INTRODUCTION

The Spanish town of Santiago de León de Caracas was founded in 1567. Located high above the Caribbean Sea in a temperate valley, Caracas flourished early because of its moderate climate and its ideal geographical setting, both near enough to the coast for commerce and yet far enough away to discourage attacks by foreign buccaneers. However, in 1567 the conquistadores who forced the Indian inhabitants of this valley to submit to their will and the authority of the Castilian monarchy were little concerned with climate or geography. In the decades before the foundation of Caracas the most dynamic enterprises on this coast had been the pearl fisheries of the islands of Margarita and Cubagua. The oyster beds in these places played out in the 1520s, and the enterprise was followed by an active slave trade as the natives who had dived for pearls were sold to Panama, where they were employed as carriers in the isthmus crossing. Until at least the 1550s ships carrying Indian slaves passed along the coast in the vicinity of the future settlement of Caracas, and it may have been at this time that the modest potential of the region, perhaps as a source of natives to enslave, attracted the tardy attention of Spanish adventurers.

The first Hispanic settlement in the vicinity of Caracas was established in 1558 by Francisco Fajardo, the mestizo son of a Spaniard and an Indian noblewoman from the island of Margarita. In that year he and a handful of Margariteños settled in a place that they called Panezillo, located some ten leagues east (upwind, or arriba in the contemporary idiom) of the site of the future port of La Guaira. Driven off by indigenous coastal people after a year spent trading along the coast, Fajardo returned from Margarita in 1560 with a larger armed force and, in 1560, with permission of the governor Pablo Collado, he founded a town eight or nine leagues west (abajo ) from Panezillo. This community, named Collado after the governor, would also fail, but not before Fajardo had divided the subju-

gated Indians of the region into permanent labor units, encomiendas , which he distributed to his followers so that they might put the natives to work in any way that they saw fit. These encomiendas were the first created on the central coast.

Yet the push from the seaside settlements of eastern Venezuela went no further west than Collado, and the foundation of the town of Caracas, located about three leagues further downwind and another three leagues south into the mountains away from the coast, would be done by men who came from the other direction. Beginning in the late 1520s, bands of men looking for Indians and gold went south and east from the tiny town of Santa Ana de Coro on the western fringe of present-day Venezuela. Coro was the headquarters of the concession made by Charles V to his Augsburg bankers, the Welsers, and until the early 1540s the exploring and raiding done in the region of the modern boundary of Colombia and Venezuela was directed by Germans: Ambrose Alfinger and Georg Spira. The Welser possession of Venezuela lasted nominally until 1556, but from the late 1540s effective governance was in the hands of Spaniards. A string of successful Hispanic settlements was then established extending eastward from El Tocuyo, founded in 1545 at the crossroads of the north—south axis of the Venezuelan Andean cordillera and the east—west chain of mountains that follows the Caribbean coast to Caracas and beyond. Many of the same individuals participated in the successive creation of El Tocuyo (1545), Barquisimeto (1552), Valencia (1556), and finally Caracas (1567). The peripatetic behavior of these settler—adventurers demonstrates that the ambition of many of them was greater than the resources of the hinterland of towns they founded, but the fact that the towns survived, their native populations divided into encomiendas, indicates that the era of simple exploitation of the Welser period, of Indian slavery and gold hunting, had begun to give way to more permanent colonization.

Located closer to the sea than the residents of other central Venezuelan towns, and with a moderate force of Indian labor, the first permanent settlers of Caracas soon found a place for themselves in a simple commercial network. Linked to the east with Margarita, still a source of pearls and merchandise brought from Spain, Caracas residents traded these items with the interior settlements of tierra adentro , where rough cotton cloth (lienzo ), ham-

mocks, and beeswax could be had. Caracas contributed directly to the exchange with certain foodstuffs that were easily grown or raised in the valley's favorable environment: wheat, maize, pork, beef, and cheese. Yet this modest trade could satisfy only a very few traders, agriculturalists, and ranchers, and until the 1580s the permanent population of the town remained small.

By the second decade following the town's creation Caraqueños had begun to sell significant quantities of wheat to Cartagena, where it was used to supply the Tierra Firme fleet. Sent from Spain to collect the silver of Peru, the fleet waited at Cartagena, the best fortress on the Caribbean coast of South America, until Peruvian silver could be brought up the Atlantic Coast and across the Panamanian Isthmus to Portobelo. Once the silver was in place, the great fair could take place at Portobelo, but that hot and unhealthy site remained occupied only for as long as it took to trade for the silver with the merchandise of Europe. The fleet arrived there ready to depart quickly for Havana and home, having already made repairs and taken on provisions during its stay at Cartagena. In the 1580s, stimulated by the sharply increasing price of wheat in peninsular Spain, Caracas owners of wheat farms known as estancias began to expand production and to transport bread and flour to Cartagena for consumption by the sailors of the silver fleet. Almost insignificant in comparison to the frenzied exchange of Peruvian silver for European commodities on which it depended, the wheat trade to Cartagena nevertheless brought Caracas directly into the commercial world of Spain's American empire, and in the process substantially transformed the character of social relations in the town.

