Company Debts and Sugar Income

The period 1720 to 1744 marks a significant phase of generational change in each of the three families: individuals who were children

or young adults in 1720 had married and were parents of children of their own by 1744. In each case there is a discernible and different pattern of gross per capita income from cacao agriculture, estimated on the basis of the number of people in each family at each date, the number of trees owned by family members, and the current price of cacao in 1720 and 1744. The Blanco Uribe experienced declining per capita cacao income, the Bolívar Aguirre remained relatively steady, and the Palacios benefited from their increased holdings. For the Blanco Uribe the worsening situation was made more difficult because the numerous family was largely dependent on cacao. In 1752 Alejandro Blanco Uribe earned 1000 pesos annual renta from a sugar trapiche in the Caracas region; a second mill, also valued at 1000 pesos, belonging to "los Blanco Uribe " was located in the Tuy. José Bolívar Aguirre, his large family matched by a proportionate increase in cacao property from 1720 to 1744, had a 1000-pesos-renta trapiche in the Aragua Valley.^[43] Neither of these sugar properties produced significant income, but the Palacios, who had prospered in cacao during the 1720s and 1730s, were also protected from the vagaries of cacao exports and prices by their several trapiches, which produced sugar exclusively for the local Caracas market. They owned three profitable mills in the hinterland of the town: Feliciano Palacios with one of 5000 pesos annual renta; his son José Palacios Lovera, whose trapiche produced 4000 pesos annually; and his eldest son by his second marriage, Feliciano Palacios Gil, with a mill of 2000 pesos renta.

Together with more than 20,000 pesos of gross cacao income, these 11,000 pesos of sugar income brought the per capita income, at midcentury, of Feliciano Palacios and his children and grandchildren to about 1500 pesos per year. By comparison, the 2000 pesos renta received from the two trapiches that belonged to the Blanco Uribe did not go far toward raising the per capita income of the thirty-six individuals who would have stood to take some benefit from them. The combined cacao and sugar per capita income for the Blanco Uribe siblings and their children can be estimated at about 450 pesos. For the Bolívar Aguirre kin the additional income from sugar was similarly slight; 1000 pesos per annum from the Aragua sugar trapiche, divided among eleven immediate kin, would have brought the per capita gross income up from the cacao estimate of 622 pesos to about 710 pesos.

Counting all individuals, adults and children alike, in families at comparable stages in the generational cycle, the 1500 pesos per capita gross annual income of the Palacios and the 450 pesos income of the Blanco Uribe kin would probably have placed them at the upper and lower ends, respectively, of the elite income spectrum in midcentury Caracas. More important for the protest written against the Guipuzcoana Company in 1744 and the much more serious uprising that took place beginning in 1749, is the observation that such income was, in the Palacios case, significantly more than had been gotten in 1720, and, in the Blanco Uribe case, much less. This difference was critical because wealth and social status of the kin group depended on the expansion of their cacao estates, which required acquisition of both land and slaves at a rate at least equal to the generational increase in number of family members. The evidence is that by the 1740s their large families had taken some of the well-established Caracas elite beyond a critical conjuncture, at which they were no longer able to plant enough cacao to keep their per capita income at levels attained a generation earlier.

The evidence also suggests that at midcentury families in straitened circumstances such as the Blanco Uribe had acquired debts that were substantial when considered in light of their declining income and dependency on cacao. In isolation, information about an individual's indebtedness, such as one finds in a last will and testament, cannot be taken as a measure of the economic health of that individual's estate. If income is also known, however, the proportion of debt to income does offer a means to take the pulse of productive property.

One mantuano whose family was definitely not in economic difficulty was Feliciano Palacios, and he had more debt with the Guipuzcoana Company than most other Caracas residents. In 1740 he received several slaves from the Company factor on credit, and in 1744 his obligation to the monopoly was 6218 pesos. His son José had also borrowed, and together they owed 7108 pesos. Four of the Blanco Uribe siblings, all of whom signed the 1744 protest, had gotten credit against future payment in cacao beans from the Company: Alejandro Antonio owed 468 pesos in 1744, Miguel owed 501, Cornelio Blanco was the major debtor of the family with an obligation of 2124 pesos, and María Josefa owed 24 pesos for merchandise she had received. The total Blanco Uribe debt to the

Guipuzcoana Company was 3117 pesos. Of the members of the third kin group considered, only José Bolívar had contracted a debt with the Company, and he owed a modest sum, 654 pesos.

What is most significant about this indebtedness is that although the Palacios owed almost one-quarter of their estimated gross annual income (7108 of 31,000 pesos), the Blanco Uribe owed about one-fifth of their collective annual income (3117 of 16,200 pesos), and the Bolívar Aguirre owed less than one-tenth of theirs (654 of 7810 pesos), both the Palacios and the Bolívar Aguirre could have easily paid their Guipuzcoana loans with one year's sugar income (Palacios: 11,000 pesos of sugar income and 7108 pesos of debt; Bolívar Aguirre: 1000 pesos of sugar income and 654 pesos of debt), while the Blanco Uribe (2000 pesos of sugar income and 3117 pesos of debt) could not. Unless they could ship in the tercio buque to New Spain, the Blanco Uribe were, in the last analysis, directly dependent on the declining price paid by the Company for their cacao beans, both to pay for standing obligations and to finance expansion of cacao haciendas that were already unable to match the cacao earnings of the previous generation. Perhaps understandably then, while the Palacios and the Bolívar Aguirre remained quiet, the Blanco Uribe and dozens of Caracas mantuanos in similar circumstances, their present well-being and several generations of elite social status at risk, first made formal and legal protest to the king. When that brought no relief, they offered their clandestine support to men of lesser status with even more at stake who were willing to risk their lives in order to rid the colony of the Guipuzcoana monopoly.