“The Most Useful Population or How to Launch Provincial Prosperity through Population Schemes: Santa Marta, 1780s-1790s”

A colloq with Ernesto Bassi (Cornell University). Please note that all colloquia papers are pre-circulated. Please register via the link below to receive a copy.

This paper looks at how the world was experienced from the coasts of the province of Santa Marta during the late eighteenth century and explores the central role of population schemes in the development of the province. The piece brings together the concerns and proposals of high-level imperial officers in Madrid and provincial governors in Santa Marta to highlight the convergence and divergence of their schemes to solve what Bassi calls the “population problem.” The population problem, a chronic problem associated with the need to populate the vast territories of the Spanish empire with the right type of people, called for different solutions in different locations. Therefore, the capacity of provincial officers to solve their specific version of the problem depended on their ability to match their local interests with the needs and desires expressed at the highest echelons of the imperial bureaucracy. Santa Marta’s experience offers a useful vantage point to understand, via its governors’ attempts to promote the transportation of enslaved Africans to the province, the possibilities that a time of imperial renovation offered provincial officers to fulfill their visions of prosperity. These possibilities, as Santa Marta’s experience demonstrates, were both real and limited.

Ernesto Bassi is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, where he teaches courses on colonial Latin America, Caribbean, Atlantic, and global history.  His publications include An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Duke, 2016). He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Plantation Dreams: A Global History from Santa Marta’s Shores, that uses the professional trajectories of a provincial governor, Antonio Narváez y la Torre, and a viceroy, Antonio Caballero y Góngora, to understand the rise of capitalism, the workings of the Spanish empire, and early modern globalization from the perspective of the province of Santa Marta during the late eighteenth century.

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