Renta del tabaco de Nueva España: the crown monopoly that became the largest payroll in the Americas, 1764-1790
A royal cédula of 13 August 1764 made tobacco a crown monopoly in New Spain. Planting was banned outside three districts, the independent cigar trade was extinguished by 1775, and by 1788 the branch paid 17,256 people, 12,028 of them factory hands. Its own accounts give 110.8 million pesos gross and 52.4 million net to 1790. The republic that replaced the empire kept the monopoly: its finance minister told Congress in 1829 there was nothing to put in place of it.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the Bourbon tobacco monopoly reach it through the fiscal literature, as a line of revenue in the reform of the Indies, and its workforce appears at best as an aside about cigarreras. The numbers here are quoted from the branch's own closing accounts, opened page by page: the count of 12,028 factory hands and 17,256 people paid by a single revenue in 1788, the payroll total of 499,817 pesos with its widows' pensions, and a twenty-five-year series of gross, cost and net whose totals were checked to subtract before use. The same pages carry the price of it — planting forbidden everywhere but Córdoba, Orizava and Teuxitlan by an instruction of July 1764, a colonial junta's decision to free the trade overruled from Madrid, and the private cigar shops extinguished by 1775 — and the 1829 ministry report closes the account by admitting the republic kept the monopoly because it had nothing to put in its place.
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 monopoly was decreed from Spain and justified by the cost of defending the Indies. The compilation written for the viceroy Revillagigedo records that the expense of the troops and militias raised "para su conservacion y defensa", and of works in "diversas islas y plazas" to put them beyond invasion, obliged the king to issue a new real cédula dated at San Ildefonso on 13 August 1764, declaring that there was no prince who did not have tobacco monopolised in his dominions, that its product could cover the increased costs, and that monopolising it "en polvo como en rama" was the "mas oportuno, suave, util y conveniente" means. The same passage notes that the plan had been urged in repeated earlier orders because tobacco "no es necesario á la vida humana", and that Peru and Buenos Aires already had it.
The first act of the monopoly was a prohibition on growing. Among the measures taken to establish it, the compilation states, was "la prohibicion general de la siembra de esta planta en todas las jurisdicciones y parajes donde se cosechaba", excepting only Córdoba, Orizava and Teuxitlan, which the real instrucción of 30 July 1764 named as sufficient to cover the kingdom's consumption. Growers at Tepic, Compostela, Jalapa, Songolica and Tehuacán among other places had their standing crops bought in during 1765 and were then out of the trade. A monopoly that would employ thousands began by closing a livelihood to everyone outside three jurisdictions.
The independent cigar makers were extinguished by stages, and the crown overruled its own colonial board to do it. A bando of 17 March 1766 barred traders and shopkeepers from the trade; juntas held on 11 December 1766 and 14 February and 5 March 1767 resolved to permit manufacture and sale freely to all and to bar the renta's own factories from it; the viceroy marqués de Croix suspended those resolutions, and the king disapproved them by real orden of 24 October 1767, ordering instead that manufacture be allowed only to cigarreros already of that trade, that no licences be issued for new cigarrerías, and that estanquillos on the renta's account be substituted for them. The bando of 12 February 1768 published this, and the compilation records that the "absoluta estincion de cigarrerías" took effect in Mexico at the beginning of 1775.
The scale of employment is stated by the branch's own accountants and is the figure this object exists to put on the record. After listing every salaried post in the kingdom, the compilation adds that this number of persons, "agregado... á doce mil veintiocho mandones, jornaleros y elaborantes de la fábrica de cigarros, establecidos en la renta", gives "el total de diez y siete mil dosciento cincuenta y seis individuos empleados que se pagan por ella" — 12,028 manual workers and 17,256 people in all on one revenue branch's payroll, which leaves 5,228 in salaried posts.
The salaried establishment was printed post by post with its pay. A statement given by the contaduría general of the branch on 20 September 1788 lists, for the capital alone, a dirección general of four persons at 8,600 pesos and a contaduría general of twenty-eight at 26,600, and the account closes at a total of 499,817 pesos 2 reales 8 granos. The same closing pages carry pensions: life pensions of 400 and 365 pesos to Doña Salvadora de Moya and to Doña María Tomasa de Acosta, widow of a factor of the renta at Córdoba, granted by royal orders of 10 April 1782 and 23 February 1784, and jubilaciones to two former officers, one on a third of his salary. A fiscal monopoly was also, for its own servants, a pension fund.
What the crown took is printed as a year-by-year series and can be checked. The table "Productos y gastos de esta renta, desde su establecimiento hasta el año de 1790" gives gross value, costs and net for each year from 1766 to 1790 and totals 110,797,358 pesos gross, 58,360,284 in costs and 52,437,074 net; the three totals subtract correctly. The net rose from 239,097 pesos in the first year to 3,397,965 in 1790, and gross value passed six million pesos from 1781. Rather more than half of what smokers paid went back out as the cost of running the monopoly, which is the arithmetic behind the payroll in the preceding claims.
The monopoly outlived the empire because its successor could not replace it, and said so in print. The Mexican finance ministry's report to Congress for the economic year 1829-30 states that of the revenues assigned to the union, apart from the maritime customs, those of the capital, tobacco and the contingente, the rest are "casi insignificantes", and that "la renta del tabaco ecsiste porque hay necesidad de sus productos y falta de medios de sostituirla con otra contribucion" — adding that the monopoly subsists "con él todos los inconvenientes anecsos" and asking whether it is not sad that it exists at the minimum of its products rather than the maximum. The minister argued that the federation must either be handed "el ramo de tabacos" or given a substitute tax, and preferred the first.
The republic inherited the monopoly's geography intact. Appendix table Nº 12 of the same report, "Cálculo de las ecsistencias de tabaco que resultaron en fin de junio de 1828", counts stocks by factoría at Orizaba (29,149 tercios), Córdova (9,499 tercios of the harvests of 1826 and 1827), Veracruz, the almacenes generales of Mexico City, the fábrica de puros y cigarros of that city and the villa de Guadalupe, reaching 7,949,272 net pounds. The three growing districts named in 1764 were still the growing districts sixty-four years and one revolution later.
What this evidence carries and what it does not should be stated. Both sources are administrations reporting on themselves: the 1791-1793 compilation was written by two royal accountants at the order of the viceroy who commissioned it and printed in 1849, and the 1829 memoria is a ministry addressing the legislature that funded it. Together they establish the founding instruments and their dates, the prohibition on planting, the extinction of the private trade, the size of the payroll, and the gross and net figures to 1790. They do not establish what the workers were paid, what the growers of the three privileged districts received against what they had earned in a free market, how much tobacco moved as contraband, or what happened to the cigarreros whose shops were closed between 1766 and 1775.