Power in the Peripheries: Family Business and the Global Reach of the 18th-Century Spanish Empire

Abstract

Through the investigation of the strategies and tactics the San Juan de Santa Cruz family used in local contexts, this study demonstrates how Spanish colonists were able to access the global economy. Beyond the construction of family and political networks, the brothers connected the peripheries of Manila- Acapulco, Veracruz, and Nueva Vizcaya in order to manage and expand their family business empire beyond the cores of Mexico City or the crown in Spain. Each chapter of the dissertation focuses on the local strategies employed by Francisco and Manuel in particular peripheries, and investigates the links created by the family between peripheral locations in an effort to access the global economy, avoiding core areas in the process. Relying on the conceptual language of Immanuel Wallerstein's world-system, but following a creative opening cracked by Andre Gunder Frank, this study posits a multi- polar world system in which there were multiple cores, namely Asia, Mexico, and Europe. Mexico is centered in this study as a core that controls aspects of Europe's access to the commanding Asian export economy. The role of peripheries within the Mexican core provides an opportunity to reevaluate the relationship of cores to peripheries, and illustrates the role of merchant- bureaucrats, located in the Americas, in the early modern world economy.