In August of 1799, José Villamil y Primo, the local magistrate (subdelegado) of Tacuba, sat down to pen his response to a questionnaire from the newly established Council on Forests (Junta de Montes, or Junta de Bosques) in Mexico City. As part of the first coordinated effort in the kingdom's history to regulate forestry practices, the questionnaire responses, the council hoped, could be used to draft a new general forestry code for New Spain, one that would supersede the piecemeal laws, edicts, and rulings that had governed the use of forests for nearly three centuries. “The state of the forests in this district,” Villamil wrote, “is not today very advantageous because the excessive cutting of wood, for firewood as well as charcoal, has destroyed them.” In his mind, this excessive cutting was the outcome of the long-term failure to develop any system of forest management. There was simply “no other method observed, other than that of going and cutting everything” that was appropriate for one's uses, and the perpetrators were “principally the Indians that live in the district, as they have no other means for their subsistence.”Footnote 1
More than 100 miles to the west, in the mountainous interior of Michoacán, another official observed that local residents “cut when they see fit, without order or method,” and that they even set fire to the forests on occasion.Footnote 2 However, this report offered a very different assessment of the situation: far from denuding the landscape and causing hardship, the clearing of forests was highly beneficial to the expansion of maize cultivation, and agriculture more generally. Although the 93 reports ultimately remitted to the council and recovered for this study do suggest that forest degradation by the end of the eighteenth century was significant near major cities and mining centers, the reports from Villamil and the Michoacán official represented an aberration. As this article will demonstrate, the common thread among the reports was not deforestation—in fact, many regional officials complained about “excessive” forests rather than the opposite—but the maintenance of forests as unregulated open-access commons.
This article offers three major contributions to the environmental, legal, and political history of New Spain. First, it explores the emergence of a colonial forestry regime in New Spain that, although constructed on a base that was both autochthonous and Iberian, was distinct from both. Second, this article examines the emergence in the late eighteenth century of New Spain's first state forestry program and the program's ultimately quixotic attempt to draft a general forestry code for the kingdom. Finally, this article uses the documents produced by and remitted to the Council on Forests, along with others, to demonstrate that the relationship between society and forests in late-colonial New Spain evolved over time, through reciprocal interactions between Spanish law, its interpretation by litigants, magistrates, and viceroys, and changes in the natural environment.
Over the past few decades, the environmental history of New Spain has emerged as a vibrant and growing field in its own right, with particular focus on the impact of Afro-Eurasian animal domesticates, mining, water and flood control, climate, and epidemic disease.Footnote 3 Because the field is relatively young, much of this scholarship has focused on the local and regional level to establish patterns of landscape change.Footnote 4 While some scholars have pointed to signs that may indicate environmental regeneration following the Spanish invasion, the general focus has been on the negative environmental impacts of the colonization and the ways in which Spanish preferences for extensive methods of production, relative to Mesoamericans, intensified ecological pressures.Footnote 5 In the long run, this certainly happened, but “intensification,” if understood primarily in terms of imported European technology, animals, and practices, obscures other important ecological, sociopolitical, and legal aspects of the colonial regime. While much research remains to be done on local processes, the documents consulted for this article offer a unique opportunity to consider the inter-regional aspects of human-forest relations during the late colonial era.
Although the Council on Forests emerged late in the Bourbon monarchy's project to revitalize and modernize the Spanish empire, the practices, laws, and expectations that constituted New Spain's forestry regime remained very much a construction of Habsburg rule. The starting point was political: as a right of conquest, the Spanish crown usurped the eminent domain once enjoyed by indigenous towns over forests and other lands and brought them under direct royal jurisdiction, with rights to be dispensed at the royal pleasure.Footnote 6 In 1542, for instance, the Nahua town of Ecatzingo, to the southeast of Mexico City, appealed directly to viceroy Antonio de Mendoza for assistance in driving some outsiders from their community forests. After reviewing the community's testimony and hearing witnesses, Mendoza personally appointed a local man to the position of “constable and guard of the said forests” and charged him with preventing intrusions from outside parties.Footnote 7
The Hispanic cabildo of Mexico City, on the other hand, was employing a guard named Juan Gallego, under its own authority and as early as 1533, to keep watch over Chapultepec Forest.Footnote 8 Thus, from inception, the crown never invited the people of the constituent towns of the República de Indios, as conquered subjects, to be full participants in the setting and enforcing of local regulations. As a result, forestry rights in practice came to be defined primarily through litigation. And precisely because communitarian rights were deeply rooted in both Castilian and Mesoamerican traditions, and because property rights are always an expression of power inseparable from the sociopolitical context, litigation created opportunities to shape new and potentially hybrid commons that pulled from their constituent parts but were also distinct from them.Footnote 9
Origins of the Colonial Forestry Regime
The legal basis for the colonial forestry regime was consolidated during the period of the Iberian reconquest, as Christians settled on formerly Islamic lands, founded new towns, and negotiated contractual rights (fueros) and territorial grants with the monarchy. Royal codes, from the thirteenth-century Siete Partidas onward, defined forests as commons and recognized municipal management rights, but retained for the monarchy eminent domain to make impositions for state needs and to adjudicate disputes. That forests were legal commons did not imply that they were available to anybody who wished to use them, but instead embodied the legal recognition of a “communitarian tradition” of municipal management according to local ecological and economic conditions.Footnote 10
Town councils set regulations and maintained forest guards to monitor and prevent illicit activities and outside depredations.Footnote 11 Practices like coppicing and pollarding were widely adopted and allowed towns to balance the needs of different industries for firewood, shade, and grazing. However, as the Habsburg state was consolidated and market production expanded during the sixteenth century, conflicts arose between local practices, state demands, and expanding market-oriented industries like iron.Footnote 12 Carlos V and Felipe II both worked to promote the conservation and acquisition of oak for shipbuilding, leading to the establishment of the office of the Superintendent of Forests in 1574.Footnote 13 Royal policy increasingly supported the creation of guided pollards through the horca y pendón method, in which two or three main branches are left atop oak trees, to protect stocks of these key species for shipbuilding. Although horca y pendón was often used in Spain, the logic was frequently at odds with the desires of charcoal makers, who supplied industries like iron and preferred to maximize profit by felling entire trees.Footnote 14 Although the reach of the Superintendent of Forests never extended across the Atlantic, colonial officials often made reference to horca y pendón because it appeared in written law and was familiar to many Spaniards as evidence of “rational” forestry practices. However, the method does not seem to have been employed by Mesoamericans prior to the conquest, or, for the most part, during and after it.
