Publishing in 1552, Lopez de Gomara, Cortes's secretary, struck a comparison which for two or three centuries did not need much qualification, and is indeed not altogether invalid today:

Over four centuries later, Lynch and Chaunu say much the same thing of the two Viceroyalties in Habsburg times: New Spain is less hostile to European life, with more diverse economic activities (including more manufacturing), and with more and more diverse involvement of Indians in European modes of production.

If in the seventeenth century recession in silver output set in earlier in New Spain than in Peru and was initially more severe, the Mexican recovery under the Bourbons was the more striking: by 1798 New Spain was producing 67 per cent of the American total, an almost exact reversal of the position a century earlier. The single site of Guanajuato, though one of the earliest exploited, was now producing more than Peru or La Plata, which included Potosi. ‘This outstanding achievement rested upon the long-term in-built tendencies of the period prior to 1630′, assisted by a resurgence at Almaden and a Bourbon policy of throwing Habsburg restrictions almost into reverse—for instance, by halving the price of mercury. There were other factors—territorial expansion of mining; a higher level of enterprise and expertise in New Spain, with a greater readiness to accept innovation; official measures such as the cut in mercury prices and replacing the quinto by the diezmo did not produce equivalent results in Peru. Of the longer-term factors in this reversal, one of the most fundamental was the renewed increase of the Mexican Indian population, accompanied by the rise of a class of free mine-workers—mestizos, mulattoes, Indians—whose wages were low but supplemented by a modest share in the product. In Peru the Potosi mita at its height took roughly one-seventh of the adult males of the region between Cuzco and Potosi, perhaps 13,500 men, to work at the mines for one week in three—for the other two they could hire themselves out. Demographic recovery must have been retarded by this disruption of normal life (some ‘journeys to work’ took two months!), and while this ‘massive input of cheap labour’ had enabled Potosi to reach its heights, it was cumbrous and not conducive to enterprise. By the eighteenth century the Toledan mita, though much attenuated, was merely ‘a wearisome anachronism’ subsidising inefficient management.^[67]

We have taken the story of silver forward into the eighteenth century since it brings out the differing roles of New Spain and Peru in ‘Le Pacifique des Ibériques’. It is in keeping with the generally more sophisticated and modernising aspect of the Mexican economy that it acted as a sub-metropolis not only to the Philippines (the Pacific wind circulation would account for that) but to the nominally richer Peru. The latter, much less diversified, had a much higher price level, and when Peru did ‘become enriched with our things’, its exports were primary products—silver first of course, sometimes mercury, then (but a long way after) wine. New Spain exported consumption goods, not just metals and foodstuffs, of her own making, as well as European re-exports; and Acapulco- 196 -was the great entrepôt for Asian trade, though the initiative, the control, and the lion's share of the profits remained with merchants of Mexico City.^[68]

Geopolitically, the maritime relationships of the two Viceroyalties were paradoxical. Physically, much of the Pacific littoral of New Spain is a rather narrow coastal plain, either semi-desert or tropical rainforest, backed (often not very far back) by rugged mountains: the Pacific States of modern Mexico have roughly 30 per cent of its area and only 19 of its people. The country as a whole looked to the Atlantic (despite the difficult and unhealthy Gulf coast) and was of course in far readier touch with the metropolis than was Peru. Acapulco itself was isolated, a town more than half deserted except when the Galleon was in, and the rest of the seaboard was (as much still is) economically backward.^[69] By contrast, the coastal departments of Peru have 20·5 per cent of its area, 55·5 of its population; the desert coastal plain is traversed by the fertile irrigated Valles. Doubtless the Andean plateau weighed more heavily in the economy in colonial times; but the littoral was ‘enriched by our things’ and had half a dozen busy ports, even excluding Guayaquil and Valparaiso, in contrast to the narrow concentration on Acapulco. And it held Pizarro's capital, by far the nearest rival to Mexico City as a centre of government and culture; although the younger in creation, Peru was recognised as the superior Viceroyalty in status. Beside Lima and Callao, Acapulco was nothing. This active Pacific seaboard was separated from the Atlantic by the immensities of the Andes and the Amazonian selvas.

Yet the oceanic Pacific played a greater part in the life of New Spain than of Peru; conversely, what was essentially thalassic navigation, in the nearer Pacific waters, played a much larger role in Peru, whose external relations (when not with Pacific New Spain—a trade carried on even when officially barred) were with the Atlantic, whether legally by Panama or illicitly by Buenos Aires. Apart from the voyages of Mendaña and Quiros, which in effect came to nothing, Peru's share in truly oceanic enterprise was limited to one or two attempts to get into the Asian trade:^[70] these, and the thalassic shipping to Panama and Acapulco or Realejo. The rest was no more than an active cabotage, from Guayaquil or Manta to Valparaiso and Concepcion. In contrast, New Spain played the key role in establishing the trans-Pacific link with Manila, taking over where Old Spain had failed with Loaysa; and through the Galleon and Macao trade on one hand, Vera Cruz and the flota on the other, she spanned two oceans, linked three continents. Once again, the motor force in all this, and much else, was silver.