La fiscalidad: un observatorio para el historiador: Ensayo de historiografia sobre el porfiriato: 1867-1995, and: Crisis Fiscal: Reforma hacendaria y consolidacion del poder: Tres ensayos de historia economica del porfiriato (review)

Javier Pérez Siller, director of the Sorbonne's Mexico-France Project, presents fiscal policy as a window on the formation and failure of the Porfirian state in a pair of little books, both brief and small. Wallet-sized, in fact; handy for reading on the go although the correspondingly tiny reproductions do not do justice to the well-chosen cartoon treasures from El Ahuizote, El Hijo del Ahuizote, El Comillo Público, La Pluma Roja and La Guacamaya.

In his Introduction to La fiscalidad, Pérez Siller succinctly argues that studies of fiscal policy should not be limited to narrow administrative, legal questions as they often are in Latin America. Rather historians should ask more sophisticated, holistic questions of fiscal data that might reveal "the multiple relations between the dynamics of the economic structures and the politics of state, between public finances and the legitimization of power, between the powers of the legislature and of the executive, between government and different social actors, between politicians and businessmen" (p. 9). This he proposes to do for Mexico, where he says such studies are in their infancy, in order to understand (if not resolve) a contradiction: Why the origins of the modern Mexican state are located in the Porfiriato, whose much vaunted Miracle collapsed in revolution. Having set the question, Pérez Siller whisks us on a flying tour of pertinent archival collections in Mexico and France, the latter cited, not unexpectedly, as a rich but neglected source. He examines contemporary accounts by José Limantour, Joaquín Casasús, Carlos Díaz Dufoo and other Porfirian policy wonks, noting their increasing concern after 1892 for the social as well as economic effects of fiscal policy, and concludes with a review of post-revolutionary historiography followed by four bibliographies—archives, published documents, and guides to same; published statistics; contemporary accounts; and modern secondary scholarship, over 250 works in all.

In Crisis Fiscal Pérez Siller fleshes out questions raised by his sketch of sources in La fiscalidad, arguing the reform of public finances was the necessary precondition for the defensive modernization known as the Porfirian Miracle. The regime's rationalization of budget and expenditures provided legitimacy in the eyes of foreign investors who then, beginning with the railroads, poured capital into Mexico creating the material basis for the consolidation of a national state, the restructure of social forces, and the emergence of internal markets. Much of what Pérez Siller presents here—the sharp decline in military spending from 1876 and concomitant rise in developmental spending mostly on railroad construction—is a tale oft told. He offers no surprises or deviations from John Coatsworth's model and his observations echo those of Enrique Cárdenas, who noted that railroad construction created an important linkage that channeled resources into government coffers, resources subsequently available for reinvestment into the domestic economy.

The direction of Pérez Siller's work also has a great deal in common with that of Stephen Haber, Noel Mauer, Carlos Marichal, Paolo Riguzzi and other practitioners of the New Institutional Economics. Like them, he links the Porfirian regime's decision to modernize banking, by favoring semi-monopolistic chartered banks backed by French and German capital, to the imperatives of regularizing its external debt, gaining access to global money markets, and off-setting the influence of direct investment by North Americans. Like them, he convincingly argues that institutions matter and studies of budgetary policy decisions...