The Economic Geography of the Guarani-Mission Urban System in Colonial Spanish America

Caterina Pizzigoni, Columbia University
Gergely Baics, Barnard College

At last year’s SSHA, we presented on our ongoing work that argues that before the Jesuits expulsion, the thirty Guarani missions founded by them in present-day Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, constituted a viable urban system of Indigenous residents. This year, we will expand on the analysis in two ways. First, with the integration of additional GIS data, including “hGIS de las Indias” on 18th-century Spanish America, the “Atlas Digital da América Lusa” on colonial Brazil, and the “French and Spanish Missions in North America” website on colonial missions in present-day USA and Canada, we now have a more robust spatial dataset on settlements and populations, covering c. 2,400 missions. This improves our spatial analysis, and addresses a comment from last year about the need to include in our study small non-mission towns in the Rio de La Plata region. Second, our focus has turned to the region’s economic geography. We seek to explore the riverine and inland trade routes for key export commodities (yerba mate, but also textiles and hides) developed by the Jesuits, which helped pay for mission imports, and sustained the region’s densely populated network of Guarani towns. Bringing GIS to the existing economic history literature on mission trade allows for situating the development of the Guarani urban system in relation to other regional urban systems, especially that of Asunción, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Potosi. It also opens up the possibility for comparisons with other regions, including the Hudson or Delaware River Valleys, similarly characterized by a densely settled riverine hinterland with a viable export commodity and a gateway port, linked commercially to other regional urban systems.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 136. Global Histories and Data: Building Maps & Linking Data Across Time and Place