These
privileges were continued until as late as 1790.
The Casa de Contratacion, although in many respects a purely mercantile
body, was endowed with special powers. So wide was its authority that to
be associated with this body was wont to prove of enormous financial
benefit. Thus, it was entitled to make its own laws, and it was
specially enacted by Royal Decree that these were to be obeyed by all
Spanish subjects as implicitly as any others of the nation.
So far as the commercial world was concerned, the powers of the Casa de
Contratacion were sheerly autocratic. The institution, in fact, held the
fortunes of all the colonials in its hand. It possessed, in the first
place, the privilege of naming the price which the inhabitants of the
New World should pay for the manufactured goods of the Old. In addition
to this, it lay within its domain to arrange the rates at which the
produce sent from the colonies was to be sold in the Spanish markets.
From this it will be evident that, commercially speaking, its powers
were feudal.
It was inevitable that frequent evils should have sprung from the
inauguration of a system such as this. It became almost a religion to
every Spanish official and trader to batten upon the unfortunate
colonial, quite regardless of the fact that the pioneer settler was
being strangled during the process.
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