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“The Veracruz Merchant Community in Late Bourbon Mexico: A Preliminary Portrait, 1770-1810”*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
Extract
More than two decades of scholarship on colonial Mexico has established both the role and character of merchant class communities, especially in Mexico City and Guadalajara. Beginning with David A. Brading's seminal Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810, several additional studies now constitute a significant body of literature on the subject. Collectively, Brading, John E. Kicza, Doris M. Ladd and others have demonstrated how Mexico City merchants consolidated their fortunes by acquiring haciendas (landed estates). Moreover, their studies describe how Mexico City entrepreneurs maintained commercial hegemony by purchasing large quantities of European merchandise and then reselling it at grossly inflated prices. These businessmen monopolized colonial trade through extensive familial ties and trading networks extending back to Spain. Although these and other revelations are important with respect to Mexico City merchants, they neither explain the position nor the significance of entrepreneurs in the principal Spanish colonial port
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1988
Footnotes
*
The author would like to thank professors Jaime E. Rodríguez-O (U. of California-Irvine) and William F. Sater (California State U.-Long Beach) for reading early drafts of this article. The Mexico-Chicano Fund at the U. of California-Irvine provided money for research conducted in Spain.
References
1 Brading, David A., Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810, (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 97–99.Google Scholar In addition to Brading, among the best studies on colonial Mexican elites are Kicza, John E., Colonial Entrepreneurs: Families and Business in Mexico City, (Albuquerque, 1983), pp. 232 Google Scholar; Ladd, Doris M., The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780–1826 (Austin, 1976), pp. 38–39 Google Scholar; Tutino, John M., “Power, Class and Family: Men and Women in the Mexican Elite, 1750–1810,” The Americas, 39:3 (January 1983), 359–381 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hamnett, Brian, Politics and Trade in Southern Mexico, 1750–1821 (Cambridge, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar has some material on Veracruz merchants. Other good works include those on Guadalajara, for example, Lindley, Richard B., Haciendas and Economic Development: Guadalajara, Mexico at Independence (Austin, 1983)Google Scholar; Greenow, Linda E., Credit and Socioeconomic Change in Colonial Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (Berkeley, 1981).Google Scholar For South America, Socolow, Susan M., The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810: Family and Commerce (Cambridge, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is excellent. See also Twinam, Ann, Miners Merchants, and Farmers in Colonial Colombia (Austin, 1982)Google Scholar; Brown, Kendall W., Bourbon and Brandy: Imperial Reform in Eighteenth Century Arequipa (Albuquerque, 1986),Google Scholar especially chapter 4; and for a different perspective, Kinsbruner, Jay, “The Political Status of the Chilean Merchants at the End of the colonial Period: The Concepci“n Example, 1790–1810” The Americas, 29: 1 (July 1972), 30–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Charles F. Nunn treats immigration in Foreign Immigrants in Early Bourbon Mexico, 1700–1760.
2 Ysidro Antonio de Ycaza, Mexico City, to Viceroy Revillagigedo, July 4, 1791, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico (Hereinafter cited as AGN), Consulado, vol. 23.
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18 Ibid.
19 The 1793 Revillagigedo census for Veracruz could not be located in any archive. This data would have afforded a comprehensive analysis of the city's merchant population with more exactitude.
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23 Libertad, 1810–1818, Archivo Historico de Hacienda, Mexico City (hereinafter cited as AHH), leg. 1040, exp. 24.
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42 Ibid.