{ "id": "reglamento-del-comercio-de-filipinas-1734", "type": "entity", "name": "Real cedula of 8 April 1734: the reglamento of the Philippines trade with New Spain", "summary": "The decree that lifted the ban on Chinese silks at Acapulco and fixed the Manila permission at 500,000 pesos out and a million back, printed in full in the Mexican treasury's own compilation. The reasons the crown records for reversing itself are the interesting part: the duties on those goods paid the subsidy sent to the Philippines and the Marianas, and the poor of New Spain wore Chinese cloth because they could not afford Spanish cloth.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "pacific", "trade", "new-spain", "philippines", "law", "silver", "spanish-empire", "fiscal-history" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "manila-galleon" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "spanish-real-global-currency" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "casa-de-contratacion" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "casas-de-moneda-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "recopilacion-de-leyes-de-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "real-compania-guipuzcoana-de-caracas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "reglamento-de-comercio-libre-1778" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "situados-de-nueva-espana" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "sangleyes-de-filipinas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "seda-de-la-nueva-espana" } ], "questions": [ "What did the real cedula of 8 April 1734 do to the Manila galleon trade?", "Why did Spain allow Chinese silks into New Spain after prohibiting them?", "What was the situado sent from Mexico to the Philippines and the Marianas?", "How large was the permission carried by the Manila galleon?", "Did ordinary people in colonial Mexico wear Asian cloth?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The text used here is tomo IV of the Historia general de Real Hacienda, the compilation of royal orders drawn from the Mexican treasury archive by Fabian de Fonseca and Carlos de Urrutia. Its opening leaf carries the superior oficio de aprobacion, in which the ministers of the treasury report that they have nothing to add to the compilers' chronological description and find the notices of its origin, progress and present state fully circumstanced - signed \"Mexico, 15 de Diciembre de 1792. - El conde de Revillagigedo. - Sres. D. Fabian de Fonseca y D. Carlos de Urrutia.\" The chapter that concerns the Pacific is headed Caja de Acapulco, and it prints the royal cedulas rather than summarising them.", "sources": [ "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The decree printed there closes \"Fecha en Buen Retiro, a ocho de Abril de mil setecientos treinta y cuatro. - Yo el rey. - Por mandato del rey nuestro senor. - D. Juan Ventura de Maturana.\" It is addressed to the marques de Casa Fuerte, viceroy and captain general of New Spain and president of the audiencia of Mexico, to the audiencia and its fiscal, to the treasury officials of Mexico and of Acapulco, to D. Fernando Valdez Tamor, governor and captain general of the Philippines and president of the audiencia of Manila, to that audiencia, its fiscal and the treasury officials of Manila, and to the archbishop of Manila - a single instrument binding two viceregal capitals on opposite sides of the Pacific.", "sources": [ "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "Its operative decision is a reversal. The king revokes the orders his viceroy had given to Manila in March 1732 and sets aside the cedula of 27 October 1720 \"en que prohibi la conduccion de tejidos de seda\", and resolves \"aumentar la permision hasta en cantidad de quinientos mil pesos de principal, y un millon de pesos de retorno, sirviendo esta mi real deliberacion de reglamento fijo, desde ahora para en adelante, en el trafico y comercio de Filipinas con la Nueva Espana\". The earlier figures are stated in the same document: the cedula of 12 August 1702 had allowed 300,000 pesos of employment in the Philippines and 600,000 of return, with the annual galleon's duties at Acapulco regulated at 100,000 pesos.", "sources": [ "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "Article 2 grounds the permission in a right rather than a favour: \"Atendiendo al derecho que tienen los naturales y habitantes de las islas Filipinas para comerciar con el reino de Nueva-Espana, y siendo justo no negarles el comercio con la China\", and because the islands cannot otherwise subsist on what they themselves produce, the king permits the Philippine trade to send 500,000 pesos of principal each year in the galleon that sails \"por el situado de ellas\" and to return a million pesos in it. The annual subsidy from the Mexican treasury and the annual cargo travelled in the same hulls, which is why the two questions could not be decided apart.", "sources": [ "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "Article 3 changes how the cargo was to be assessed, and the change is administrative rather than commercial. Valuation by piece is abolished and the opening of crates and bales forbidden; instead each shipper must present a factura at the contaduria of Manila within an assigned term and swear a solemn oath that the goods are his, that the invoice contains no more than it states, and that nothing in it belongs to residents of New Spain or to any other person barred from the trade. A declared and sworn manifest replaced a physical search.", "sources": [ "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The same chapter prints the regime that was being undone, and it was severe. An earlier order recited there limits the cargo from the Philippines to Acapulco to 300,000 pesos employed only in \"oro, canela, elefantes, cera, loza, clavo, pimienta, cambayas, lienzos pintados, chitas, zarazas, gasas, lampotes y mantas de hilado, y seda floja y en rama hilada, jarcias\", forbids silk textiles by name down to stockings, ribbons and handkerchiefs, and punishes contravention with forfeiture, three times the value divided in thirds between the royal fisc, the judge and the denouncer, and \"destierro perpetuo de las Indias\"; the seized