The Church in the Economy of Spanish America: Censos and Depósitos in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

F ROM 1535, when the Spanish crown issued the first of several decrees that prohibited the acquisition of land by any monastery, or ecclesiastic, to the end of the colonial period, the Catholic church, or, more correctly, the various branches and agencies of the Spanish church in America, managed to create a vast material base that ultimately reached into every corner of the newly converted Indies. Apprehensive of clerical power while at the same time convinced that restriction on rights to property would spare the church material concerns that might interfere with its spiritual mission, the crown sporadically opposed, but in the end was unwilling to limit, the income of an institution that provided the fundamental social cohesion in a disparate but pious empire. By the last third of the eighteenth century, however, the various elements that had permitted the church to flourish economicallycrown support, creole largesse, Indian and Black labor-began to come apart. At first, because of the peculiar way in which the church was involved in colonial economy and society, the clergy and creole property owners stood against the crown, an alliance that emerged in the conflict over the expulsion of the Jesuits and the Consolidation of 1804. With independence, however, and the removal of the royal bureaucracy, the victorious but impoverished creoles began to look upon the church for their financial, as much as their spiritual, salvation; the erstwhile ally quickly became the foremost prey. Here again, an important explanation may be found in the peculiar way the church and creole landowners were economically interrelated. The long-term development of ecclesiastical economy in Latin America from the cumulative buildup under crown protection to secularization by the later Bourbons and nineteenth-century liberals forms the political

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