Founding of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata
The Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was created by Charles III in 1776, carving out of Peru a new jurisdiction covering modern Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, with its capital at Buenos Aires. The immediate reason was Portugal. Portuguese settlement from Brazil had been pushing into the Banda Oriental for a century, and the fortified town of Colónia do Sacramento sat directly across the estuary from Buenos Aires as a permanent smuggling entrepôt. Pedro de Cevallos was sent with a large expedition, took Colónia, and was made the first viceroy. The deeper reason was the Bourbon Reforms. Buenos Aires had been an administrative afterthought, forbidden to trade directly with Spain and supplied through Lima across the continent, which had made contraband the basis of its economy. The reform inverted that. The Reglamento de Libre Comercio of 1778 opened the port to direct trade with Spain and the Caribbean, and the silver of Potosí — transferred from Peruvian to Río de la Plata jurisdiction — now flowed east through Buenos Aires instead of west to Lima. The city's population and wealth grew rapidly. A merchant class formed whose interests lay in open Atlantic trade rather than in the old imperial monopoly. That class defended the city itself when British expeditions took it in 1806 and 1807 and were expelled by locally raised militias without help from Spain — which demonstrated, three years before the May Revolution, that the colony could defend and govern itself. Upper Peru's transfer also seeded the later separation of Bolivia.
- Year: 1776 CE
- Category: Political
