The Role of the Merchants in the Economic Development of São Paulo, 1765–1850
M /[ ERCHANTS have been the focus of a continuing debate among colonial Latin Americanists for over a decade. Questions at issue include the social origins of merchants, their relationships to planters and government officials, and their presence in elite institutions. A recent study by Rae Flory and David G. Smith on colonial Bahia demonstrates the seventeenth and eighteenthcentury participation of merchants in elite institutions and the impossibility of maintaining that merchants and planters were rigidly divided in social and/or economic terms. Flory and Smith's work is an important addition to a body of literature that includes contributions by David Brading, Stuart Schwartz, A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Susan Socolow, John N. Kennedy, and Louisa Hoberman.' This literature clearly demonstrates the permeable quality of elite institutions and the colonial social structure they reflect. However, the new view of the colonial elite fails to explain either laws excluding merchants from certain elite institutions or such events as the 1711 war between planters and merchants in Recife (the Guerra dos Mascates). Scholars must be careful not to dismiss this evidence of conflict between merchants and planters for a new vision of