Whatever occurred elsewhere in Mexico, in the Bajío there is no evidence to suggest that the period known as the Porfiriato (1876–1910) witnessed any concentration of landownership. Indeed, since the census recorded that the number of haciendas and ranchos in the State of Guanajuato respectively increased from 442 and 2,716 in 1882 to 534 and 3,999 in 1910 the average size of these units obviously diminished. Certainly in León, although the largest haciendas such as Otates, Santa Rosa and Sandía continued without partition, other estates like Palote, Sauces, Pompa, Losa, and Hoya were divided and sections sold. By far the most striking example in this latter group is afforded by San Nicolás which in 1894 was broken up into ten separate farms or ranchos by the widow and children of Miguel Urteaga Septién. Moreover, since these properties only comprised 1¾ caballerías or 75 acres, it is clear that the outlying rancho called Noria de Septién already had been sold. In this fashion the estate so patiently pieced together by Agustín de Septién y Montero in the 1740s, after four generations of subsequent possession by the same family, finally disappeared from the map. It is a commentary on the value of lands situated close to the expanding limits of the city that in 1922 just one caballeria of the former San Nicolás sold for 19,000 pesos.

In his classic account of the formation of the great estate in New Spain, François Chevalier observed with some surprise that it is not until the latter part of the eighteenth century that we encounter any contemporary description of the Mexican hacienda. Moreover, it is startling to note that the first comments by travellers from abroad were almost invariably hostile. On his journey to the North in 1777–78, Juan Agustín de Morfi, a friar from the Peninsula, sharply criticised the concentration of landownership in the colony, which left the countryside vacant and uncultivated. Passing through the district of San Miguel el Grande he found that the hacienda of La Erre devoted a vast area of land to mere pasture, whereas the Indians of the neighbouring village of Dolores lacked space to plant their maize. Much the same reaction was expressed by the British Minister, H. G. Ward, who in 1827 deprecated the stark contrast on Jaral between the great fortified casco and the squalid huts of its peons.

Official opinion coincided with the views of the travellers. By the late eighteenth century belief in the economic virtues of the proprietary farmer, with the consequent condemnation of any monopoly in landownership, had become articles of faith among the enlightened, administrators who served the Bourbon dynasty. The same doctrines were embraced by the Liberal politicians who fought to transform Mexican society in the decades after Independence.

In a frontier society such as eighteenth century León, where the development of haciendas depended on the financial resources of their owners, it was only to be expected that merchants and miners would play an important role in the transformation of the countryside. In a few cases hacendado families contrived to improve their estates over the course of the century. But in the years prior to 1760 it was mainly merchants who were responsible for the formation of new haciendas, either by financing the conversion of scrubland into arable, or through the purchase of entire series of ranchos and labores. Only in the last decades of the century did wealthy miners from Guanajuato and Catorce emerge as the leading landowners in the district. Obviously, these distinctions in period and occupation should not be pressed too hard, since from the start several merchants derived their profits from mining operations and they certainly did not disappear from the scene after 1780. Indeed, at all times, many proprietors were described as ‘merchants and landowners’. It is surely significant that in a group of ten leading merchants who contracted to farm the royal excise or alcabala, no less than six owned or were about to own haciendas. Then again, apart from a few absentee landlords, virtually all the hacendados in the district lived in León so that it would be quite false to present any radical dichotomy between the rural gentry and urban traders.

How many workers were employed on haciendas in León? What was the ratio of resident peons to the number of seasonal jornaleros? How many tenants were there and how much of the hacienda did they farm? What proportion of the harvest was actually sold each year? What was the rate of profit? As we argued above, answers to such questions can only come from an analysis of the accounts of particular haciendas. Unfortunately, there were no legal reasons why anyone should deposit his private papers in a public archive. Indeed only in cases of judicial embargo or when an estate was managed by a guardian was there any call for a public comprobation of accounts. In León summary returns were filed with the municipal magistrates for only three states – Duarte, Otates and Sauz de Armenta – which at the time were respectively managed by a legal executor or guardian on behalf of an elderly infirm spinster, a lunatic and a child. Clearly, the reasons which dictated the survival of these documents also biased their direction against any high yield of profit. The selection is also distorted, although the interest greatly heightened by the coincidence of our first two examples with the Insurgency of 1810–21. Despite these obvious defects, the records provide invaluable evidence about the internal organisation of agricultural production which cannot be found in any other type of source material of this period.

Although both foreign travellers and native novelists of the last century commented extensively on the manners and life of the rancheros, it was left to the American geographer, G. M. McBride to provide the first systematic survey of this neglected stratum of society in the Mexican countryside. From a brief study of the census returns, he found that the number of small properties in the Republic had risen from 15,085 in 1854 to no less than 47,939 in 1910. By this latter year, about a third of all ranchos were located in the adjoining states of Guanajuato, Jalisco and Michoacán. Strongly influenced by the theories of Luis Wistano Orozco and Andrés Molina Enríquez he ascribed this surprising increase to the Liberal Reform Laws of the 1850s which had effected the auction of corporate property in land and enforced the distribution in separate lots of the communal holdings of the Indian villages. Equally important, he identified the rancheros as an embryonic, rural middle class of predominantly mestizo origin. Confirmation for these hypotheses came from a study of Las Arandas, a district situated among the hills of Jalisco, where in the middle years of the nineteenth century the great estates which hitherto had dominated the zone were broken into small units and sold to a numerous group of local farmers.

There was little in the early history of León to suggest its future prominence as a leading industrial centre. For most of the colonial period, it remained a small market town overshadowed by the booming prosperity of Guanajuato which was situated only a day's journey away in the sierra. Founded in 1576 as a military outpost to safeguard the silver trains from Chichimeca attack, the villa of San Sebastián de León soon benefited from its commercially advantageous position at the western border of the Bajío, straddling the trade routes which led to Zacatecas and Guadalajara. The town also served as the administrative capital of an extensive alcaldía mayor, which included the districts of Pénjamo, San Pedro Piedragorda and Rincón. But the main purpose of the town was to serve as a place of residence for local landowners and farmers.

From the outset the small band of Spanish settlers were joined by free mulattoes and Indians. In 1591 a few Otomies set up a small village called San Miguel a few hundred yards south of the main square, and some years later another group of Indians, possibly Tarascans, built a second pueblo, called Coecillo, on the eastern outskirts of the town. That Indians moved into this zone some years after the Spanish occupation is confirmed by the comparatively late foundation of San Francisco de Rincón in 1605, and still more by the viceregal recognition of its neighbour, Purísima de Rincón, in 1648.

In the winter months of 1969, shortly after the completion of Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, I returned to the archives of Mexico. In that book I had argued that ‘the Mexican hacienda was a sink through which drained without stop the surplus capital accumulated in the export economy’. But for the historian, as much as for the scientist, hypothesis often runs ahead of available evidence. It was now time to verify this proposition. Anxious to avoid a wild goose chase for random data, a procedure bound to turn up material biased in favour of my case, I chose to concentrate on haciendas in the Bajío, the region most affected by eighteenth-century expansion of silver production. In the event, only Léon was found to possess a continuous series of records. The scholar may propound his questions, but it is the sources which prescribe the limits of the answers. In point of fact, the very reliance on public documents, be they municipal, notarial or parochial, precluded any sustained treatment of the central issue of the original hypothesis – the rate of agricultural profit and its relation to capital investment. Only the internal accounts of individual haciendas will yield a satisfactory resolution of this problem. Similarly, without access to such papers it was difficult to obtain any sure impression of the organisation of production or the disposition of the work-force within the great estate.