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Abstract: The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a period of dramatic economic and population change for the Spanish Caribbean, including Puerto Rico. This note describes a unique collection of population data that sheds nuanced light on older research themes and promises to inspire new inquiries. These aggregate population data, or padrones, commissioned by the Spanish Crown and now more widely available and usable than ever before, offer details on Puerto Rico's sex, age, status, and socio-racial composition on an annual basis for the period spanning 1779 to 1802. We describe the data, their accompanying limitations, and their potential uses to advance scholarship on late-colonial Spanish America.
In the present note, we describe a set of population padrones from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for the Spanish Caribbean colony of Puerto Rico extant in the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville, Spain, that we have digitized and made available for public use in an unprecedented way. This rich collection of twenty-three yearly summary censuses covering the years 1779 to 1802 documents a period of steep growth in the island's population. It is part of a larger set consisting of as many as twenty-seven padrones commissioned by the governors and captains general with data most likely conveyed to central authorities by parish priests. This statistical effort followed in the wake of a 1776 Crown request for annual population figures on many Spanish American jurisdictions. Despite their limitations, the documents are a unique source, an annual statistical series of considerable value for understanding the social and demographic history of late-colonial Spanish America. The consistency and care with which government officials compiled them and shipped them to the métropole, despite disruptions in transatlantic navigation during the 1790s and early 1800s, underscores their special character and value. Scholars will welcome the fact that the padrones have been digitized and made available for public access as part of the collections housed in the University of Wisconsin's Data and Information Services Center (DISC) as well as the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), thus making them more widely available and usable.
In the following pages, we describe the collection and suggest some of the uses to which its rich data may be put. First,...