The largest indigenous groups of central Mexico, including Nahuas, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Otomí, and Totonacs, all entered the Spanish colonial era with their own methods of complex communitarian management that were well suited to local conditions. They did not possess any preservationist cultural mores entirely unique to themselves, but instead, like other peasant societies including Castile, these groups learned through centuries of trial and error to manage scarcity to mitigate vulnerabilities.Footnote 15 Proxy data strongly correlate the expansion of maize-based agriculture after about the sixth millennium BCE and, after about 1500 BCE, the emergence of state-level societies with decreased forest cover. Conservationist practices like coppicing, pollarding, pruning, and replanting were adopted, along with cultural and religious mores to reinforce the importance of such measures, so as to maximize the human share of resources without increasing risks of famine.Footnote 16
Many Mesoamericans also entered the Spanish colonial era with experience living within organized political states with complex legal systems, although less bureaucratized than those of the Spanish and with greater reference to spoken, rather than written, law.Footnote 17 Among the Nahuas of central Mexico, where the population on the eve of conquest ran well into the millions, forests were incorporated within the territories claimed by individual ethnic states, the altepeme, and remained under the eminent domain of each tlatoani, or sovereign. Upon ascending to the throne as the tlatoani of Texcoco in 1473, Nezahualpilli gave a speech in which he mentioned “taking charge of the forests” among the duties of his office, suggesting his responsibility to prevent significant degradation and to adjudicate disputes between commoners.Footnote 18 Direct authority over forests was likely exercised by the leaders of local wards, the calpolli or tlaxilacalli, who often controlled the allocation of lands and other local resources. The cutting and collecting of timber, firewood, plants, and incense were specialties of certain members, who often exchanged their goods at local markets.Footnote 19 Forest management remained a distinctly local affair, and recent research suggests that today Mexico's diverse agroforestry systems retain a strong imprint from the pre-Hispanic period.Footnote 20
Without the apparatus of state forestry, the crown's role in forestry matters in New Spain remained primarily that of an arbiter of disputes, a role deeply rooted in the Habsburg philosophical conception of the monarchy's responsibility to maintain “the relations of each thing to all others.”Footnote 21 As Susan Kellogg has shown, Spanish law created space for indigenous vassals to negotiate their new circumstances, which worked not only to strengthen Habsburg legitimacy but also to reshape their expectations and practices.Footnote 22 During the sixteenth century, indigenous litigants learned to defend and establish forestry rights through the legal system, and often cited laws protecting the rights of usufructuaries to make use of the commons.Footnote 23 The viceregal notarial registers for the sixteenth century are filled with conflicts over forest rights and grants specifying where, when, and how much could be cut.Footnote 24 And then, by the seventeenth century, these requests and grants all but disappear from these registers and, apparently, from official concern. Why?
The first explanatory factor is demographic. As is well known, the Spanish invasion set in motion a series of epidemics that intermittently decimated the indigenous population, which plummeted calamitously during the century after the 1540s before beginning a gradual recovery.Footnote 25 Afforestation in many areas subsequently reduced the ratio of people to forests, which led to our second factor: a decline in the perceived need among usufructuaries and officials for the strict enforcement of forestry regulations that were not well suited to New Spain's changing circumstances.Footnote 26 Since the purpose of Habsburg law was, above all, the maintenance of social harmony, it was often easier to ignore requirements that horca y pendón be left or that trees not be felled—both of which were relics of shifting Iberian circumstances—than to enforce laws that would lead to needless resistance. Because the Habsburg legal apparatus was intended to be flexible, justices were expected to apply written law with reference to local customs, circumstances, and communally defined notions of fairness (equidad).Footnote 27 Considering these circumstances and the Habsburg monarchy's paternalist position vis-à-vis indigenous subjects, more often than not this meant prioritizing access to forests over the strict enforcement of conservation measures.
The final factor was primarily economic. While Habsburg rule saw the development of major cities, market economies, and the movement toward the consolidation of landholdings, the Bourbon accession to the Spanish throne at the dawn of the eighteenth century ushered in a period of unprecedented economic growth. Following the seventeenth-century arbitristas, Bourbon policymakers sought to revive the glory of the sixteenth-century Siglo de Oro to make Spain once again competitive with the ascendant monarchies of Europe, particularly the British, by replacing the old composite monarchy of the Habsburgs with a modern, centralized state. Regalism, the subordination to all authority to that of the crown, was the instrument through which reformers sought to spur economic and demographic growth in the colonies to maximize revenues in Spain, although much of this expansion occurred independently of reformist efforts.Footnote 28
Among Bourbon policymakers, economic expansion gradually overtook the maintenance of social harmony as the guiding philosophy of the monarchy.Footnote 29 Policies loosening trade restrictions and attacking corporate privilege, along with strong demographic growth, encourage commercial production and urban expansion, which in turn increased the value of productive land and encouraged elite encroachment on indigenous communal lands. Feeling both the push and pull of encroachment, Nahuas, Otomís, and others took to the forests to produce timber, firewood, and charcoal to supply urban demand and to feed the rapacious appetite of the mines, silver refineries, and gunpowder factories in and near Mexico City.
As the history of the Council on Forests shows, the royal “men-on-the-spot” in New Spain who undertook the project were imbued with certain elements of the monarchy's regalist philosophy, but they were also influenced by older Habsburg notions and local ecological, political, and social realities that constrained their desire and ability to fully abandon their commitments to protectionism and the pursuit of social harmony.Footnote 30Hacendados were among the first to recognize the potential threat that deforestation might pose to their rural enterprises, and in 1756 they received a favorable auto acordado, a form of judicial precedent intended to resolve future forest conflicts, from the Audiencia de México. The auto upheld the usufruct rights of indigenous commoners while also emphasizing that these rights were contingent upon leaving horca y pendón. In addition, products obtained under usufruct were to be directed toward subsistence uses only and not the pursuit of profit, upon pain of deprivation.Footnote 31 But the reality was that as many indigenous people were pushed and pulled into the market economy, profit increasingly was essential to their subsistence. Yet, this measure was almost never fully enforced—for the very reasons that made it necessary.
