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Eighteenth-Century Mexican Peonage and the Problem of Credits to Hacienda Labourers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2008
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The transition to modern, capitalist agriculture is usually marked by the replacement of traditional forms of farm service by a free labour market based on short-term contracts and cash payments. This process is often described in terms like ‘pauperisation’ and ‘proletarianisation’. But, of course, proletarianisation is not an inevitable consequence of the rise of day-labouring in capitalist agriculture; a point emphasized, for example, with particular reference to eighteenth-century Scotland by Alex Gibson and Alastair Orr. Contrary to much of southern England, where the forces of production developed rather fast, in Scotland traditional forms of farm service survived largely intact well into the nineteenth century despite the development of capitalist agriculture. As late as 1861 over 60 per cent of the total agricultural work-force in some Scottish regions were servants on long hires as opposed to day-labourers.
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References
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25. Mortality from exhaustion was high among oxen, and the hacendado purchased additional oxen all year round (at a price of 10 pesos, the equivalent of 40 to 50 man-days) or made more use of hired oxen and laborers from the pueblos de indios than earlier in the year.
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50. See also Scott, J., ‘Exploitation in rural class relations. A victim's perspective’, Comparative Politics (1975), 489–532, esp. p. 494.Google Scholar The effect of population growth in this context can be expressed by a formula to understand peon-hacendado – vassal-lord – relationships, see Chapter One of my Shadows over Anáhuac, and my ‘Altepeme and pueblos de indios’. Since it is known that the collective mentality adjusts to changes in socio-economic circumstances, in a situation of population growth or a relatively high population density we can state:
where P stands for the volume of population (↑ = growth or high population density; ↓ = decrease or low population density), p stands forpower of, that is, a dominant bargaining position, 1 stands for ‘the lords, elite and state’, and b for the ‘peons’; the → sign indicates who exercises power over whom. In a situation of low population density or a decrease in population, in which alternative sources of income are available to the peons, the situation is the reverse:
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