Sales Tax Excesses. Mining and the Defense of Commercial Monopoly in 18th Century Mexico

This text reveals the complexity of corporate conflicts between merchants and the royal treasury over a secret sales tax fund discretionally administered by the merchants’ guild that was discovered thanks to a conflict between the Basque and Montañes merchant factions. The text examines the importance of this corporate group and its source of income in supplying banks with silver, examining how these merchants controlled the supplies to Mexico’s mint and, therefore, the market of silver currency. The beneficiaries of the fund were grouped in the Tagle-Valdivieso and Arozqueta-Fagoaga families, showing the strength of these kinship networks in terms their control of the guild and the crown’s fiscal institutions; it also shows the weakness of the latter on this side of the Atlantic. However, a minor incident that displeased the Count of Rábago showed the vulnerability of this network of corporate interests while affirming the powerful influence of ethnic coalitions, which nevertheless did not constitute themselves as homogenous interest groups. In the end, despite the internal frictions between clans of merchants, the equilibrium between the interests of the crown and the corporation was preserved through a solution offering continuity, showing the complex interaction between institutions, corporations and interest groups