It was during the eighteenth century that these political, ecological, and economic factors collided within the forest commons of New Spain. While some scholars have applied Garrett Hardin's “tragedy of the commons” thesis to explain the destruction of common resource systems, his work was largely ahistorical—and wrong on empirical grounds. At the least, it grossly oversimplified the ways in which humans can and do manage common resource systems for the long term.Footnote 32 In her Nobel Prize-winning study, the political economist Elinor Ostrom theorized a distinction between common-pool resources, which are owned and managed by the commoners who derive benefit from them, and open-access commons, which are unowned and difficult to regulate.Footnote 33 Ostrom extrapolates a series of factors typical of successfully managed commons, which include the establishment of clear boundaries between commoners and outsiders, the rights of commoners to set and enforce rules through graduated sanctions, provision for swift and affordable resolution of conflicts, and recognition by higher authorities that commoners have the rights to set these rules.Footnote 34 In short, Ostrom suggests that the successful long-term management of commons is best achieved by empowering the communities that make use of them, and more recent research by Ian Rotherham has further lent weight to the notion that cultural severance, the separation of nature from local community ownership, closely correlates with negative environmental outcomes.Footnote 35
However, New Spain's legal, economic, and political circumstances tended to disempower local decision-making, with deleterious results. In their attempt to come to grips with an unsustainable political ecology they did not fully understand, respondents to the forest surveys of the Council on Forests tended to place blame not on the larger system, but increasingly on a set of cultural and racial assumptions they chauvinistically ascribed to the people they called indios or naturales, whose economic marginalization tended to reinforce these beliefs. While respondents to the council's surveys recognized the need for increased local control, they were far more comfortable in the milieu of the late Bourbon period in assigning this responsibility to the regalist state, and never seriously considered the possibility of empowering communities to set and enforce their own rules. None seem to have realized that the prescribed program for Spain's economic and political revitalization, that is, the disempowerment of local corporate groups and the facilitation of economic expansion, was itself a fundamental source of the problem.
Origins of the Council on Forests
As in Spain, state-sanctioned conservation measures emerged not out of concern for the needs of vassals but for the promotion of key state interests, particularly silver and gunpowder manufacturing, both of which required significant inputs of firewood and charcoal at multiple levels of production. The specific roots of the Council on Forests are found in a rather prosaic 1792 conflict involving the forests of the state-owned Hacienda de San José de Chalco, located to the southeast of Mexico City, which the crown had seized from the Jesuits following the order's expulsion from the Spanish realms in 1767. Diego de Bulnés had recently rented the estate from the Royal Treasury, which was administering the formerly Jesuit property until it could be sold, under the condition that he share the seeds, pastures, and tools with Julián de Lezaun, the former administrator. Bulnés complained to the crown attorney dealing with treasury matters (fiscal de real hacienda) that Lezaun abused this relationship by usurping hacienda lands and, most egregiously, by wantonly destroying some of the hacienda's forests, which had already prompted him to hire a forest guard to stop these abuses. Because these activities were potentially harmful to royal finances, the fiscal ordered an inspection that confirmed Bulnés's account: the property had been largely despoiled of oaks and reduced to only some small poplars of little utility.Footnote 36
Anxiety over the destruction of these forests quickly spread to other areas of the royal government in Mexico City as evidence mounted that the disappearance of San José de Chalco's forests was not an isolated incident. The defensor de temporalidades, who oversaw the bidding process on the formerly Jesuit estates, became alarmed by reports that the felling of entire trees “was the custom in that district,” despite the harm done to the “farm and the public,” and he pointed directly to Isabel and Fernando's 1496 pragmatic prohibiting such practices. Based on what he had heard, viceroy Revillagigedo ordered an extensive inspection of the entire province, which confirmed his fears that “razing to the ground and putting an end to the forests” was the normal practice.Footnote 37
In July 1793, the fiscal wrote to the viceroy regarding his concerns and his recommendations that “nothing can bring a greater utility than to cut short similar abuses in all this kingdom.”Footnote 38 He cited a number of legal precedents, including Bourbon Spain's 1748 forestry code, which had never been applied in New Spain because it was not specifically designated to do so, and pointed to the threat deforestation posed to mining and gunpowder manufacturing.Footnote 39 “To ensure the correct measure,” he wrote, “Your Majesty should instruct the Intendents of this viceroyalty … to inform on the state of the forests in their respective districts, and the method practiced in the cutting of firewood and timber.”Footnote 40 Revillagigedo was convinced of the urgency of the matter and shared the defensor's concern that destructive practices had become normalized and that “similar abuse and harm will be irreparable if not prevented in time.”Footnote 41
Revillagigedo issued a cédula the same day ordering the kingdom's regional officials to report on the state of the forests within each respective district “with reference to the Royal Cédula of 7 December 1748,” the first modern forestry code issued for the metropole. Following on the cédula came an 11-question survey that was dispatched to regional officials. These surveys were based directly on the method of forest reconnaissance employed in Spain by the Marqués de Ensenada in the 1730s that culminated in the 1748 code, which was copied in Mexico City, possibly for the first time, in March 1794.Footnote 42 The viceroy and his advisors thus hoped to develop a unified code, one that while adapted to the particularities of the kingdom differed little in premise from metropolitan law. While the more than 90 reports remitted to Mexico City between 1794 and 1800 demonstrated the futility of this endeavor, in 1794 officials in Mexico City were optimistic about the prospect of bringing uniform order to bear upon the king's subjects to protect royal interests.
