Reglamento y aranceles reales para el comercio libre de España a Indias (1778)
The rulebook that widened Spain's American trade beyond the old fleet system, opening thirteen ports in Spain and the islands to more than twenty in America and abolishing the shipping duties of the 1720 project outright. Read from the Madrid sheets of 1778, it also names its own limits in the same voice: every hull reserved to the king's own subjects, Venezuela left with the Caracas company, and New Spain kept outside the concession altogether.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the comercio libre of 1778 run on a paraphrase, that Spain opened its American trade, and they carry the exceptions, when they carry them at all, as a footnote about New Spain joining in 1789. Here the operative clauses are transcribed from the Madrid sheets of Pedro Marin with the printed page and the marginal heading beside each: the thirteen European ports and the twenty-odd American ones by name, the article reserving every hull to the king's own subjects, the parenthesis that keeps Venezuela with the Caracas company, and the sentence in article 6 that puts New Spain outside the concession and offers it the mercury registers instead. The achievement and its limits come from the same document, which is what makes either of them checkable.
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 document is a royal cedula printed as a book. Its title page reads "REGLAMENTO Y ARANCELES REALES PARA EL COMERCIO LIBRE DE ESPAÑA A INDIAS de 12. de Octubre de 1778", with the imprint "MADRID. En la Imprenta de Pedro Marin", and the text closes at printed page 262 with the subscription "Dada en San Lorenzo el Real a doce de Octubre de mil setecientos setenta y ocho. = YO EL REY. = Don Josef de Galvez", followed by the line "Es copia de la original. Galvez". The sentence immediately before the date forbids the cedula to be reprinted "sin mi especial permiso despachado por el Ministerio Universal de Indias".
The stated motive, in the crown's own words on printed page 1 under the marginal heading "Motivos de esta concesion", is that "solo un Comercio libre y protegido entre Españoles Europeos, y Americanos, puede restablecer en mis Dominios la Agricultura, la Industria, y la Poblacion a su antiguo vigor". That is the king describing his own policy, and it is quoted here as such rather than as a finding about what followed.
The preamble dates its own steps. A decree and instruction of 16 October 1765 had opened several peninsular ports to the Islas de Barlovento, and that concession "luego se fue estendiendo a otros parages de America con la experiencia de sus ventajosos efectos"; a royal decree of 2 February 1778 widened it to the provinces of Buenos Aires and the kingdoms of Chile and Peru; and the present cedula brings in "los Reynos de Santa Fe y Goatemala". The opening of 1778 was the last stage of a thirteen-year sequence, not a single act.
Article 1 fixes who may own the ships, and it is the first limit on the word libre: every vessel employed in this trade must belong "enteramente a mis Vasallos sin participacion alguna de Extrangeros", the owners to prove it before the Jueces de Indias of the respective enabled ports, whether the hull was of Spanish or of foreign build.
Two provisions on printed page 6 price the policy. Whoever builds a merchant ship of three hundred tons or more is granted "por via de premio la rebaxa de UNA TERCERA PARTE de los derechos que adeude en su primer viage a Indias" on the goods he ships on his own account; and article 3 requires the captains, masters, sea officers and two thirds of the sailors to be Spaniards or naturalised in Spain or the Indies, allowing the remaining third to be made up of foreign Catholics.
Article 4 names the enabled ports on the European side - Sevilla, Cadiz, Malaga, Almeria, Cartagena, Alicante, Alfaques de Tortosa, Barcelona, Santander, Gijon and Coruña on the peninsula, with Palma and Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the islands of Mallorca and the Canaries. Thirteen doors, where the fleet system had in practice left the trade to one.
The island concession is narrower than the peninsular one, and the text says so on printed page 8: the natives of those islands may load in their registers only "las producciones y manufacturas proprias de las mismas Islas, con absoluta prohibicion de conducir generos Extrangeros", unless their vessels come to take such goods on at one of the enabled ports of Spain.
Article 5 lists the American ports of destination: San Juan de Puerto Rico; Santo Domingo and Monte-Christi in the Isla Española; Santiago de Cuba, Trinidad, Batabano and la Habana in Cuba; the two of Margarita and Trinidad; Campeche in the province of Yucatan; the Golfo de Santo Tomas de Castilla and the port of Omoa in Guatemala; Cartagena, Santa Marta, Rio de la Hacha, Portovelo and Chagre in Santa Fe and Tierra Firme; Montevideo and Buenos Aires on the Rio de la Plata; Valparaiso and la Concepcion in Chile; and Arica, Callao and Guayaquil in Peru and the coasts of the South Sea. A parenthesis in the middle of the list withholds four of them, "exceptuando por ahora los de Venezuela, Cumana, Guayana, y Maracaybo concedidos a la Compañia de Caracas sin privilegio exclusivo", so a chartered company's ground stayed outside the opening.
Article 6, under the marginal heading "Derechos abolidos", grants entire freedom from the duties of "PALMEO, TONELADAS, SAN TELMO, EXTRANGERIA, VISITAS, RECONOCIMIENTOS DE CARENAS, HABILITACIONES, LICENCIAS para navegar" and the other charges and formalities of the project of 1720, which it revokes. The same article then removes the largest American economy from the concession: the king reserves to himself "formar el correspondiente para el Comercio y negociacion con la Nueva-España", and permits only that from the immediate year 1779 the annual mercury registers may carry the produce and manufactures of Spain to Vera-Cruz at the same reduced or exempt rates. New Spain was not inside the free trade of 1778, and the printed text is where that is stated.
The closing address on printed page 261 shows the machinery the rules were handed to: mayors and ordinary judges, royal officials, administrators of the customs and other revenues, the Diputacion General del Reyno, the Sociedades Economicas, the Consulados de Comercio, and all vassals "de estos Dominios, y los de Indias, e Islas Filipinas de qualquiera dignidad, estado, y condicion que sean".
This entry is bound to the pages actually opened, not to the whole book. The volume runs to 262 printed pages of cedula followed by tariff schedules of valuations and duties, and the sumario at its front lists more than fifty numbered articles; this run read the sumario, the preamble, articles 1 to 7 and the closing subscription. Nothing here should be taken as a summary of the articles not named above.
The document is a rulebook and a tariff, not a report of results. It states which ports may trade, who may own a ship, which duties are abolished and what valuations will be charged; it carries no return of tonnages, prices or revenue before or after 1778. Whether the opening enriched the American provinces, or drew their trade further into peninsular hands, is a question these sheets cannot answer, and no source reachable for this entry measured it.