El credito en Nueva Espana (review)

El crédito en Nueva España. Edited by MARÍa DEL PILAR MARTÍnEZ LÓpEZ-CANO and GUILLERMINA DEL VALLE PAVÓN. Lecturas de Historia Económica Mexicana. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1998. Tables. Bibliography. 243pp. Paper.

During the past two decades, scholars have produced a steady flow of monographs, papers, and anthologies about this complex and important subject. Like the current volume, many works have been published by Mexican institutions such as the UNAM, the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, and the Fondo de Cultura Económica. This valuable collection of studies ranges widely across many of the uses, instruments, and impacts of credit in the economy of eighteenth-century New Spain. All of the essays are written by previously published authors, who weave together a variety of archival and secondary sources. They all agree that credit in its many forms encouraged colonial economic development and growth, a view that some would dispute.

The first essay, by editors María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano and Guillermina del Valle Pavón, reviews the progress made in documenting and analyzing ecclesiastical and commercial credit in colonial New Spain. This essay introduces many of the topics upon which the other chapters are based. Its outline of significant issues related to the Bourbon reforms compensates for the lack of a concluding chapter that would have suggested the next round of research questions. In the second essay, John Kicza narrows the subject to commercial credit, discussing how Mexico City's merchants established credit networks in the early colonial years and thus became the link between silver mining and trade with the Philippines. This enabled them to expand their influence into agriculture, intracolonial commerce, and regional trade networks.

Kicza's essay provides an excellent backdrop for the following chapters. Louisa Hoberman disputes the image of "the merchant as predator" (mercader como depredador, p. 80) by analyzing the interdependence of merchants and miners through their credit and other financial relationships. Pedro Pérez Herrero then successfully leads the reader through a thorny thicket of definitions and uses of libranzas, concluding that they eventually became financial products to be bought and sold themselves, not simply documents to facilitate trade of other goods. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, "The circle was closing perfectly" (El círculo se cerraba perfectamente, p. 98) as a younger generation of merchants, with less capital than their fathers, adopted this method to expand their businesses.

A case study by Carmen Yuste describes how a Basque merchant, Francisco Ignacio de Yraeta, built a network of suppliers, customers, and agents from Manila to Guatemala. Yraeta is the subject of an entire anthology published in Mexico in 1985, and is meant to illustrate how other merchants may have succeeded with similar attitudes and strategies. Valle Pavón's essay describes how the Crown's ongoing demands for loans through the eighteenth century were met by members of the consulado of Mexico City and, later, by other individuals and institutions. The motives of creditors in influencing economic policy in New Spain make for interesting reading. At the local level, Danièle Dehouve brings together a number of studies to reconstruct why and how alcaldes mayores transformed the repartimiento into a system of trading goods and labor with credit. She documents a variety of methods for carrying out commercial transactions, which, in turn, integrated the repartimiento into provincial systems of production and trade.

The last two essays shift the focus to ecclesiastical institutions. Gisela von Wobeser, who has written extensively on this subject, compares the use of censos and depósitos irregulares by Mexico City's ecclesiastical institutions. Finally, Cervantes Bello describes the results of the application of the Law of Consolidation in Puebla. As in other regions of New Spain, the dependence of landowners and businesses on ecclesiastical credit was so great that a deep financial crisis was provoked by this policy.

The editors of...