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Hispanic American Historical Review 82.2 (2002) 360-362



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Book Review

Indians, Merchants, and Markets:
A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750-1821


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, 2000. Maps. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 306 pp. Cloth, $60.00.

The repartimiento de mercancías is a controversial topic in Latin American historiography. Its negative characterization remains an article of faith among scholars who have based their conclusions on the ample archival documentation attesting to how overpriced and unwanted merchandise was unloaded on the indigenous peoples who were then forced into the market economy to pay off their debts or hounded into flight to escape debt peonage. In short, it was a brutally coercive institution by which colonial officials exploited the Indians by forcing them first to consume and then to work and produce to cover their debts.

But the truth was something else. In fact, the Indians willingly sought out the cash or wares advanced. Their decisions were entirely rational and voluntary. The repartimiento was an innovative mechanism that overcame the market limitations of a pre-Columbian indigenous economy and of a premodern Iberian bureaucracy. It made life easier for peasant producers, government officials, and Iberian merchants by offering them economic opportunities that were not otherwise available. [End Page 360]

This is the argument of Jeremy Baskes in his brilliant case study of the cochineal or dye trade in Oaxaca. In the tradition of economic historians such as Nobel laureate Douglass North, Baskes shows us economic history at its best. What a job of a demolition he does. His book reminds one of the controversy surrounding Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's examination of slavery, Time on the Cross (1974). When good economic historians stake out their claims, their theses usually anchor the scholarship for decades to come. This will be the case with Baskes's Indians, Merchants, and Markets.

So what is the underpinning work that makes for so much historiographic demolition? By actually examining how the repartimiento functioned and by using microeconomic analysis, Baskes clearly shows—at least in Oaxaca, but the case for Peru still has to be demonstrated—that its purpose was to provide producer and consumer credit to indigenous peasants. In return, they provided merchants and their agents—government officials—with cochineal, which was more efficiently produced in labor intensive operations on family plots by peasant families. Producers often needed loans to jump start the year's cycle of production or to buy relatively expensive items—oxen, mules, horses, for example—normally out of their reach. Loans were almost always made at the rate of 12 reales (1.5 pesos) for each pound of cochineal they promised to hand over at some future date. Most loans were for small amounts, with the median being less than ten pesos. Defaults were many and had to be written off. Nevertheless, the alcaldes mayores had enough legal muscle to enforce the law of contracts and to collect enough of the debts to make it worth the merchants' efforts to bankroll the process. This included putting up money when alcaldes mayores bought their office, sometimes years in advance.

The beauty of the repartimiento was that it served both merchants and peasants. For merchants, it reduced transaction costs because they had at their disposal the authority and knowledge of regional government officials who effectively screened peasants, provided them cash and merchandise incentives, and collected the debts. Otherwise merchants would not have extended credit to peasants. Peasants, on the other hand, could draw on a line of credit where none other existed. In times of economic need or famine such a line was often a lifeline.

So why have scholars been taken in by the repartimiento's Black Legend? Most were interested in the repartimiento as a by-product of their study of the Bourbon Reforms, Indian rebellions...

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