The report from the mining center of Guanajuato, which alone produced between a fifth and a quarter of New Spain's silver output throughout the eighteenth century, confirmed fears that deforestation might shortly shutter the mines, which by the 1790s were importing wood from distances of nearly 100 miles.Footnote 43 Yet, officials in Guanajuato did not blame the deplorable state of the region's forests on the mining industry itself but rather on the complete lack of conservation practices that had grown up around it. The author of the report, Juan Antonio de Riaño, a military veteran appointed to the Intendancy of Guanajuato in 1792, painted a grim picture of a province “in perfect abandonment.” Yet, even in this mining district things were not always so grim. “In no time has the conservation of [the forests] been attempted,” he wrote, “because the consumption is inferior to the richness of [the land's] production, since the forested parts of it since antiquity have outpaced the destruction,” suggesting that regeneration had blunted concerns over poor forestry practices.Footnote 44
By the 1790s, however, the situation was so dire that the Diputación de Minería de Guanajuato, a creation of the 1783 mining ordinances intended to adjudicate property disputes, issued a separate plea to the Tribunal de Minería in Mexico City on the immediacy of the threat.Footnote 45 The letter echoes Riaño's sentiment: not only had every forest within roughly 13 miles been obliterated, but the still-living stumps had been uprooted to produce boxes, extinguishing any possibility of coppicing or pollarding. The deputies who wrote the letter, Gervasio Antonio de Irizar and Francisco de Septién y Arce, both well-placed merchants, also pointed to the unmanaged and unregulated system of forest use as the origin of this disaster, stating specifically that “there is not a palm of land that is not occupied by individuals,” and that the town of Guanajuato had been left without “ejidos, dehesas, pastures, woodlands, or forests, against all the spirit of our legislation and in great public harm.”Footnote 46 Far from managing the forests they owned, hacendados simply charged a fee for woodcutters to enter and take what they wished, which over centuries created a barren wasteland where “nature, without the hand of man, had situated beautiful and thick forests.”Footnote 47
During late 1795 and early 1796, the Mining Deputation, the intendant, and other Guanajuato officials dispatched several letters to Mexico City offering their recommendations for reforms, in which they emphasized the urgent need to establish forest guards and to coordinate the management of forests among the city's ayuntamiento, the deputation, and the intendancy.Footnote 48 In addition to the feckless felling of trees, officials pointed to the intrusion of goats into recently deforested lands: their “venomous teeth” lifted the vulnerable roots of saplings from the earth, wreaking destruction that could have been prevented with the establishment of pollards.Footnote 49 On February 16, 1796, viceroy Branciforte, who succeeded Revillagigedo, issued a comprehensive cédula in response to the petitions received from Guanajuato, ordering the posting of broadsides to remind subjects of royal conservation laws, the establishment of forest guards to enforce them, and the expulsion of goats from recently deforested lands. The next month in Guanajuato, Riaño convened a council consisting of himself, city council member Lic. don Martín Coronel y Jorganes, and two mining deputies, don Juan Francisco de Villamar and the aforementioned Francisco de Septién y Arce, to pen a reply to the viceroy's order. In the letter, they noted that previous orders to post broadsides accomplished nothing because of “the shortcoming of the people charged with their observation” and thus concurred with the urgent need to establish mounted guards.Footnote 50 They suggested that two horses be requisitioned for that purpose and that four guardamontes be appointed and assigned to work along strategic routes throughout the sierra, their salaries of 400 pesos to be drawn in part from the city's coffers and in part from those of Diputación de Minería.
Regarding the expulsion of goats, the council Riaño had convened pointed to the stiff resistance this order had faced from estate owners like the Condesa de San Mateo Valparaíso who, along with her husband don Miguel de Berrio y Zaldívar, owned numerous haciendas scattered throughout the viceroyalty, including some near Guanajuato on which she raised goats that fed a good portion of the region's population.Footnote 51 The condesa's lawyer pointed out that goats “were not less useful to the labors of the mines and the necessities of life” than firewood; that the laws of the Indies stipulated that trees should be reserved as shade for animals; and that it made no sense to “destroy one necessary thing to foment another.”Footnote 52 Though self-serving, the argument derived directly from Castile's communitarian tradition of local management to coordinate forest use among different economic sectors. The lawyer explained, echoing earlier arguments from the Diputación de Minería, that since a goat “cannot knock down a tree or cut off a branch,” the problem was not the presence of goats but the unregulated cutting that proceeded “heedless and disorderly, without having any other rule than self-interest.”Footnote 53 For the condesa, the problem was that since forests were defined as commons under the law, and since the 1783 Mining Ordinances explicitly protected the supply of firewood to miners, the cédula “opens a free door to all who want to enter and cut wood in forests owned by individuals, destroying them” and leaves the owners “without the least means of recourse.” If people were to show up with axe in hand claiming “that they are going to cut wood for the mines, you can't say a word to them.”Footnote 54 The reality was that in most places with an established market for wood, hacendados and their mayordomos were happy to permit cutting in exchange for fees.
Josef de Peón Valdés, the intendant of the old mining zone of Zacatecas, echoed many of Riaño's sentiments about Guanajuato, including the observation that significant deforestation was a recent phenomenon that had become truly severe only during the past 18 to 20 years. In his report, Peón wrote that “it is not doubtful that the origin of these evils, and those that successively, in just a few years, have been experienced in this place, they come from the bad method that is observed in the cutting of wood.” The method that Peón described differed little from what was practiced in Guanajuato: the owners and renters of forests simply charged an entry fee for woodcutters, who, “bringing no other aim than their own self-interest,” felled trees at their discretion and left a significant portion of the wood to decompose in the forests.Footnote 55 He also attributed the problem to the long-standing negligence of local officials in enforcing and carrying out the laws regarding the use and replanting of forests. Finally, he pointed to the use of fire to clear forests to open new pastures for livestock, again, like the condesa, highlighting the lack of coordination among key industries.
Evolution of the Council on Forests
The situation in Guanajuato and Zacatecas is instructive, not just because of the mines and their voracious appetite for wood or because Bourbon conservation measures were concerned primarily with protecting this industry, but because the “abuse and disorder” so often mentioned in the documents echo dominant forestry practices throughout the kingdom. Riaño's explicit connection between the lack of municipal management and the land's ability to “outpace destruction” since antiquity suggests an evolving political ecology in which forest regrowth seemingly rendered conservation measures unnecessary. Indeed, despite numerous reports by the 1750s of indigenous people, some local and some from distant parts, invading the hills near the city and clear-cutting forests, rulings and injunctions continued to defend the pasturing of goats and the free cutting of wood as compatible industries.Footnote 56 It is also notable that the recommendations from the diputación—that forest guards be posted, that local practices be established through local cooperation, and that the needs of different rural industries be balanced against each other and the common good—were all expected duties of municipalities in Spain.
The lawsuit involving the Condesa de San Mateo Valparaíso and the early reports received in Mexico City laid bare the theoretical problems of the universalizing program and set in motion discussions about how to proceed. In addition to the intendants, ministers, and judges already weighing in, several fiscales protectores de Indios, officials who investigated complaints by indigenous people and served as their advocates before the colonial government, expressed their concerns that a universal law was neither possible nor desirable. “The diversity of circumstances that are advised from one province to another, and even among places within just one, according to the reports from the Señores Intendentes” they advised, “does not permit a general resolution.”Footnote 57 In other words, a general forestry law was too blunt an instrument to account for differing and often contentious local practices. In part this was because, while deforestation posed a significant threat in some areas central to the Spanish economy, elsewhere forest regrowth hampered economic development.
