Empresas y modernización en México desde las reformas borbónicas hasta el Porfiriato (review)

In his brief Introduction to Empresas y modernización en México editor Richard Liehr tells us that the collection's four essays deal with the creation of modern Mexico by entrepreneurial families over generations from the Bourbon Reform and through the Porfiriato. Using the traditional tactics of campadrazgo, strategic marriages, entail, and political alliances, such families dealt with often hostile business environs to survive and transition to more modern forms of organization, the partnership and later the sociedad anónima (joint stock corporation). Unfortunately Liehr's Introduction describes only two of the essays—puzzling given that he adequately summarizes each one.

Also editor Liehr did not organize the collection well. He should have opened with Carlos Riojas's chapter, a case study of colonial Guadalajara that begins with an extended critical review of the proto-industrialization model of economic modernization and of its methodology and that provides a broad theoretical context for the other essays. Riojas's analysis exposes the dominant model's underlying tautology: "[t]hat the development of the industrial revolution is exclusive to countries that achieved industrialization" (pp. 125, 140) and calls for broader approaches that recognize many paths to industrialization rooted in local conditions, traditions, and geography.

Next in my hypothetical reordering would come Alejandro Tortolero Villaseñor's chapter, a study of the pre-hispanic canal systems of lakes Chalco and Texcoco and an analysis of the effect of the availability of waterborne transportation on hacienda production and profits. This essay demonstrates that these caminos de agua were indispensable to New Spain's economic development, specifically in the provisioning of Mexico City. I do question his conclusion that the creation of mayorazgos was a rational economic strategy to preserve fortunes. Given entails, high initial cash cost, the prohibition on mortgaging such properties in an economy that ran on credit, and the fact that the same ends could be accomplished other ways, I would suggest entail represented not formal economic rationality, as Villaseñor suggests, but what Max Weber termed value oriented rationality.

Neither Rosa María Meyer Cosío's "El dificil equilibrio. Tropiezos de una empresa británica con el Gobierno mexicano," nor Lucía Martínez Moctezuma's "Íñigo Noriega Laso: un empresario agrícola en México, 1868-191," are described by the three-generational entrepreneurial family archetype of Liehr's Introduction. Rather, in a broad sense, both deal with the failure of Mexican entrepreneurial families to achieve economic modernization, opening the door to foreign immigrants and their capital. Cosío describes in great detail the entry of British capital during Mexico's early Republic through the firm of Robert Manning and William Marshall which served as agent for Barclays and Barring Brothers banks, held a tobacco monopoly, and, through its subsidiary Cía Minera Anglo de México, operated the Guanajuato Mint, effectively controlling eighty-percent of Mexico's silver. Later Ewen Mackintosh joined the firm, and by 1834 was its sole representative in Mexico. Macintosh married the daughter of an important local family, was appointed as British consul and, on the eve of war with the United States, involved the firm in the netherworld of Mexico's foreign debt. Cosío's account of the disastrous outcome confirms the findings of previous scholars that such investment was almost always unprofitable.

Martínez Moctezuma brings us to the Porfiriato with the success story of Asturian immigrant Íñigo Noriega who rose from humble merchant to politically well-connected industrialist-financier. By applying modern business methods and forms of organization to his tobacco, textile, agricultural and forestry operations and by skillfully seeking and using political influence to gain concessions and favored access to credit, Noriega amassed a fortune estimated at forty-million pesos in 1913. He died in exile in 1920, undone by the revolution like so many other foreign investors. Martínez Moctezuma makes...