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Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico: A Review Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Richard Salvucci
Richard Salvucci*
Affiliation:
Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas
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Extract

About twenty years ago, the Mexican SepSetentas series published La historia económica en América Latina, the proceedings of a symposium held at the thirty-ninth International Congress of Americanists. For many novice historians of Mexico, the SepSetentas collectionavailable for ten (very old) pesos each at fine shops in the Metro, or at Sanborns-were Penguins or Pelicans of a lesser sort. Graduate students eagerly awaited new volumes, and scoured the streets for older ones. SepSetentas published some first-rate items, and, alas, some not-so-first-rate ones. La historia económica en América Latina was a keeper. Its second volume contained useful bibliographies and historiographical essays by Enrique Florescano, David Brading, Woodrow Borah and Sherburne Cook, and Jan Bazant. To take just one example, Brading noticed that no one had reconciled Chevalier's Land and Society with Borah's New Spain's Century of Depression. “Where should one look to study domestic industry or commerce?” Brading wondered. The accounts of the Royal Treasury had not been systematically exploited. The tobacco industry had yet to find its historian. The costs of Spanish colonialism were essentially unknown. The proper scope of rural history was the regional study. And so on. Obviously, Brading's essay proved remarkably prescient. Historians in Mexico, Great Britain, Western Europe, the United States and Canada have all had a hand in carrying out the agenda that Brading proposed. We have, as the song says, come a long way. The latest and most comprehensive measure of our progress is the long-awaited appearance of Richard Garner's (with Spiro E. Stefanou) Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993).

Type
Research Issues
Information
The Americas , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , October 1994 , pp. 219 - 231
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1994

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References

1 La historia económica en america latina, 2 vols., (México, 1972).

2 La historia económica, vol. 2., p. 103.

3 See O’Brien, Patrick, “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 41:1 (1988), 3.Google Scholar

4 Rosenzweig’s well known study, “La economía novohispana al comenzar el siglo xix” has been reprinted in El desarollo económico de México, 1800–1910 (Toluca, 1989), pp. 23–85.

I combined Garner’s data and Rosenzweig’s shares of value added to compute the following equation, 1.3= .47(.8)+ .15(1.4)+ .38(x), where “x” is the implied rate of growth of manufactures. Lucas Alamán shows that silver coinage was five to six million pesos per year around 1700. See his Historia de México (1849), vol. 1, Appendix, Document 4.

5 Brading, D.A., Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío. León 1700–1860 (Cambridge, England, 1978), pp. 65, 70, 180–182.Google Scholar

6 Rosenzweig, , “La economía novohispana al comenzar el siglo xix,” p. 81.Google Scholar

7 Salvucci, Richard J., “The Real Exchange Rate of the Mexican Peso, 1762–1812: A Research Note and Estimate,” The Journal of European Economic History (forthcoming).Google Scholar

8 Herrero, Pedro Pérez, Plata y libranzas. La articulación comercial del México borbónico (México, 1988), esp. pp. 224–227.Google Scholar

9 O’Brien, , “Political Economy,” p. 3.Google Scholar

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11 Coatsworth, John H., “Obstacles to Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” American Historical Review, 83:1 (1978), 85.Google Scholar

12 Coatsworth, John, “The Decline of the Mexican Economy,” in Liehr, Reinhard, ed., América Latina en la época de Simón Bolívar. La formación de las economías nacionales y los intereses económicos europeos, 1800–1850 (Berlin, 1989), p. 50.Google Scholar

13 Reynolds, Lloyd, Economic Growth in the Third World, 1850–1980 (New Haven, 1985), pp. 15–48, 98–99.Google Scholar