ABSTRACT
The Bourbon reforms in the field of colonial trade represented a supreme effort to recover for Spain a dominant position in the markets of Spanish America. The Creole upper class enjoyed greater opportunities for material and cultural enrichment in the Bourbon era. The Bourbon reforms, combined with a rising European demand for Spanish American products, helped expand colonial trade and prosperity in the last half of the eighteenth century. In the last half of the eighteenth century, colonial manufacturing, after a period of long and steady growth, began to decline as an influx of cheap European wares displaced domestic products. Peru and Mexico both shared in the advance, but the Mexican mines, where production had been rising quite consistently since the sixteenth century, forged far ahead of their Peruvian rivals in the Bourbon era. Despite Catholic censorship, the Bourbon monarchs and their advisers encouraged the dissemination and practical implementation of new ideas, particularly those pertaining to economic and scientific development.
