Cited by 2Historical Studies in Latin AmericaHistory and Politics in Latin AmericaLatin American history and culture

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 23 of the 63 references it cites were found in a registry or an index, and 4 are not checked yet; none of the 49 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Political Economy and Knowledge Production in the Making of the Viceroyalty of New Granada

Open access
Afanador Llach, Maria José·2023·Historia Crítica

Abstract

Objective/Context: During the eighteenth century, officials from different colonial powers attempted to turn the viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada—present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama—into an economically viable territory. The Spanish Crown embraced its most radical jurisdictional reform in centuries to exercise effective state control, extract more revenue, and defend the colonies from foreign incursions. This article explores the particularities of New Granada’s economic governance and argues that colonial officials produced local discourses of political economy to turn unfamiliar spaces into familiar places for economic, political, and military ends. In doing so, producing knowledge about the land and its resources became a key bureaucratic practice that shaped the imagining of a paradoxical territoriality in Northern South America. First, I detail the impact of political economy frameworks on imperial governance and bureaucratic practices. I then showcase how administrative narratives, mapping projects, and fiscal networks reveal the workings of Bourbon economic governance and the search for regional integration. Methodology: This article is built from an analysis of archival documents consisting of a selection of evidence from chorographic texts about New Granada and its provinces produced between 1720 and 1808. Originality: Reflecting on the ways in which the pursuit of knowledge for wealth creation affected the creation of territorialities contributes to uncovering how the imperial political economy was never a top-down imposition. Local officials negotiated it vis-à-vis singular geographical realities and knowledge production practices. Conclusions: Chorographic texts were central devices of imperial reform. The search for wealth production and territorial integration occurred in colonial outposts, not in intellectual treatises in Europe. In forging New Granada as an integrated, potentially rich place, bureaucrats’ experience of moving across the territory and inscribing the landscape on paper shaped perceptions of cohesion and difference, economic dependence, and regional fragmentation.

Checked 2026-11-10 · 4 references not checked yet

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This article argues that eighteenth-century Spanish imperial reform in the Viceroyalty of New Granada was driven less by European intellectual treatises than by colonial bureaucrats producing "chorographic" knowledge—maps, reports, natural histories, and geographic descriptions—that rendered unfamiliar territory legible for taxation, defense, and wealth extraction. It shows that this knowledge production forged a paradoxical territoriality: an imagined cohesive, resource-rich viceroyalty that was in practice regionally fragmented and contested.

Key findings

  • The Bourbon Crown established the viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada between 1717 and 1723, extinguished it in 1723, and restored it in 1739; the Real Cédula of August 20, 1739, defined its jurisdiction as including "Choco, Popayan, the kingdom of de Quito and Guayaquil, the province of Antioquia, Cartagena, Santa Marta, Rio del Hacha, Maracaibo, Caracas, Cumana, Guayana, Islands of Trinidad and Margarita, and Orinoco River, provinces of Panama, Portobelo, Veragua and Darién."
  • Francisco Antonio Moreno y Escandón's 1772 *Plan Geográfico del Virreinato de Santafé de Bogotá* depicted the viceroyalty as a single bounded unit separated by a thick line from Peru and New Spain, while its margins carried statistical charts on the Royal Treasury, salaries, cities, towns, missions, and tributary populations—making the map a fiscal-administrative instrument rather than a neutral representation.
  • Fiscal interdependence ran contrary to the imagined cohesion: Meisel's analysis of Cartagena's incomes from 1751 to 1808 shows the *situado* (intra-imperial money transfers) "became the vital sustenance of the public finances and economy of Cartagena," funded by surpluses from Andean treasuries such as Honda and Mompox and remittances from Quito and Santa Fe.
  • Jurisdictional reform generated inter-colonial conflict: Peruvian authorities and merchants protested the separation of Panama and Guayaquil, and a royal decree in 1803 ordered Guayaquil's annexation to the Viceroyalty of Peru, a dispute that persisted into the independence struggles.

Methods

  • Archival analysis of a selection of chorographic texts about New Granada and its provinces produced between 1720 and 1808, including maps, economic improvement projects, administrative reports and petitions, geographic descriptions, and natural histories.
  • Sources drawn from the Archivo General de Indias (Seville), the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, and published primary sources such as Campillo y Cossío's *Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América* (1743), Gumilla's *El Orinoco Ilustrado* (1741), and Moreno y Escandón's "Estado del Virreinato de Santafé."
  • Qualitative historical analysis organized around three themes: imperial reform and political economy, wealth creation and cartography, and Andean–Caribbean fiscal and commercial relations.

Limitations

  • The paper states no explicit limitations section.
  • Evident from the text: the author notes that "it is unclear how many local officials submitted chorographic reports," so the representativeness of the surviving reports cannot be established.
  • Evident from the text: the analysis rests on a "selection of evidence," and the author repeatedly relies on secondary scholarship (Eissa-Barroso, Paquette, Meisel, Múnera, Grafe) for key claims about fiscal flows and merchant conflict rather than on primary quantification.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.7440/histcrit89.2023.03

Cites

23 of 63 references verified0 citation errors · 36 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Figures

Map 1 . Plan Geográfico del Virreinato de Santafé de Bogotá Nuevo Reyno de Granada
Map 1 . Plan Geográfico del Virreinato de Santafé de Bogotá Nuevo Reyno de GranadaCC-BY-NC-ND · From the PDF

Verification

Claims the paper makes

97 Own interpretation · 70 No basis given · 46 Sources not found · 4 Own result · 3 Not checked yet · 2 No full text of the sources

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 100
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 56
124 of 124
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The selected chorographic texts are representative of broader bureaucratic knowledge production in New Granada.

    “This article is built from an analysis of archival documents consisting of a selection of evidence from chorographic texts about New Granada and its provinces produced between 1720 and 1808.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The period 1720–1808 is a coherent unit for analyzing the making of the viceroyalty of New Granada.

    “produced between 1720 and 1808”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The Viceroyalty of New Granada was internally topographically dislocated and permeated by foreign incursions.

    “unique position, internally topographically dislocated and permeated by foreign incursions”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Insurmountable topographical obstacles impeded fluid communication among the provinces of New Granada.

    “The same was true on the ground visà-vis a reality of insurmountable topographical obstacles that impeded fluid communication among provinces.”
4 of 4

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

2 of 2

Citations

Cites

Show all 60 references

Metadata

Authors
Afanador Llach, M. J.
Venue
Historia Crítica
Published
2023-07-04
Issue
89
ISSN
  • 0121-1617 (ISSN-L)
  • 1900-6152
OpenAlex
W4383065237
Cited by
2
References
60
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2024: 1
FWCI
7.78
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Historia Crítica (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) (submittedVersion)
  • OpenEdition (OpenEdition) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Historical Studies in Latin America
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › History and Politics in Latin America
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Latin American history and culture
Keywords
Viceroyalty of New Granada, colonial political economy, Bourbon reforms, chorography, colonial cartography, knowledge production, territoriality, regional integration, colonial bureaucracy, New Kingdom of Granada

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