongside these agro-pastoral developments, and based on the raw materials they provided, was the manufacturing of minor consumption goods, carried on mainly in small workshops or obrajes. The original Spanish entrants of course included a complement of artisans and, as always on frontiers, these had to be able to turn their hands to anything at all resembling their specialism, especially in munitions of war: ‘even a builder of musical instruments could make wooden powder flasks.’^[33] Initially the home government, and Castilian public opinion, favoured American self-sufficiency, to offset the sharp rise in prices of consumption goods, which was ascribed to the American demand backed by the high purchasing power of successful conquistadores. In 1552 the Cortes of Valladolid demanded the import of foreign textiles and a complete ban on exports, and the last major expression of this consumers' concern was the sending to Peru, in 1559, of Maestro Francisco of Segovia (the leading textile centre of Spain) with a team of weavers, shearers, combers, carders, and dyers. But under Philip II there was a trend towards a- 185 -stricter mercantilism; stricter at any rate in intent, for the many regulations to protect both Indian workers and Spanish suppliers were rarely effective.^[34]

The obrajes were manned, or womanned, mostly by Indians, who after the more or less nominal abolition of repartimiento were held by debt peonage, or simply illegal coercion, this most often at the hands of the corregidores de indios, or local ‘justices’, in alliance with Indian caciques, or chiefs: both parties were supposed to be protectors of the Indians, and both earned an ill name for eager use of their ample opportunities to impose forced labour as a penalty for alleged crimes. An attempt in 1601 to prohibit the employment of Indians, replacing them by Negroes or others, lasted eight years; perhaps some 10,000 Asians (mostly Chinese) may have come to New Spain, over a longer period, and some of these ended as virtual slaves in the obrajes.^[35] Despite efforts at amelioration, conditions in the shops remained abominable throughout colonial times; they survived as an evil necessity.

Obrajes had a wide range geographically—from Guadalajara to Tucuman—and in products, though textiles, woven mostly by Indian women, bulked as the largest single line on almost any index: so soon was set the standard pattern for infant colonial industry in the imperialist world. For the most part the obrajes were devoted to cheap products for the masses—coarse cottons and woollens, blankets, ponchos, with silks in Mexico and some vicuña stuffs in Peru; there were also specialisms such as lamp-wicks for mines, slow-match for arquebuses, and so on. Leather goods probably ranked next to textiles, in output, variety, and geographical spread. Furniture, unless in the form of chests, was obviously too heavy and space-consuming to be generally imported: at first somewhat clumsy and ‘frontier’, colonial woodworking, in all its forms, was to reach very high levels of craftsmanship; but here we are entering the realm of the artisan. Of luxury trades, silversmithing—again hardly likely to be left to the obrajes!—was probably the most important. Nor should printing be overlooked: the first press was opened in Mexico City in 1539.

These various enterprises, but more particularly the agricultural ones, were the basis of a lively coastal and intercolonial trade (below, Ch. 8)—perhaps not the first long-distance trade in the Pacific,^[36] but the first to be linked to world exchanges. It also involved substantial shipbuilding, especially at Realejo and Guayaquil. There was also of course much building, including great cathedrals and palaces, and major public works such as the drainage of the Valley of Mexico undertaken in the 1630s.^[37] Major road-building, however, lagged badly; most routes were merely pack-trails, even the all-important Isthmus crossing. Carreri about 1700 thought it a miracle that he got safely from Acapulco to Mexico by the grandly named Camino de China, while Gage's account of his journey over the windy mountains between Tehuantepec and Chiapas is hair-raising; but there was a cart-road from Mexico City to Zacatecas, some 700km, constructed between 1542 and 1570. In Peru, the Inca ‘roads’ were meant for human porters or llamas, and they ran longitudinally to the mountain grain: invaluable pathways- 186 -for the penetration of the Conquista, they were of much less use in the later mise-en-valeur of the Andean region, and the mining centres had to develop transverse pack-trails to the sea. It was not until the eighteenth century that much was done in the way of up-to-date road-building.^[38]

All these economic activities, important as they were and essential to the working life of the Indies, were overshadowed by the giant: mining.