At present our knowledge of Bourbon Mexico is partial and inconsistent. Although progressive increments of quantitative data have effaced the traditional image of this epoch, the new lines of research have yet to be framed within a general perspective. Since the salient opened by our work on León may prove difficult to capture, it behoves us to examine its implications for the current debate. In any case, the history of a particular locality rarely makes much sense without some consideration of its place within the overall context.

The conventional view of Bourbon Mexico as the golden age of the colonial regime was first propounded in the last century by the conservative historian, Lucas Alamán, who painted a bitter contrast between the economic retrogression and political disorder which followed the attainment of Independence and the enlightened government and diffusion of prosperity which characterised the last decades of the previous century. The burden of proof here rested on the array of statistics presented in the Essai Politique of Alexander von Humboldt. These figures showed that it was in the years after the general Inspection of José de Gálvez (1765–71) that silver output leapt forward from about II million pesos to a peak in 1805 of 25 million pesos. At much the same time overseas trade and government revenue registered substantial increases. Equally important, the Church tithe levied on agricultural production in the six leading dioceses rose by 60% from 1.19 million pesos in 1771 to 1.91 million in 1789.

At the close of the eighteenth century, it took from four to six days to ride on horseback from Mexico City to Querétaro, still then called ‘the door to the Interior’. But before entering the arid steppelands of the North, the traveller first came to the Bajío, an area which was ‘rich and fertile and very carefully cultivated’. Indeed Alexander von Humboldt, who visited the region in the summer months of 1803, later wrote: ‘In Mexico the plains which stretch from Salamanca to Silao, Guanajuato and the town of León have the best cultivated fields in Mexico and remind one of the most attractive countryside in France.’ Similarly, Joel Poinsett, the first American envoy to Mexico, was surprised to find that ‘the plain which extends from Apaseo to León is full of small cities, villages and farms.’ It is only fair to note, however, that impressions, depended upon the season, since H. G. Ward, who saw the province, in November 1827 after a prolonged drought, confessed his disappointment that ‘the country wore the same dull livery of dust which gives so monotonous a character to the scenery throughout, the Tableland’.

Situated at the very centre of the modern Mexican republic within the states of Guanajuato and Querétaro historically and geographically, the Bajío was a frontier zone, standing between the inhospitable wastelands of the north and the fertile valleys of the central plateau. During the Tertiary Age, the plains had formed a vast lake lined by volcanoes.

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.