This article examines the factors that enabled French merchants to enter the Spanish Indies markets during the 1620s, particularly in the period betwen the Peace of Monzón (1627) and the outbreak of the Franco-Spanish War (1635). It highlights how the French nation of Seville received unprecedented support from the Crown to develop their marginal enterprises in the Carrera de Indias. Royal patronage played a significant role in integrating—or exluding—wealthy merchant communities from the Spanish Atlantic trading system, therby expanding their networks for direct exchanges with the Americas. The study reconstructs French commercial connections within the Spanish Atlantic trade, contextualized alongside Flemish and Italian networks already operating in New Spain. These three nations dominated much of the cargo legally shipped to and from the viceroyalty in the 1620s and 1630s. The analysis details French business interactions with “native” and “foreign” merchants, their resilience following the economic reprisal of 1635, and observations on the reconfiguration of foreign trading networks alongthe New Spain axis during the Spanish Empire’s economic and political crises of the 1640s.

Between 1800 and 1820, Buenos Aires and the former colonial Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata faced an unprecedented fiscal crisis caused by the revolutionary wars, eventually solved by levying forced loans. This paper considers the unintended institutional consequences of these loans. The novel devices allowed (1) the holders of forced-loan coupons to use these bonds to pay off debts incurred in customs duties and (2) the holders of bills of exchange involved in the provisioning of the military to use these bills to pay part of their forced loans. Starting with the conceptualisation of the institutional order as a complex system, this paper examines the interactions among the circulation of financial paper bills, the financing of war and changes in the position of the merchants' guild and the legal framework for Atlantic trade. It thereby contributes to renewing institutional change approaches in the Spanish-American context.