New Spain

Politics and institutions

New Spain was less a colony than a crown transplanted: the viceroy at Mexico City ruled in the king's name over audiencias, governors, corregidores and town councils, while the Council of the Indies in Madrid wrote the rules. The kingdom founded in 1521 was raised to a viceroyalty in 1535, when Antonio de Mendoza arrived; his successors balanced peninsular officials against creole elites, and the church — regular orders first, secular clergy and the Inquisition after 1571 — held the parishes, schools and much of the land. The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century tried to make the machine efficient: intendancies in 1786, a standing army, royal monopolies and the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. They also excluded creoles from office and taxed them harder, and when Napoleon's invasion broke the monarchy in 1808 the crisis of legitimacy became a war of independence that ended the viceroyalty in 1821.

Economy and finance

Silver made New Spain the richest possession in the Spanish world. Zacatecas, discovered in 1546, and Guanajuato poured bullion into the royal treasuries; mercury from Almadén amalgamated the ore, and the crown took its fifth before the bars sailed from Veracruz in the Atlantic fleets. Around the mines grew haciendas of wheat, maize, sugar and cattle that supplied the towns; indigenous communities paid tribute and provided rotating labour, while African slaves worked plantations and households. The Manila galleon, inaugurated in 1565, carried American silver to China and returned silk, porcelain and spices to Acapulco, linking Asia to Europe through Mexico. Cochineal, tobacco and cacao added royal monopolies and export income. The eighteenth-century mining boom financed the Bourbon state, but the wealth stayed concentrated, and the wars after 1810 destroyed the credit networks that had held it together.

Society and culture

New Spain was a society of corporations and castas. The crown recognized two republics, that of the Spaniards and that of the Indians, each with its own courts, taxes and municipal institutions; in practice a hierarchy of peninsulars, creoles, mestizos, mulattos and Indians ordered daily life, recorded in the casta paintings of the eighteenth century. Missionaries learned Nahuatl, Otomí and Maya, built monasteries and parish churches, and made the Virgin of Guadalupe — said to have appeared to Juan Diego in 1531 — the common emblem of the colony. The University of Mexico (1551) and the first printing press in the Americas (1539) gave the colony a literate elite, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz made the viceregal court a literary centre. The indigenous population collapsed under smallpox and the epidemics of 1545 and 1576, and the mixing of peoples produced the mestizo society that would inherit the country.

Military and frontiers

New Spain's army was built for frontiers, not for European battlefields. Presidios and garrison towns guarded the silver road north to Zacatecas and the new provinces of the interior; the Chichimeca war of the 1550s–1590s ended less by victory than by settlement, missionaries and subsidies. On the Caribbean coast, Havana, San Juan and Cartagena were fortified against English and French privateers, and the 1762 British capture of Havana exposed the empire's weakness; Madrid answered with militias and a standing army under the Bourbon inspector-general, the Marqués de Rubí, whose inspection of 1766–68 reorganized the northern presidios. The army that fought the insurgency of 1810 was locally raised and creole-officered, and its loyalty cracked: Hidalgo's parishioners marched under the Virgin of Guadalupe, Morelos held the south until 1815, and Iturbide, a royalist colonel, defected in 1821 and marched into Mexico City at the head of the Army of the Three Guarantees.

Foreign relations

For three centuries New Spain was the hinge of the Spanish empire's Pacific and Atlantic diplomacy. The Manila galleon made Acapulco the western terminus of a trade that reached China, and the Philippines were governed from Mexico City until 1821; the same route made New Spain a target for Dutch, English and French raiders, whose attacks along the Caribbean forced the crown to build the fortifications of San Juan and Cartagena. The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 had divided the globe with Portugal, but the Portuguese advance into the Amazon and the Río de la Plata, and the founding of Colonia do Sacramento in 1680, kept the frontier contested. Eighteenth-century dynastic wars brought Havana to Britain in 1762 and Louisiana to Spain in 1763; Spanish exploration of the Pacific northwest reached Nootka Sound, and the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819 fixed the northern border of New Spain with the United States.

Legacy and influence

New Spain's legacy is the map of modern Latin America. Its viceregal administration, its silver peso — the first global currency — and its network of cities from Mexico City to Manila shaped three centuries of world trade. The independence of 1821 produced the Mexican Empire, which dissolved in 1823 into Mexico and the United Provinces of Central America; the borders of the northern presidios became the Mexican-American frontier of 1848. Its institutions survive in the grid-plan town, the parish church, the University and the Spanish language, and its social hierarchy in the inequalities that independence did not undo. The casta order and the colonial extraction of silver and labour remain the frame of Mexican historical memory; Guadalupe remains the nation's patroness, and Mexico City still stands on the drained lake of Tenochtitlan.