As seen in the reports from the Intendancy of Valladolid (Michoacán), it was simply “useful to permit, and even secure, the arbitrary cutting of wood” so as to open fields and roads that had been swallowed by expanding forests (emboscados), while elsewhere it was necessary to establish strict oversight of cutting and replanting efforts.Footnote 58 In this sense, the fiscales protectores were in agreement with conservatives like viceroy Antonio María Bucareli, who in the 1770s had expressed deep skepticism that New Spain, an ecologically diverse land dominated by expansive haciendas and isolated Indian pueblos rather than Hispanic towns, could be governed by the same laws as Spain.Footnote 59 But the fiscales did want reform, recommending the establishment of a system whereby rules could be adapted to each province “according to nature and the circumstances of the forests, of the immediate population,” and permitting the provinces to raise funds to cover the salaries of the needed guards. In some cases, they suggested, vecinos could rotate this responsibility among themselves “according to the practice in the Kingdoms of Spain.”Footnote 60 Such statements reflect a growing awareness of the need to return to a system of localized control.
In February 1799, the judges of the Audiencia of México convened a royal council known as a Real Acuerdo (Royal Agreement) to advise the viceroy on the best course of action. Based on the recommendations and reports they had seen, the Real Acuerdo agreed that “it is not possible to make uniform in everything the government of the domains of Spain with those of this America, because of its expansive area, climate, people, and many other circumstances that make them different.”Footnote 61 They pointed to many of the aforementioned difficulties: that some areas suffered extensive deforestation while others owing to the “fertility of the land” needed greater clearing; that private owners charged fees for access to forests without providing any reciprocal care for their conservation; and that conservation measures had to be balanced against the needs of indigenous subjects. The Real Acuerdo thus recommended that the viceroy issue an order to each intendant instructing them to convene councils of their own comprised of local stakeholders, including the mining deputations and Hispanic town councils, to produce a set of rules best adapted to the local circumstances of their jurisdiction, but based on the laws of Spain and the Indies. The rules would then be remitted to Mexico City for examination and approval.
The approval of regional ordinances and the establishment of regulations for the Intendancy of México would require a body of men dedicated to the task and possessing the requisite knowledge and experience to understand the potential impact of regulation on different economic sectors. To this end, viceroy Miguel José de Azanza, the duque de Santa Fe, extended invitations to six men during the summer of 1799 to form a new committee known as the Council on Forests. The highest-ranking member of the council to accept the viceroy's invitations was Francisco Fernández de Córdoba, the marqués of San Román, whom Alexander Von Humboldt described as “an enlightened administrator.”Footnote 62 More important than his fidelity to enlightened reform was Fernández's appointment as superintendent of the Royal Mint in Mexico City. Other members were similarly drawn from key areas of royal interest: the director of mining, the director of gunpowder, a municipal lawyer from Mexico City, and Antonio Rodríguez de Velasco, a lawyer and councilman of the cabildo of México.Footnote 63 A representative of the tanners’ guild (gremio de curtidores) of Mexico City, a group that depended heavily on tannins contained in tree bark to tan the hides they produced, was also appointed to the junta.
The Council on Forests had three primary objectives: to review ordinances remitted from the provinces, to draft a set of ordinances for the Intendancy of Mexico, and to inform the viceroy of their proceedings so that he could advise and issue laws. Within the Intendancy of México, subdelegados drafted their reports and submitted them directly to the viceroy and the council, as did some subdelegados from adjacent areas. However, if the Council on Forests ever produced a comprehensive code, it has not been recovered, and the only comprehensive ordinance remitted from another intendency that has been recovered was written by the vigilant Felipe Díaz de Ortega, a locally well-connected successor to Riaño as intendant of Valladolid, dated February 5, 1800. His 12-article code emphasized the need for greater state oversight of forest cutting and highlighted the difficulties facing statist conservation efforts. While several of his articles emphasized the need to encourage the supply of wood to silver, saltpeter, and sugar producers at “comfortable prices, for the interests of the state,” others spoke of the need to control the destructive behavior of the primarily indigenous charcoal producers and woodcutters, whom Díaz de Ortega called the “moth (la polilla) of the forests.”Footnote 64 He, like many others of his social class, attributed the “disorderly” nature of indigenous forestry practices to what he saw as limited mental horizons and a penchant for lawlessness. Thus, while these reports did not lead to any significant innovations in forestry practices in New Spain, they offer a trove of information about both the realities and elite perceptions of forest use during the waning years of the viceroyalty.
Deforestation and Its Causes
How generalized was the problem of deforestation during the final decades of colonial rule? Some 93 reports contain enough information to classify the state of a region's forests as sufficient, fair, or poor.Footnote 65 “Sufficient” forests were those that clearly met the needs of the local economy, and indeed were often a nuisance. A total of 48 (51.6%) of the reports fall into this category. Forests classified as “fair” were those that supplied sufficient timber and fuel to meet local needs but either required traveling some distance to achieve this or led authors of the reports to express concern that local practices might soon lead to scarcity. A total of 20 reports (21.5%) met this classification. “Poor” forests that did not meet local needs also accounted for 25 jurisdictions (26.9%). Of these 25 jurisdictions, the “poor” status of 18 (72%) was clearly associated with human activities, since some regions, like the sandy Gulf Coast city of Alvarado, were not favorable to forest growth, or the fact that the reports did not contain enough information to judge the reasons for inadequate forest cover. Thus, the reports indicate that nearly three-quarters of all jurisdictions had forests that met local needs, compared to only a quarter that did not, and only 18 of the 93 classifiable reports (19.4%) clearly reflected anthropogenic degradation.
It is clear from the reports that expanding cities of any size usually had a significant negative impact on forest cover that could be felt over some distance. A brief analysis of the Valley of Toluca is instructive. Because the Valley of Toluca, most of which fell within the Marquesado del Valle, lacked significant mines and is situated across the Sierra de las Cruces about a thousand feet above Mexico City, early Spanish settlement tended to overlook the region, which remained largely indigenous despite demographic decline. However, over time the region's agricultural and stock-raising potential invited settlement from Spaniards unable to secure positions within the orbit of Mexico City's economy, and in 1662 Toluca was upgraded to a ciudad. The indigenous tributary population of the corregimiento of Toluca grew also during the second half of the eighteenth century, from 11,612 in 1756 to 16,030 in 1800.Footnote 66 While the city itself was essentially Spanish, it was surrounded by numerous Otomí, Nahua, and Matlatzinca towns.
