The situados of New Spain — Mexico's treasury as paymaster of Havana, San Juan, Santo Domingo, Florida, Louisiana and Manila
Before any of its own charges were met, the treasury of New Spain paid out more than three million pesos a year to places that did not raise enough revenue to defend or govern themselves: Havana, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Florida, Louisiana, the Marianas and the Philippines. The treasury's own compilers itemised every consignment in 1791 and printed the arithmetic, including the larger sum sent the other way, to Spain.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of colonial Spanish America describe silver moving from Mexico and Peru to Spain, and stop there. The situados are the other half of the flow and almost never appear: three million pesos a year leaving New Spain's treasury, before its own government was paid, for garrisons and civil establishments in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Trinidad, Florida, Louisiana, Guam and Manila, with the Philippine share defined as that territory's fiscal deficit. This object gives the line-by-line figures from the treasury's own 1791 compilation, states the rule by which the deficit was computed, sets the larger remittance to Spain beside it, names the tributary base the money came from, and reports that the printed items do not sum to the printed total rather than quietly repairing the list.
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 compilers state the order of the accounts plainly: after the costs of administration, the purchase of raw materials and particular consignments are taken out of each branch, what remains liquid "para componer el fondo total de este erario" is 8,855,102 pesos, and "el primer descuento que sufre el liquido producto de esta masa comun o erario de Nueva-Espana" is 3,011,664 pesos remitted annually to overseas destinations. The transfer abroad was the first charge on the fund, ahead of the kingdom's own justice, church, magistracy and military costs.
The arithmetic checks exactly and is printed in the volume itself: the 3,011,664 pesos of overseas extractions, "rebajados de los 8.855,102 pesos referidos", leave 5,843,438 pesos for the charges of New Spain. Subtracting the first figure from the second gives that residue to the peso.
The Caribbean consignments are itemised on page XXIV. Havana was to receive 700,000 pesos a year for the subsistence of the armada de Barlovento, the naval squadron of that department; 435,978 pesos went to the pay of the standing army in the island of Cuba; and a further 150,000 pesos a year the king had ordered remitted to that "importante plaza" for the increase of its fortifications. Puerto Rico had a situado of 376,896 pesos for its costs of justice, treasury and war, Santo Domingo 274,893 pesos for the same objects, and Trinidad 20,000 pesos for its establishment.
The same page carries the North American and Pacific consignments. Florida received 66,666 pesos 5 reales 4 granos by resolutions of the junta superior, on account of whatever situado the king might assign, "sin embargo de considerarse necesarios 150,000 ps. para anual dotacion de aquel presidio" as the royal tribunal of accounts had reported — the record therefore states its own shortfall. Louisiana received 537,869 pesos 4 reales 11 granos as a fixed situado, the Mariana Islands 20,137 pesos 4 reales, and the Philippines 25,223 pesos for the year 1789, with a footnote adding that a situado of 250,000 pesos for the Philippines had just been fixed.
The rule governing the Philippine payment is stated on page XXV and is the clearest statement of what a situado was: royal orders provided that what should be remitted from New Spain be the deficit of the royal revenues of that district, "cotejado con el desempeno de sus cargas" — the shortfall between what a territory raised and what its government and defence cost. The situado was deficit financing between treasuries, not a subsidy fixed by favour.
Grouped in the same deduction were payments that did not stay in the Americas at all: 124,000 pesos a year employed in copper for the foundries of Spain, 50,000 pesos to the artillery factory named in the text as Ximenez, and 50,000 pesos to the charge d'affaires of the court in the United Provinces. The overseas deduction was therefore not exclusively an American transfer.
The printed enumeration does not add up to the printed total, and this object records that rather than resolving it. Taken at the figures given on pages XXIV and XXV, the named consignments come to roughly 2.83 million pesos against a stated total of 3,011,664; the gap moves between about 130,000 and 350,000 pesos depending on whether the Philippine figure is read as 25,223 or as the 250,000 of the footnote, and on whether the copper, artillery and diplomatic remittances are counted inside the total or beside it. The list should be read as the principal consignments, not an exhaustive account.
The counterweight is on the same pages and is larger than the situados. Of the 12,523,705 pesos the introduction reckons as left liquid to the treasury, 3,361,328 pesos 7 reales were to be remitted annually to Spain out of the tobacco, mercury and playing-card revenues, with a further 224,000 pesos in copper, the artillery factory and the diplomatic agent. More money left New Spain for the metropolis each year than for Havana, San Juan, Santo Domingo, Trinidad, Florida, Louisiana, the Marianas and Manila together.
What was redistributed had first to be raised, and the introduction names the branches: tribute, alcabalas, pulques, gunpowder, the lottery, saleable and renounceable offices, coinage, and armada y averia. Within the tribute branch alone the compilers list, as charges borne before anything reached the common fund, pensions to various persons perpetual and temporary, the salaries of the company of halberdiers, and the material fabric of the parish churches of pueblos de indios by way of commutation. The money that paid for the walls of Havana was raised in large part from the tributary population of New Spain.
Two branches ran at a loss and the compilers say so: the branches of armada, averia and donativos were so far from leaving any residue for the common mass that the outflows to their destinations caused it an annual deficit of 176,788 pesos, and this is the first discount applied to the 9,031,890 pesos from which the fund is formed, reducing it to the 8,855,102 pesos on which everything else is reckoned. The defence establishment did not pay for itself even in the accounts of the government that ran it.
The witness is the administration's own. Fonseca and Urrutia were royal treasury officials compiling from the Mexican treasury archive by order of the viceroy conde de Revillagigedo, as the title page states, and their work stayed unpublished until a Mexican republican government licensed its printing in 1845. What the figures record is what was ordered and accounted, not independently audited receipts; arrears and non-arrival are outside what this source can show.