Summaries of Cargo and Tax Revenues of the Royal Treasury of Santiago at the pinnacle of Bourbon Reformism in Chile (1768-1790)

Abstract

This article deals with the evolution and structure of the tax revenues of the royal treasury of Santiago de Chile during the last third of the 18th century, based on the distinction between the summaries of cargo from the books of this treasury and the effective tax collection reported by the General Accounting Office in 1792. This exercise shows the impact of the accounting reform of 1784 on said administrative records and the difficulty that it could mean for the timely obtaining of comprehensible syntheses about the state of this treasury. The high correlation between the economic and official fiscal variables, unlike that obtained through the summaries of cargo and, regarding the growth of the Santiago treasury, although it was partly explained by the course of the economy, it was also the result of the reformist process organized from the metropolis.