The 1799 report from the city of Toluca is short and rather blunt: “There are no forests at all from which wood or fuel can be cut, and thus I have nothing to report to the Council created by Your Excellency.”Footnote 67 Toluca in the eighteenth century was supplied with wood from the forests near the mines of Temascaltepec in the mountains to the southwest, which by the end of the eighteenth century were “quite deteriorated” because “the cutting of timber and firewood is done at the discretion of whoever needs one or the other.”Footnote 68 As forests disappeared and demand for agricultural goods increased, Toluqueños began to exert greater pressure on more distant forests. As far to the east as San Mateo Atarasquillo and San Miguel Ameyalco, trees existed in “very short quantity.”Footnote 69 As early as the 1720s, the gobernador and principales of Santiago Temoaya, about 13 miles north of Toluca, were complaining that vecinos of that city had been invading forests that they claimed to possess and pasturing livestock without permission:
That which is near a numerous population, or productive agricultural land, suffers deforestation. This is what has happened in the vicinity of Toluca, in whose jurisdiction there is not even a parcel of land (una yugada) populated with trees, although in the hills the surest signs still exist that these were once seen covered with [forests] in another time. Their total annihilation has forced those inhabitants [of Toluca] to come to this province [Metepec] to supply themselves from the forests, that were once, without assistance, sufficient for the consumption and uses of the vecinos.Footnote 70
The towns and settlements of the northern Sierra de las Cruces were heavily involved in the harvesting of timber for Mexico City, and to a lesser extent Toluca. The region immediately surrounding Jilotepec was denuded and covered with only mesquites, but above the town in the sierra dense forests supplied royal works, including the great drainage project known as the Desagüe. The Hispanic and indigenous residents of Villa del Carbón and Chapa de Mota both subsisted largely on this trade to the capital. Near Tenango del Valle, to the south of the city, indigenous people cut “without any method or rule whatsoever,” harvesting only the best parts of the ocote pine trees for charcoal-making and abandoning the rest to the forest floor. As mentioned above, José Villamil y Primo, the subdelegado of Tacuba, attributed deforestation directly to officials’ failure to enforce royal laws, which allowed the supposedly ignorant masses to make use of these resources in self-serving, anti-communitarian, and irrational ways.Footnote 71
All the reports from the vicinity of Mexico City indicate that human activities had progressively reduced forests to only the higher mountain slopes, save for Chapultepec, which was managed by the city's cabildo.Footnote 72 Like Tacuba, Coyoacán had also undergone extensive clearing, with forests enduring primarily in the mountains, specifically several haciendas and the Carmelite retreat of Santo Desierto, which, as one of the few intact forests within the city's orbit, was acquired by the colonial government in the 1790s to supply the gunpowder factories at Chapultepec and Santa Fe. Yet, these forests were also threatened, and many trees could be found throughout the region decomposing and unutilized on the ground, echoing reports from Toluca and elsewhere. To the south near Cuernavaca, the situation was similarly grim, with the “greater part of [the forests] arid and barren,” save for the occasional mesquite or similarly spiny plant, a condition Francisco Javier Ramirez attributed to the lack of established order.Footnote 73 Near Chalco, long a major source of grains and wood in the city, there were “as in all those of this kingdom, abuses in the felling [of trees] at the whim of whoever goes to the forests, without a single person planting or caring for more than their destruction.”Footnote 74 None of these reports provide any evidence that intervention on the part of local officials had slowed the process of forest depletion.
Near Puebla, only the respondents from San Juan de los Llanos and Tetela de Tonantla, both near the mountains far to the northeast, reported having good forests.Footnote 75 The gobernador of Tlaxcala described the nearest forests as “not the most advantageous” and the hills nearest the city as reduced to small and spiny taxa. The two exceptions were the Matlalcueitl (Malinche) Volcano and the mountains just beyond Tlaxco, more than 20 miles to the north. Even these, Francisco de Lissa reported, “day by day are diminishing, since moreover there is no care by the owners of the referenced forests,” who had to accept the concentrated efforts of wood traders with decreasingly few options.Footnote 76 All forests near Huejotzingo and Cholula had been severely depleted, with the official from Huejotzingo noting that what little remained was being “destroyed because the possessors of farms (fincas) found therein have tried only to take from them the products that they have been able to by destroying them, without having cut with order or method.” As in forests of Tlaxcala, most of this wood was cut by Nahuas and transported to both Mexico City and Puebla. Near Cholula, forests could be found on only two small estates, and both were mostly “annihilated” from incessant cutting “without order or method.”Footnote 77 Forests near Atlixco and Tecali suffered the same fate, while those near Izúcar had been consumed by the sugar mills scattered throughout the region.
The lack of concern over the enforcement of forestry laws is also evident for regions with abundant forests. In the high Sierra Nevada mountains above Izúcar, where sugar producers turned after annihilating forests at lower elevations, forests were so abundant that woodcutters “keep no method at all, nor could the case arise that the forests would deteriorate, or that the inhabitants would be harmed with the lack thereof.”Footnote 78 In the mountains of Veracruz, all parties were similarly in the habit of cutting trees at the base, and no order was followed, because the fertility of the land meant that “it is not necessary to leave horca y pendón.”Footnote 79 There, indigenous commoners treated the forests “as commons without anyone impeding them” and, despite the overall healthy state of the forests, they were being diminished by this cutting, which the reports make clear.Footnote 80
Similar observations were made in other regions remote from the economic “trunk line” of the Spanish economy.Footnote 81 While local conservation methods no doubt endured longer in these regions, indigenous men and women quickly learned to take advantage of the Spanish legal system as haciendas and the market economy took hold during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because of the abundant forests near Jiquilpan, to the south of Lake Chapala, indigenous people, probably Nahuas and Purépecha, cut trees at the base “with the greatest disorder, annihilating them, especially on the hillsides and slopes, making the acquisition [of wood] more expensive.”Footnote 82 Despite rapid economic development and an influx of migrants into Guerrero during the eighteenth century, in the jurisdiction of Chilpancingo “and in contiguous ones, no method is observed at all” because the forests were “so extensive” that all parties cut freely.Footnote 83 In Colima, forests were “so abundant that no method in the cutting of wood has ever been established,” and the same was reported for the remote coast.Footnote 84 Near the similarly sparsely populated region near Tlalpujahua, extensive forests were cited as a reason that unregulated cutting prevailed.Footnote 85