cloth, once valued so the triple penalty could be levied, was to be burned \"irremisiblemente\", no other means being considered fit to stop so repeated a disorder. The same order requires that two ships of 500 tons each, and not one alone as had been done until then, carry the trade and the situado.", "sources": [ "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The fiscal argument the crown records against prohibition is that the prohibition would defund the subsidy. The representation printed in the chapter states that \"con los derechos que rinden los espresados generos, se puede remitir a las espresadas islas Filipinas y a las Marianas, el situado, cuyo importe en defecto de ellos se habra de satisfacer de mi real hacienda, en las cajas de esa ciudad\" - the Acapulco duties on Asian goods paid the annual remittance to Manila and the Marianas, and without them the Mexico treasury would have to find it from revenues already stretched. The royal treasury is also said to lose the ten per cent charged on the silver landed when the galleon returned.", "sources": [ "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "The social argument is the one that is almost never quoted, and it is on the record in the crown's own paper. Prohibiting Chinese cloth would fall on the poor: the inhabitants of New Spain, \"siendo tan escesivo el numero de ellos\", are \"no menos lastimosamente comprendidos, respecto de ser su regular vestuario la ropa de China, por lo comodo de su precio y no poderlo hacer los pobres (como quisieran) de la de Espana, por mas subido\" - Spanish cloth being better and longer-wearing, and out of reach. The document adds that the poverty which made them buy Chinese cloth would, if it were withdrawn, show itself in nakedness and in the thefts and offences that follow.", "sources": [ "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The same page divides the kingdom by who wanted which ship. The arrival of a fleet from Spain \"es celebrado de los mercaderes ricos que llaman de almacen, y son los que hacen empleos de su carga; pero que la mayor parte de ese reino, desea con mayor eficacia la nao de China, y que si se dilata su llegada, ocasiona muchos clamores y sentimientos.\" The Atlantic convoy served the wholesale houses; the Pacific ship served everyone else, and its lateness was a public grievance.", "sources": [ "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "Two further reasons are recorded, and they show the mixed motives honestly. One is missionary and imperial: enforcing the prohibition would bring \"el descaecimiento de la religion\" in the islands and force the Spanish families who sustained the settlements to abandon them, since the permitted goods gave them no living. The other is circumstantial: the first news of the galleon's arrival in that season came together with a report of \"lastimoso universal lamento, miseria y consternacion\" in the islands, from a plague of locusts and extreme want of the rice that was their principal food. The decision of 1734 was taken with a famine in the balance.", "sources": [ "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "What this evidence is, and is not, should be said plainly. It is the text of a royal decree and of the representations behind it, printed from the Mexican treasury's own files by officials working for the viceroy who commissioned the compilation. It is strong evidence of what was decreed on 8 April 1734, of the figures fixed, and of the reasons the crown chose to put on paper. It is not evidence that the reglamento was obeyed, that the permitted values matched the cargoes actually carried, or that the situado arrived. Nothing here measures the contraband the same documents keep legislating against, and the silver that made all of it possible was mined in New Spain under conditions this chapter has no occasion to describe.", "sources": [ "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "primary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of the Manila galleon reach the 1734 reglamento, if at all, as a number: the permission raised to 500,000 and a million pesos. The document itself is here, read from the compilation the Mexican treasury made of its own orders, with its dating clause at Buen Retiro, the two audiencias it binds, and the sworn-invoice rule that replaced searching the crates. And with the reasoning the number conceals - that the Acapulco duties on Asian goods paid the subsidy to Manila and the Marianas, that the ordinary people of New Spain were clothed in Chinese cloth because Spanish cloth was beyond them, and that the fleet gratified the wholesale houses while most of the kingdom waited for the nao de China. Set beside the burning of seized silk and the perpetual banishment the earlier order prescribed, that is a fuller and more useful account of how the Pacific trade was actually governed than either the romance or the indictment.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-11", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/reglamento-del-comercio-de-filipinas-1734", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/reglamento-del-comercio-de-filipinas-1734.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Real cedula of 8 April 1734: the reglamento of the Philippines trade with New Spain", "description": "The decree that lifted the ban on Chinese silks at Acapulco and fixed the Manila permission at 500,000 pesos out and a million back, printed in full in the Mexican treasury's own compilation. The reasons the crown records for reversing itself are the interesting part: the duties on those goods paid the subsidy sent to the Philippines and the Marianas, and the poor of New Spain wore Chinese cloth because they could not afford Spanish cloth.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/reglamento-del-comercio-de-filipinas-1734", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-11", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Historia general de Real Hacienda, tomo IV", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=cj5KAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA488" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Real cedula of 8 April 1734: the reglamento of the Philippines trade with New Spain" } }