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  • Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821
  • Sudipta Sen
Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821. By Jeremy Baskes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Before they were replaced by aniline in the 1870 cochineal, a red dye made from dried, crushed cactus-eating scale insects (Dactylopius coccus) introduced into Mexico from Europe was the principal source of scarlet, crimson, and related pigments. The Aztecs had developed a technique of brushing and collecting female insects from the cacti, and the Spaniards developed it as a major export to Europe. The book under review is a detailed study of the cochineal industry in colonial Oaxaca, one that looks at the rise and fall of the production of grana cochinila under a system known as the Repartimiento (comparable to the Mita in Peru and Cuatequil in New Mexico) by which the Spanish Crown allowed forcible recruitment of Indian wage-labor.

The traditional image of the cochineal cultivation is one of unbridled coercion of the alcalde mayores, minor officials in charge of law and order and the collection of tributes, whose trifling salaries were compensated by returns from their investment in cochineal. Bourbon reformers of the eighteenth century propagated the view, one still shared by historians, that the alcalde mayores were enriching themselves at the expense of the indigenes. They were replaced with new officers (intendentes) under Charles III and his minister José de Gálvez's policy of direct administration and free trade. Ripartiminetos were banned and Indians no longer forced to collect cochineal. Such measures have been traditionally held responsible for the eventual decline in cochineal production.

In light of fresh evidence from the cochineal industry in Oaxaca, and recent economic theory on the role of informal credit markets in developing countries, the author attempts to dismantle this long held view. He advances instead that the institution of the alcalde mayor was indispensable to a system of grassroots credit network with access to financial capital in Mexico City, and that rather than a source of coercion, the Repartimiento not only encouraged peasants to participate in the market economy of colonial Mexico, but actually provided a renewed basis for their subsistence.

Beyond doubt, cochineal (colonial Mexico's second largest export) production in Oaxaca became a mainstay, peaking in the 18th century. In Baskes's study peasants re-emerge as enterprising, resilient and market-savvy, and not helpless victims of the debt-exacting and price-fixing alcaldes mayores. The Ripartimiento, he reasons, was a system designed for flexibility, and peasants could accept oxen, mules or money as loan, often without collateral, and repay their debts in cash or cochineal. The alcaldes mayore was sheltered by distance, his autonomy commensurate with a freer hand in providing much-needed credit to the indigenous people. In most cochineal producing communities the Spanish population was barely 1.5%; the incidence of flight and forcible takeover of cropland in such places was much lower than in large haciendas. Peasants took to the market on their own accord as producers and consumers.

Baskes explains how money-lending figures remained exorbitant due to risks and costs associated with the chain of middlemen and traveling merchants, various stages in transatlantic shipping, volatile maritime freight, and the fluctuating markets of London and Amsterdam. Periodic crises ravaged the sequence, especially wartime exigencies and prohibitive insurance till the fall of Napoleon, restoration of the Spanish monarchy, and the re-conquest of Oaxaca stabilized prices. The correlation of profit and freight after the new free trade policy (freight ceiling was lifted for trade between Mexico and Spain after 1778) shows that variable costs rose precipitously in the late colonial period because freight and insurance were affected badly by war. Thus the eventual decline in cochineal production had little to do with the articles of the 1786 Ordnance banning Ripartimientos, as has been traditionally viewed. Indians did not suddenly abandon cochineal; dye merchants took their money elsewhere.

Baskes cautions against exaggerating the profiteering and rapacity of the colonial merchants and moneylenders and suggests that their interests did not always diverge from...

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