For more than thirty years after 1580, wheat, and an occasional shipment of tobacco or cattle hides, provided Caracas residents with profitable exports. Sometime during the 1620s Caraqueños discovered that cacao beans, which grew on trees indigenous to the Venezuelan coast, could be sold for profit to Indian consumers in Mexico. The market for Caracas cacao proved to be vast, and the cacao trade across the Caribbean early and permanently fixed Caracas as a colony of the silver-rich and economically powerful viceroyalty of New Spain. The cacao trade was directly responsible for the transformation of the labor base in the Caracas province from Indian encomienda to African slavery. Alone of Spain's American

colonies in the seventeenth century, Caracas came early to depend on slave labor. Sustained for several generations by steadily expanding sales of cacao, slavery had a profound effect on the character of Caracas society.

The combined impact of earthquake, crop blight, and reorganization of the silver economy in New Spain caused the Caracas economy to slump from the late 1640s through the 1660s. Profitable exports resumed in the 1670s, and a surging, booming business in cacao production and commerce followed, expanding virtually without a pause until the 1740s. Before the end of the seventeenth century the original cacao groves of most of the coastal valleys had been expanded to the physical limits of those valleys, and the vigorous planting of new haciendas shifted south and east of Caracas to the fertile valleys of the Tuy River and its several tributary streams. The Tuy boom attracted both established planters, who sent their younger and stronger slaves there to plant new haciendas, and more humble Spanish immigrants, especially Canary Islanders, who came to the colony looking to follow the pattern of the earlier settlers and become hacienda owners and slave masters themselves. The cacao prosperity of Caracas also finally attracted the attention of the Bourbon state. Ignored by the crown for more than a century, beginning in the late 1720s the colony was subject to new and comprehensive policies which were designed to increase royal revenues and to acquire much greater quantities of cacao for Spanish and European consumers and markets. The principal instrument for the implementation of these policies was the Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas , Spain's first royally chartered commercial monopoly company.

From its headquarters in San Sebastián in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, the Guipuzcoana Company enjoyed exclusive rights to carry cacao from Caracas to Spain. Reflecting the general autonomy of the Basque provinces, which were united with the crown of Castile only through the person of the king, Company ships could leave for Caracas directly from San Sebastián without paying any duty whatsoever, and, after stopping to pay royal taxes at Cádiz, they could return there to unload.^[1] By condition of its royal license, granted in 1728, only Company ships could carry cacao to Spain, but the traditional trade with New Spain was not altered in any way. The Company was not supposed to compete for cacao car-

goes with those merchants and hacienda owners who preferred to ship their beans to Mexico. Rather, as the Basques who advocated the monopoly had argued in their initial request for a royal charter, Company profits were to come from two other sources: a substantial increase in cacao production, which would naturally follow the commercial stimulus provided by the Company, and a sharp reduction in cacao smuggling, which Company proponents claimed was widespread. To prevent the illicit trade, which would channel cacao by way of the royal monopoly into the legal (and taxable) market, the crown charged the Company with the responsibility of creating an effective coast guard.

In the event, the Guipuzcoana Company did not cause cacao production to increase substantially and, in an effort to increase their portion of cacao exports, aggressive Company factors did interfere with the traditional trade to Mexico. Basque governors who administered the province in the 1730s and 1740s favored the Company and collaborated with their monopolist countrymen, much to the disgust of many Caraqueños of all classes. Discontent reached a crisis in 1749, when Canary Islander cacao farmers, supported surreptitiously by members of the provincial elite, left their fledgling haciendas in the Tuy Valley and marched to Caracas to protest. Although it was not their intention, the protesters became rebels against the authority of the king when the governor fled in fear of the mob and took refuge in the fort at La Guaira. The royal reaction to this threat was swift and the king's justice did not equivocate. First crown troops from both Santo Domingo and Spain overwhelmed the rebels and punished the ringleaders, and then, during the 1750s, a series of military governors established the firm presence of the king in Caracas. Before the end of the decade a brigade of soldiers was permanently quartered in the town, taxation was revamped, and a myriad of lesser policies were enforced to make royal authority more immediately evident. These significant changes, which have until now gone unnoticed by historians, constitute the first steps in what would become a comprehensive effort by the Spanish monarchy to strengthen control of its American empire. That the Bourbon Reforms were originally implemented in the wake of a popular uprising in Caracas in the 1750s, and not in Havana after the English occupation a decade later, is an important new discovery that suggests the need to reconsider more

than one aspect of the history of Spanish America in the eighteenth century.

