In 1800, the viceroy of the Rio de la Plata, Marqués de Avilés, abolished the communal system that organized the economic life in the Guarani missions. With this decision, Avilés was trying to end with a long period of socio-economic crisis of the Guarani missions that started after the expulsion of the Jesuit and prolonged until the nineteenth century. Historians that studied this economic crisis focused primarily on demographics, production, trade and the institutional architecture that organized the economic life of the missions. These valuable studies, however, have not approached the consequences of economic transformations over the power relations inside the missions.

In this article I argue that: 1) structural transformations modified the relationship between Guarani authorities and commoners, weakening the first; 2) the consequences of the economic transformations were unequal over Guarani population and with regional variability; 3) these transformations led to a process of social differentiation inside the missions that had no place before the expulsion of the Jesuits.

Pre-Circulated Paper and Registration

The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Amanda Pinheiro.

This is a virtual event on Zoom.