Main Treasury or General Treasury?. The accounting control in 1720

a troubled history

Abstract

The paper studies the conflicts originated because of the organization of accounting control of the Exchequer between two groups of persons who had to do with the first political-administrative reforms carried out by Philip V at the middle of the 1720s. The different forms of control practiced by the Tesorería Mayor (Main Treasury), which was established in 1703, and in particular the implications of the Unique account. In this account were combined the accounts kept by the diverse treasurers of the army, who reported to the Main Treasurer. They also recorded the charge and discharge operations made by the responsible officers of the king's incomes when their product was trusted to the Main Treasurer. This was the case with the treasurers and receivers of the most important incomes of the Crown (general income, salt income, tobacco income, mining income, etc.). The Main Treasurer supervised these agents and in this way one of the persons involved in the conflicts could compare the Main Treasury with a General Audit Body.

The Unique account was conceived in diverse ways by its contemporary, as the paper shows. While Fernando Verdes Montenegro (Secretary of State and Finance of Louis I) and Jose Patiño (Secretary of Finance from October 1726) opted for systemizing the Unique account, the Treasurer Nicolás de Hinojosa promoted an alternative organization of control and the Treasury. In this proposal the Unique account disappears: the Treasurer, called here General, and the army treasurers present their accounts separately and the aggregation of the information in order to establish balances and estimations was made out of the Treasury office. This understanding way of the General Treasury was abandoned few months after having been established: it functioned from March to September 1726.

The purpose of this paper is both informative and interpretive. It makes known this scarcely known episode in the financial control history. My analysis confirms that this history is not a lineal process oriented towards concentration, homogeneity, and rationality: it has to be read in political key. In fact, my hypothesis is that behind the different Treasury models are at stake conflicting conceptions of financial government. For this reason, José Patiño does withdraw Hinojosa's General Treasury because of technical inferiority, but for political reasons.