The rebellion of 1749 and its aftermath mark the end of a distinct epoch in the history of early Caracas. Cacao would continue to be the motor force of the provincial economy until the end of the colonial period, but after midcentury agricultural expansion would be at a much slower pace. The century-long cacao boom was over, and the particular features of Caracas society which such sustained growth had fostered would undergo substantial adjustments.

One of these features, in my opinion the most distinctive aspect of colonial Caracas society, was the continuation in status and wealth of many of its elite families from one generation to the next without decline. It has become conventional wisdom to regard elite status in Spanish America as a volatile condition characterized by "a high rate of change in the composition of the elites on individual and, to some extent, family levels."^[2] Once acquired by individual initiative or good fortune, wealth was difficult to multiply because economic activities either produced low incomes, as in the case of agriculture, or were subject to high risks, which was generally true in commerce, mining, or industry. Equally problematic for longer-term status maintenance, wealth rarely survived the passing of the generations. Castilian inheritance law did not allow primogeniture, and those individuals who died wealthy were obliged to divide their estates more or less equally among their often many heirs. Yet many families of the Caracas gentry were able to preserve their wealth and elite status for, in a good number of cases, as many as six and seven generations. The most famous of all colonial Caraqueños, Simón Bolívar, was a seventh-generation native son, and his case is not exceptional.

The success of the Caracas gentry depended directly on the steadily expanding demand for cacao in two very distinct markets, Mexico and Europe. Also of essential importance was the regular supply to Caracas of African slaves, which, with intermittent but short interruptions, was constant to the late 1730s. The steady demand for cacao and constant supply of slave labor coincided with an abundance of land suitable for cacao haciendas. The combined benefits of cacao markets, slaves, and available land sustained a score of families in local elite status from the middle of the seventeeth century through the first several decades of the eigh-

teenth. The collapse of the slave trade in 1739 and the control over cacao commerce exercised by the Guipuzcoana Company in the 1730s and 1740s brought the prolonged cacao boom to a standstill. Although the second half of the eighteenth century is beyond the scope of this book, the Caracas elite obviously made adjustments that allowed foremost families such as the Bolívar to retain their status during the last decades of the colonial period and to emerge as leaders in the wars for independence. The first phase of these adjustments, which included cooperation with both the Guipuzcoana Company and a forceful royal authority in exchange for assistance in forging a free-labor replacement for slavery, is discussed in the last section of this book.

The research for Early Caracas was done in Caracas archives, in particular the little-used depository of notarial records, the Archivo del Registro Principal, and in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. Much of the analysis is based either on sources that have traditionally formed the documentary core of colonial histories—governors' reports, royal cédulas, actas of the town cabildo, and so forth—or on sources, such as wills and notarial data, that have been used by researchers with increasing frequency and sophistication over the course of the last decade. The method of analysis is for most part traditional as well, formed usually by a close reading of discrete documents in an effort to come to an understanding of the particular problem at hand. In one detail, however, the methodology is sufficiently innovative to merit a comment here.

One obviously distinctive characteristic of colonial Caracas was the fact that the same elite families were able to counter the effects of bipartible inheritance (male and female heirs received an equal share of the estate; no primogeniture) and to thereby retain both wealth and political power for many generations. An understanding of how this longevity was accomplished seemed central to the internal dynamics of this society; therefore, to allow me to follow the Caracas elite over the course of several generations, all the families identified as having been of high status and influence were reconstituted from the first immigrant ancestor who arrived in Caracas in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century to his or her descendants who lived in the city at the turn of the nineteenth century. These family histories confirmed genealogical linkages,

and complete demographic data (birth date, marriage date, death date) were obtained for many individuals.

Studied in isolation, this collective genealogical history of Caracas elite families made it possible to examine such facets of elite social life as strategies of marriage (including nonmarriage). The rapidly expanding literature on colonial elites emphasizes the importance of marriage in the maintenance of elite status. Much is made of the value of marriages of prominent creole women to peninsular Spaniards, who brought both prestige and new commercial contacts to the family. In addition, patriarchal authority is almost universally credited with the direction of family marriage strategies.^[3] Again in these particulars the Caracas elite differed significantly from the Spanish American norm. The several clans that made up the Caracas gentry were decidedly self-contained with regard to marriage. It is clear that marriage between first cousins was common among prominent families, and that strict endogamy increased as a proportion of all elite marriages during the course of the eighteenth century. It is also evident that elite Caracas fathers, because they typically married in their late thirties and died in their middle fifties, were not often alive when their children married. Because mothers did survive to witness the weddings of their children, and for a number of other reasons discussed in the text, it would seem that elite women played a more instrumental part than men in arranging marriages and in several ways directing and determining the membership of the family, or rather the lineage, from one generation to the next. This study attempts to link these patterns to the general course of Caracas economic and social history.

