The Agentes de Indias: Transatlantic Lobbying and the Representation of Spanish-American Interests in Madrid, c. 1776-1820

Between 1778 and 1817, the Spanish crown issued 100 royal titles of Agentes de Indias to an equal number of men who lived in Madrid. While the number of recipients of these titles is far from negligible, those who were on the receiving end and what did they do remains, to a large extent, unknown. This dissertation is the most significant effort to date to shed light on these Agentes de Indias and their “system.” The Agentes, this dissertation establishes, were more than the holders of an empty shell of a title. Instead, this thesis shows how the Agentes constituted themselves as the mainstay representatives of colonial interests before the central institutions of the Spanish crown for Indies’ affairs in a professionalized capacity. This dissertation establishes so using an array of primary sources collected through archival research in several South American countries, and multiple archives in Spain. This evidentiary corpus is interpreted from Agentes’ perspective as historical actors invested in representing Indies-related matters (negocios de Indias) as a way to make a living. However, the dissertation does not consider the Agentes’ professional endeavors as a self-explanatory enterprise. Instead, it draws broader meaning from the experience of the Agentes by situating this system in the historiographies of European and Spanish absolutism, the Bourbon reforms in the Americas, and the age of revolutions in the Hispanic Atlantic. By envisioning the Agentes as actors invested in making a livelihood from furnishing royal decisions produced in Madrid to ambitious clients in the Indies, the dissertation positions them at the crux of intra-imperial relations. The Agentes role as intermediaries in crown-subjects relations constituted itself as all the more relevant as the Spanish Empire navigated the resistance elicited by new taxes imposed in the 1780s, as crown officials wrestled with the consequences of foreign wars and fear of revolutionary expansion in the 1790s, and as monarchical legitimacy experienced a deep crisis in the Americas after 1810