In areas of dense forests, officials were more likely to complain about their excess than their lack. In Carácuaro, in the mountains of Michoacán, the free cutting and burning of forests was preferred and actively encouraged to support the expansion of maize cultivation to feed the growing population.Footnote 86 The reports from Ario and Coahuayana, both in the jurisdiction of Valladolid (modern Morelia, Michoacán), specified the lack of cutting regulations as a boon because of the clearing that it encouraged. In Colima, cutting was similarly unregulated “because of the benefit that results in deforestation for the planting of maize and cotton,” while in Erongarícuaro it was done to expand pastures. Free cutting was also encouraged to expand cultivation and for better “ventilation” in the remote regions of Huetamo and Tacambaro.Footnote 87 The subdelegado of Metztitlán lamented that forests there overgrew roads and harbored dangerous animals; he believed, as many did well into the nineteenth century, that forests brought constant deluge and cloudiness to the region.Footnote 88 He recommended that forests remain “open for any to cut freely, so that the terrain is opened and cleared and the dangerous paths be widened,” revealing an explicit awareness of the relationship between open-access regimes and deforestation.Footnote 89
While some hacendados in economically peripheral regions did enforce cutting measures, in more central regions privately owned forests generally fared little better than those remaining under royal domain. Hacendados and their mayordomos were driven by short-term economic considerations conditioned by the generally low rate of return on agricultural enterprises.Footnote 90 Agricultural lands were also generally more valuable assets than forests, so the collection of fees to cut was doubly profitable.Footnote 91 Forest owners surrounding Tlaxco, at the base of the forested mountains north of Tlaxcala, permitted wood traders to cut freely for a fee of three pesos annually “without any rule whatsoever.” The traders, “thinking only of the present day,” left only a small trunk incapable of regrowth and sold most of the wood in Puebla to limestone producers, meat smokers, and bakers.Footnote 92 Nahuas from San Francisco Tetlanohcan subsisted almost entirely by selling tar that they produced by piercing the trees, which usually stunted or killed them. Forest owners near Chiautla allowed cutting for “a small gift,” and the subdelegado of Zacatecas condemned the hacendados of his jurisdiction for doing nothing other than “setting and receiving the sums that must be paid to them for the taking of wood” and making it impossible for the local justices to intervene over the use of these forests.Footnote 93 Estate owners near the mines of Taxco also gave open access to their forests to all who were willing to pay one real weekly.Footnote 94 Throughout central Mexico, hacendados, rather than towns, regularly employed forest guards—to enforce the extraction of fees rather than the conservation of forests for the common good.Footnote 95
Indigenous gobernadores at times behaved much like hacendados and allowed outside parties to exploit nearby forests for a fee, at times against the wishes of local residents. The gobernador of Jilotepec did precisely this, leading the community to complain about his despotism and the damage the intrusion of outsiders did to the nearest forests.Footnote 96 “For a small stipend,” they complained, “they have the forests at their disposition, with neither the rents nor the frequent products they take providing any common benefit.”Footnote 97 The forest report verified that “no agreement has been observed in previous times for the cutting [of wood]” and that local hacendados also permitted open-access cutting for a fee.Footnote 98
The expansion of arable lands and pastures to sustain local populations and to feed growing cities was another important factor. One Otomí witness from Jilotepec testified that many “recently married and poor” were unable to obtain communal tierras de repartimiento on which to build their homes and that many entered the trade in timber and tannins.Footnote 99 Those who did not enter the trade had the option of clearing trees to open new fields, which many did. However, beginning in the 1760s, several haciendas, particularly the Hacienda de Nixini to the southwest of Villa del Carbón, began making stronger claims to some of the lower forested slopes and pushing the impoverished woodcutters farther up the roads, making the expansion of arable fields more difficult. Most of the hacendados allowed unrestricted cutting in the forest for a fee. Testimony from the 1780s describes the use of burnt oak trees as boundary markers within the lands claimed by Nixini, suggesting the use of fire to clear the lower forests to expand pastures.Footnote 100 Chapa de Mota into the 1790s tried to dislodge some farmers (labradores) from the forests that he used to supply wood to the Real Desagüe.Footnote 101 The complaint did not specify a single party, but rather noted that “with the passing of time the neighboring labradores have slowly been introducing themselves into our lands and usurping them to the point that they have legally claimed them.”Footnote 102
Several reports strongly condemned the expansion of pastures near forests. Each year in the months of March and April, ranchers set fire to their pastures and montes to recycle nutrients into the soil, to open new lands for planting and grazing, and to eliminate unwanted weeds and pests from the tall grasses. While this was beneficial in the short term, fires also destroyed the seeds and shoots of many trees that were beginning to sprout during the spring. Any shoots that did emerge were often consumed by goats and other draft animals. The subdelegado of Zacatecas criticized the destructive practice of burning to expand grazing land, which turned great expanses of forest into arid wastelands, while the official from Xalatlaco observed that the forests grew back “unless they are burned for pastures.”Footnote 103 Livestock invasions into recently deforested lands also contributed significantly to hillside erosion. Near Toluca this practice “exposes the soil to the violence of the storms that drag the agricultural soils down to the plains below.” According to the official, “this is the origin of these slopes of Santa Fe and the hills of Toluca, and many others in this kingdom, appearing so barren and depopulated.”Footnote 104 The combined effects of unrestricted cutting, burning, and pasturing permanently converted high-altitude hardwood forests into an eroded and degraded landscape of little economic utility.
Official Remedies
To remedy these problems, officials recommended few if any changes to existing law, believing instead that the problem was one of enforcement. The most common remedy officials suggested was the establishment of royal guards to enforce forestry laws. The subdelegado of Tenango del Valle believed that such guards could prevent the local Nahua and Matlatzinca populations, who supplied wood and fuel to the Royal Mint, from wastefully felling trees that they did not use.Footnote 105 The report from Taxco notes that the implementation of a rational forestry system would require the establishment of one or two forest guards to police and punish violators, a duty historically expected of municipal councils. Some respondents, however, believed that guards alone were insufficient and instead recommended the creation of a new permanent office dedicated to forest conservation. The official from Temascaltepec recommended that “in each jurisdiction or district a committee member be named by Your Excellency, authorizing him with the greatest respect with the title of Forest Conservation Judge”; the person so designated would be granted effective jurisdiction over all public and private forests. Both he and the subdelegado from Zacatecas recommended as well the appointment of trained carpenters who could recommend and verify the quantities of wood that might be taken for a project. Several reports suggested that any person who wanted to fell a tree be made to solicit the expertise of a master carpenter (at their own expense) to determine the type and quantity of wood needed.
