Obrajes and the Industrialisation of Colonial Latin America

Popular understanding of Latin America’s economic past holds that local industry was systematically discouraged by ‘mercantilist’ policies throughout the colonial era. This reading of the colonial experience, which finds echoes in a sizable body of writing with scholarly pretensions, has been sometimes construed as part of the reason for the region’s inability to industrialise successfully during the nineteenth century. As an economic counterpart of the political proposition that the roots of republican-era instability lay in the crown’s proscription of local participation in governmental processes, the view has the appeal of explanatory symmetry. And for those, in Latin America and elsewhere, enthralled by the leyenda negra, it has the additional advantage of placing the onus for national economic and political inexperience on the misguided policies of Iberian rulers. Yet, the falsity of this version of economic history has long been recognised in serious scholarship, notwithstanding the fact that proscriptive decrees can indeed be found among the voluminous economic legislation of Spain and Portugal and that it is certainly the case that Spanish America and Brazil seem to have been ill prepared to cope with the problems of the industrial age.