In Search of a “Decent Coin”: The Value of Small Change in Bourbon Spanish America

• In Event: Making and Valuing Money in the Americas, 17th – 19th centuries

Abstract

Small change was a big topic of debate in the upper ranks of Spain’s imperial bureaucracy in the eighteenth century. Officials in Spain and Spanish capitals across the Americas considered a number of proyectos, or proposals, to introduce copper coins and replace the “arbitrary tokens” that circulated in cities across Spanish America. Called tlacos in Mexico and raciones or tabillas in Guatemala, these were forms of privately-issued money that shopkeepers gave to their customers as change for their purchases, compensating for the lack of silver coins small enough for many everyday transactions. The proyectistas argued that copper coins would promote commerce, alleviate poverty, and restore the king’s monopoly on making money in his American possessions. But the projects encountered opposition from local officials and colonial elites and gained little traction before the outbreak of the wars for independence in the nineteenth century.
This paper examines those proyectos to shed light on competing understandings of money, value, and wealth in Bourbon Spain and Spanish America. While many Spanish officials believed that money’s value was tied to the worth of the underlying material, consumers in Spanish American cities thought otherwise. They had long traded tokens made of wood, lead, copper, or even soap—fiduciary money more akin to today’s bills and coins. The paper argues that these divergent views of money speak to the uneven bonds of trust that linked Spain’s American subjects to the Crown and to one another in the late-colonial era.

Author

• Andrew P Konove, University of Texas at San Antonio