Real Tribunal General de Minería de Nueva España (1776-1783)
A self-governing corporation of miners in the Americas, erected by royal cédula of 1 July 1776 and codified in 1783: thirty-three territorial deputations electing the deputies who sat in Mexico City, its own court of appeal, its own development bank, and a technical school funded from a duty on its members' own silver. Humboldt thought the representative machinery its best feature; he also recorded the loans it never recovered and the war levies that broke it.
Why this wins its question: Colonial Spanish America is described in general accounts as administered from above; a chartered corporation of colonial producers with elected deputies, its own appellate jurisdiction, its own credit bank and its own engineering school is not part of that picture, and is almost never quoted from its charter. This object binds the institution to the 1783 code and to Humboldt's on-the-spot account, and gives equal room to what the arrangement cost: the unrecovered avíos, the war levies extracted by the crown it served, and the Cortes commission's 1821 verdict on the wreck.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The corporation was created before its code. The miners' own representation asked that they be formed into a body like the merchant consulados, that a Banco de Avíos be established to finance the mines, that a Colegio de Metalurgia be created for practitioners who would build machines, and that a new mining code be drawn up — the establishments to be endowed from the doubled señoreage duty their metals paid. The Council of the Indies was consulted on 23 April 1776, and by royal cédula of 1 July 1776 the King granted the erection of the guild into a formal body.
The resulting code was the Reales Ordenanzas para la dirección, régimen y gobierno del importante cuerpo de la minería de Nueva-España y de su Real Tribunal General, signed at Aranjuez on 22 May 1783 and countersigned by José de Gálvez. The copy read here is the reprint issued at Lima in 1812, in the Casa de Niños Expósitos — the New Spain code still being put into print in Peru three decades later.
As Humboldt found it, the Tribunal was composed of a director, two deputies of the mining body, an assessor, two consultors and a judge presiding over the juzgado de alzadas of mining; thirty-three territorial diputaciones depended on it; the miners sent deputies to those subordinate deputations, and the two general deputies resident in Mexico City were elected from among the provincial ones. The body also kept its own agents at Madrid to deal directly with ministers on mining matters.
Its director was Fausto de Elhuyar, whom Humboldt describes only as a head bearing "un nombre célebre en los anales de las ciencias químicas", naming him in the footnote.
Humboldt judged the representative arrangement the corporation's real achievement: it maintained public spirit in a country whose citizens, scattered over an immense territory, did not sufficiently know that they had interests in common, and it gave the Tribunal the means to raise large sums whenever some great and useful undertaking was in question. He entered two reservations in the same passage — that he wished the director could influence the progress of provincial workings more, and that the miners, "menos zelosos de lo que llaman ellos su libertad", were better instructed in their true interests.
The Tribunal drew more than 200,000 duros a year, the King having granted it at its creation two thirds of the señoreage — a real of silver, an eighth of a peso fuerte, on each mark carried to the mint — out of which it paid its members' salaries, maintained the college, and funded the avíos advanced to miners.
The lending failed. Humboldt records that the avíos were granted "con mas liberalidad que discernimiento": a miner of Pachuca obtained 170,000 pesos at a stroke and the shareholders of the Temascaltepec water mine 214,000, and these advances produced nothing.
The corporation was also drained from Madrid. During the wars with France and England the Tribunal was obliged to make the court a gratuitous gift of 500,000 duros and to lend a further three million, of which 1,400,000 were still unpaid when Humboldt wrote; to meet these extraordinary charges it had to borrow in its turn.
By 1821 the machinery was being reported as failed by Spain's own legislature. A special mining commission of the Cortes, reporting at Madrid on 24 May 1821, set out to examine both the taxes laid on the mines and the special tribunal itself, and found that except for some workings in Zacatecas and Tasco not one mine was being formally worked; that what remained was the scraping of the old wealth above the flood line, with no exploratory work at all; and that the waters were rising while the miners lacked the means to drain them.