[instructor: Robin Grier ] In Part1,
we talked about Spanish in attention to infrastructure and transportation
in the new world.
In Part 2,
we are gonna talk about Mexico, more specifically
Spain introduced an extremely restricted road system in Mexico
Trade between Mexico and Spain was limited to two ports
Veracruz in Mexico
and Seville in Spain
In theory,
a convoy came once a year to bring goods
and take back the silver
By the late colonial period, this happened less and less so.
Spain became more interested in transportation
when a very rich silver mining area was discovered,
stretched over some 400 miles
mainly to the north of Mexico City.
Silver needed to be transported from these mines to Mexico City to be minted
In order to do so, it needed to transport heavy or bulky supplies
including salt, mercury, lead,
firewood and mine timbers
and carry as return cargoes
the silver, sugar and other products of the interior.
In addition, the cargoes needed to be
protected from Indian raids.
particularly from the fierce Chichimeca tribes
in the northern part of the country.
So in response, Mexico developers were referred to as the Carro,
which is a large cart, pulled by up to 16 mules.
Mines were located on a relatively flat plateau
so the officials could build road accessible to wheeled vehicles.
The colonial government was anxious to fuel the expansion of silver mining.
To do so, they helped in several ways.
First, they help pay for the roads
They also ordered all towns in the region to provide mules with free grazing
so that animal transport was relatively cheap.
They also helped to provide security by building fort along the routes
and providing military escort of silver shipments
In the late 17th century, the government lost much of its enthusiasm
for the construction and maintenance of roads.
And by that point, almost all transport went back on the backs of mules,
and the carros were only used within large estates.
The road linking Mexico City to the northern mining towns
was called the "El Camino Real" or the King's Highway
It stretched from Mexico City
all the way up to what is now
northern New Mexico.
On this map, I wanna point out two important ports during the colonial period
One is Veracruz
the other is Acapulco.
We are gonna talk about them in the upcoming slides.
I wanna point out here that
besides El Camino Real,
there were two important roads
in the colonial period.
One went from Mexico City to Veracruz,
and the other one from Mexico City
to Acapulco.
Veracruz was the only legal port
on the Atlantic side of Mexico
that was allowed to engage in international trade with Spain.
Given that, you'd think that the port was of good quality,
and that the road linking Veracruz and Mexico City was also
well maintained and efficient.
Unfortunately, neither of those were true.
The influential German geographer, Alexander von Humboldt
went to Spanish America in the opening years of the 19th century
at the commission of Spanish king to gather information about the region.
He remarked, "the port [is a] bad anchorage among sand banks."
Likewise in 1822, Joel Robert Poinsett
notes "the port is very insecure, It is not only open to this wind. No vessel
is considered secure, unless made fast to rings fixed in the castle wall."
On top of that, the castle wall to which he refers
was on a fort, well out in the port.
So if Veracruz wasn't such a great natural port,
why did the Spanish choose it?
J.H Parry argued in 1982
that originally Cortes seemed to have landed at Veracruz almost by chance,
and he never returned to the East Coast to find any better port.
His original aim
was to find passage to the Pacific,
and once the valley of Mexico was secure,
Cortes renewed his quest for "a strait between the oceans"
or for "harbors which could become bases for Pacific exploration."
The road from Veracruz to Mexico City
was if anything, worse than the port itself.
The road had to go over 2 mountain ranges to reach Veracruz,
and the second was particularly steep.
Humboldt, again, called it "frequently nothing
but a narrow and crooked path one of the most difficult in all America"
David Ringrose, in 1970,
characterised it as
" a perilous mule track".
The road to the Pacific from Mexico City was, if anything, even more difficult.
When the King opened trade with Asia in 1564,
he ordered the construction of a new route between Mexico City and Acapulco.
Until then, the colonial authority has used Huatulco,
a port 500km south of Acapulco.
A pre-Columbian trail has linked it to the city of Oaxaca and then onward
to the Mexico City.
Unlike his negative characterization of Veracruz,
Humboldt had positive things to say about Acapulco,
calling it "one of the finest ports in the known world
and only 280 miles from Mexico City."
On the other hand,
the road was relatively perilous,
travel to Mexico City took about a month's time.
An important bridge constructed in 1574
reduced travel to 6-10 days.
The trail still proved problematic.
It wasn't suitable for wheeled transport until 1927
results of no effort by colonial authorities to develop multiple ports.
It seems that it would have been natural for Huatulco to focus on
trade with South America,
but this did not happen,
in large part because the authorities did not want Mexico trading
with South America.
In 2008, my co-author, Jerry Hough, and I
investigate some of the motivations for why Spain paid so little attention to
transportation in the new world.
We argued that there are several reasons
for Spain's highly restrictive transportation policy in Mexico.
The insistence on a single route from the mines to Mexico City to
one of the two ports, Acapulco or Veracruz,
reflected a fear that silver would be hidden from the tax collector
and smuggled to various places outside of Spain.
The low quality of the roads to the coasts is more difficult to explain.
A path was generally enough for mules carrying silver
which was heavy but relatively small in volume.
But it obviously restricted trading other goods.
Possibly Madrid was trying to make invasion of the heartland more difficult.
In addition, the Mexico City merchant guild, the Consulados,
may have feared competition.
Since the Consulados merchants were defect of customs collectors,
the King may've been glad to support them
against less sufficient merchants who didn't play this role.
In the end, the limitation on the number of ports didn't end smuggling.
The Yucatan Peninsula supplied Mexico with many products and its port
Campeche, was often used by smugglers.
Similarly, the prohibition of trade for South America was poorly enforced.
By all reports, a significant amount of unminted silver flowed from South America
through Mexico to Philippines and China for the purchase of Chinese goods.
Some scholars estimated that in some decades of the 1600s, as much as 40%
of Spanish-American silver was not registered with the tax authorities.
Transcribed by: Yuelin Li Edited by: Bassma Mahmoud