Bourbon Reforms, State Capacity, and Revolution in the Spanish Empire

We study the interplay between state modernization, extractive institutions, and political upheaval in the colonial world. Our analysis focuses on the introduction of a new corps of governors called intendants, overseeing a new set of intermediate administrative units called intendancies, throughout Spain’s American empire during the late 18th century. Leveraging granular microdata and the staggered adoption of the reform, we show that the intendancy system alleviated agency problems and led to improvements in state capacity along four key dimensions: (i) greater state presence in peripheral areas; (ii) higher fiscal revenue; (iii) production of new cartographic information; and (iv) reduced incidence of Indigenous conflict. However, additional evidence based on naming patterns, a catalog of letters, and biographies of notable individuals, indicates that the reform also led to heightened anti-Spanish sentiment amonglocal elites, who saw their economic privileges curtailed, and bolstered Latin America’s nascent independence movement in the early 19th century.