Many reports reiterated the need to enforce the medieval requirement that firewood be collected from either deadwood or the small branches of trees, always leaving horca y pendón on hardwoods.Footnote 106 The official from Jilotepec recommended that woodcutters and traders be forbidden to fell trees larger than they needed, echoing other complaints about the cutting of immature trees that required less work to process. While most blamed deforestation on perceived indigenous racial and cultural traits they saw as incompatible with rational conservation measures, some did blame hacendados for failing to properly regulate the forests on their properties. The official from Zamora (Michoacán) noted the failure of hacienda owners to enforce the leaving of horca y pendón and recommended an order requiring them to do so.Footnote 107 Others saw the need to leave forests fallow for a time to permit regrowth. The respondent from Taxco suggested that local officials work with estate owners to establish a system of rotation whereby a portion of their forests would be left “to rest” (descanzar) and recover.Footnote 108 The official from Jiquilpan suggested that local magistrates demarcate areas where cutting would be permitted.Footnote 109
The replanting of trees, a legal requirement emphasized by Spanish state forestry officials, though with mixed success, was essentially unknown in Mexico, save for the occasional beautification project or where it would reinforce dikes.Footnote 110 Noting this failure, the official from Metepec implored the council to take up replanting in a serious way, since plantations of trees were “one of the principal branches of the rural economy.”Footnote 111 Oak trees were particularly emphasized because of their slow rate of growth and high versatility within a mixed agrarian economy. He explained that the replanting of trees in Spain was why “the forests of the Province of Guipúzcoa,” a major shipbuilding region, “are maintained in a better state than those of the rest of Spain.”Footnote 112 The official who prepared the report for Temascaltepec also suggested the establishment of an oak plantation in his jurisdiction near Almoloya to the northwest of Toluca, perhaps because there was still a small grove of trees there in the 1790s.Footnote 113
The need for replanting was emphasized most strongly by officials from mining districts, with the official from Taxco condemning his predecessors’ failures and noting that “it is easy to conceive that these [forests] are being felled, without there having been planted a single tree in three hundred years,” and pointing to the negligence officials had displayed in enforcement.Footnote 114Novohispano officials also recommended much higher ratios of newly planted trees to those cut, demonstrating the degree of crisis. While Spanish law required the planting of three trees for each one cut, the subdelegado of Taxco suggested a ratio of seven to one, while the official from Tlazazalca suggested a ratio as high as ten to one to offset the unregulated cutting of traders who fed the mines of Guanajuato.Footnote 115
Josef de Peón Valdés and Miguel Pacheco Solís, the responding officials from Zacatecas and Taxco, respectively, penned perhaps the strongest indictments of New Spain's sylvan political ecology. Pacheco understood that the barren and desertified landscape of his jurisdiction resulted from a lack of cooperation among local stakeholders. Both indigenous towns and hacendados, who together owned all forests in the region, welcomed the formation of family settlements (rancherías), which paid fees to the owners for open access to their forests. He noted, however, that within these settlements owners appointed local captains who worked with the local justices to prevent conflict and ensure the collection of fees, and this group, he argued, could form the basis for a new conservation program. While such an undertaking might “appear at first glance harmful to the hacendados because it restricts their decisions within their absolute domain,” Pacheco thought this view was short-sighted: without the adoption and enforcement of local conservation measures, their enterprises would collapse along with the “ruin of an entire mineral province.”Footnote 116 But Pacheco was optimistic, channeling the poet Virgil's parable that while the descent into hell is simple, the return to light is the hard part: “Hoc opus, hic labor est.”Footnote 117 The case highlights the late colonial tensions between older cooperative regimes and landowners’ increasingly fervent assertions of individual rights.
Peón similarly decried the failure of officials to regulate forest use and the profit-seeking hacendados’ collection of rents for open access to the few remaining forests within the orbit of Zacatecas. But he was more pessimistic than Pacheco, arguing that the extreme desertification of his jurisdiction prevented the establishment of any new plantations. His understanding of the common good was also more closely linked to the Bourbon promotion of royal absolutism and private property as means toward economic revitalization. “To remedy such pernicious evils against the state, and against the same hacendados,” he wrote:
I do not find any means other … than that the forests cannot be commons, so that in this way they come under the immediate direction of the royal judges and guards. The owners will be obliged to take special care of [the forests], that the cutters of wood do not make use of them, but only of the useful branches, reserving those that do not allow for reproduction and regrowth until the appropriate time. In this way the little trees that recently grew from a seed that fell on the ground would be able to grow, and the case of their total extermination will not arise.Footnote 118
Peón hailed from the densely forested Spanish region of Asturias, a key supplier of hardwood for the shipping industry, which had witnessed increasingly intense efforts by state foresters during the eighteenth century to study deforestation and to bring the powers of the state to bear upon communitarian practices.Footnote 119 It was a short leap for Peón to believe that the remedy applied in the metropole could be applied generally, even if others before him had come to different conclusions.
Conclusion
From the sixteenth century, interactions between woodcutters and the Spanish legal system had intersected with ecological, demographic, and economic changes in ways that tended to convert the common-pool forests of New Spain into open-access commons, which in turn created new possibilities for litigants to promote their interests. Because the crown's usurpation of indigenous communities’ eminent domain over forests disempowered their ability to directly shape the rules and regulations governing local forest use, litigation became the primary avenue through which local rights were established, even when these new rights infringed upon traditional conservation arrangements. During the eighteenth century especially, population pressures and the market economy further drove the infringement of woodcutters, which in turn motivated the landed elite to seek new avenues of power through appeals to the state and the establishment of private, rather than communal, forest guards.
Like the Novíssima Recopilación, which the monarchy intended to serve as the embodiment of Bourbon regalism throughout the empire, the reform project of the Council on Forests never lived up to the lofty goals set by its framers.Footnote 120 The documents do not record exactly why the new forestry regime was never put into practice, but informed speculation is possible. For one, less than a decade later Napoleon deposed the Spanish monarchy and set in motion the crisis of sovereignty that finally severed the political ties between Mexico and Spain. But the reform efforts had hurdles of their own. Among them was a basic contradiction: the responses and recommendations received by the council drew, in often contradictory ways, from older Habsburg notions of the bien común, which stressed the monarchy's imperative to protect the public good from private greed, whereas newer Bourbon interpretations elevated the monarchy's responsibility to foment economic development above such considerations.
Differences in geography, climate, economy, and entrenched interests also served to hinder efforts to establish a new general ordinance, which led the council to abandon the project in favor of a more regional approach. But most important were the expectations held by commoners, who pushed crown officials to uphold their usufruct rights, and landowners, who expected the state to uphold their “absolute domain” over privately held lands. At a time when the intellectual forces of individualization and economic growth were beginning to overtake notions of protectionism and stability as the raison d’être of the state, both the old and the new blended together in contentious ways within the pages of the colonial legal system. In the end, both usufructuaries and landowners got just enough of what they wanted to set in motion an evolving crisis that remained almost imperceptible for nearly three centuries, until it became impossible to ignore.
