Old Habits

This chapter asks what the implicit understandings were between empire and colony for almost two hundred years before the change to Bourbon governance and an eighteenth-century period of commercial conflict. It discusses briefly how the Spanish Empire addressed smuggling in the immediate decades after Caracas’s mid-sixteenth-century founding, then moves to the seventeenth-century transition to an almost monocrop, cacao-based economy and the rise of interimperial contact that accompanied it. The chapter ends shortly before the establishment of the Caracas Company in 1728. It also includes a basic primer to the Spanish commercial system meant to give the reader a sense of exactly how illicit trade deviated from imperial guidelines. Chapter one functions as an examination of the Habsburg status quo of benign neglect that governed Venezuela from its inception until the rise of the Caracas Company. It argues that this was a colony that received little commercial support but also little outside intervention where extralegal interimperial trade was concerned.