El Consulado de ComercioCartagena de Indias y su papel económico y político en el conflicto de independencia (1795-1821)

Laburpena

The economic politics of the absolutist monarchy did not find goods ways from which to impose a rational authority of the resources. Thus, the individual actions of the «virreyes» more reformists finished hitting against the inability to reform an economic obsolete and archaic system. The «Real Cédula» of June 14, 1795 arranged the erection of a consulate of trade in Cartagena de Indias. The merchants natives of Cartagena, triumphant on those of Santa Fe, had from this moment a powerful political weapon to lean the economic power that of fact already they were handling. The economic structure of the monarchy would not change with the introduction of these new institutions (of medieval origin), but the politics were modified: new political recognized agents who till now had been relegated to the local governments, will show a supra-regional power to facing the civil servants of the wreath. Nevertheless, except in very isolated and theoretical cases, they will raise neither a transformation of the economic structure nor a process of dynamization of the trade and of the production and will conform, at first, to that the new institutions they use as defense of own profit and very concrete interests, which did not come any more than to the individuals ones and to those of his own socioeconomic nets. But to the time, the assumption of the political power come from the new consular institutions, prepared the strategies that might develop in a future and divided deeply the societies. In the struggle for the independence, the fight for the political institutional control, channeled the political action of the social nets and separated, forever, creoles of peninsular Spanish.