Studied in conjunction with other materials, such as the censuses of haciendas made in 1684, 1720, and 1744, and the household census of Caracas taken in 1759, the reconstituted family data allowed me to trace the generational transfer of agricultural wealth and to make some observations about the matrix of kinship and residence for Caracas elites at midcentury. The results of this form of inquiry appear throughout part II of the text, dealing with the eighteenth century. As an example of the way elite family reconstruction can be used to inform the general history of Caracas society, it is my understanding that many of the Caracas elite were particularly desperate to end the Guipuzcoana Company monopoly by the 1740s because the number of living individuals by

then with claims to elite status was increasing at a much faster rate than the cacao economy. Those elites who were most vociferous in their opposition to the Company usually belonged to large and rapidly expanding families whose members, on a per capita basis, owned fewer cacao trees in 1744 than their parents had held a quarter-century earlier. Unable to provide for their children as they had been provided for, they protested, and some, surreptitiously, even backed the rebellion of the lower classes in 1749.

The terminal date for this history of early Caracas is 1767. It is not entirely satisfactory as an ending point in that no particularly significant event occurred in that year which might be used to mark the end of a precise epoch or a clearly delimited phase in the history of the town and province. Yet it was chosen to suggest that the first two centuries after the foundation of Caracas can be seen as a coherent period. In 1767, after twenty years of protest and repression, elite young men took the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the newly emphatic authority of the Bourbon monarchy, and joined the Company of Noble Adventurers, an honorary king's militia of cavalry created in that year. By that time the elite had come to terms with the Guipuzcoana Company, for more than a decade they had been paying new taxes without protest in support of the contingent of regular army troops quartered in the plaza, and they had begun to make adjustments to the end of the long, often remarkably dynamic, boom in cacao agriculture and commerce. As an example of this adjustment, a long hiatus in slave imports—there was virtually no trade at all from the end of the English asiento in 1739 until the 1780s—obliged elite hacendados to turn increasingly to wage laborers to work their cacao estates.

By the middle of the eighteenth century Caracas had experienced a fundamental change for the middling class of Hispanic residents as well for the elite. For several generations Caracas had been a true frontier where wealth and slaveholder's status awaited the ambitious immigrant, but failure of the 1749 revolt signaled the end of the long bonanza and the closing of opportunity for those who were not already well established as slave and hacienda owners. The reforms of the 1750s, including the vagrancy laws that served to help elites in their search for an alternative to slave labor, provided the mechanisms needed to enforce the new order, which would last for another fifty years.

Finally, the history of revolutionary Caracas lies beyond the scope of this book, but it is worth noting that most of the colony's leaders in the movement for independence were members of families whose elite status of nearly two centuries had not been diminished by the crisis of 1749 and its aftermath. At that time the Caracas elite established a modus vivendi with the Bourbon regime which allowed them two more generations of profit from their haciendas and, along with the profit, significant local prestige and authority. This arrangement lasted until the end of the century, when the markets of the empire once again became inadequate to fulfill the needs and aspirations of the colony's foremost families. From the perspective of the internal dynamics of early Caracas, the primary impetus for independence seems to have come from elites who were again desperate to preserve their traditional place in the local society. Needless to say, the second crisis of the Caracas elite, that of 1810, was resolved in a manner very different from that of the first.

By way of definition: the concept of elite used in this book is based on families, or more exactly family lineages, rather than on individuals. Granted that certain individuals, governors and bishops for example, were given elite status from the moment of their arrival in Caracas, but the primary interest here is the resident, permanent, planter and slaveholding elite. Colonial Caracas was characterized by the long tenure of elite status maintained by a number of families, and this tenure is included here in the definition of elite, in as much as such antigüedad counted for a great deal to early Caraqueños. Therefore, an elite individual, a mantuano as he or she would have been referred to in eighteenth-century Caracas, was someone whose paternal and maternal ancestors in most cases had been in Caracas since the middle of the seventeenth century or earlier, whose male relatives and ancestors served and had served on the town council, and whose family members appear on lists of cacao haciendas taken in 1684, 1720, and 1744. It is my belief that all those colonials who would have been considered mantuanos by their contemporaries have been included in the analyses that are presented in these pages.