La Banca en Mexico, 1820-1920 (review)

The Instituto Mora, along with El Colegio de Michoacán, El Colegio de México, and the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas of the UNAM have collaborated in publishing a series, "Colección Lecturas de Historia Económica," of which this anthology is a part. There are, at present, ten volumes dealing with a wide array of subjects including public finance and the public debt; money, credit and banking; agriculture, mining and the textile industry; and railroads, public works, and the internal market. All are edited by respected authorities and, as a whole, the series ranges widely over space and time. Some volumes are essentially readers and include translations of major essays that have appeared in languages other than Spanish. Others, like this one, contain a critical introduction by the editor or editors, specialized bibliographies, a chronology, and even a selection of primary sources. This is, then, a major publishing effort, one for which those interested in social, economic and political history of Mexico will be grateful. There is something for everyone from beginner to specialist. A visit to the website of the Instituto Mora <http://www.institutomora.edu.mx/carpetaPublicaciones/historia.htm> will provide further information.

Three of the essays published here, by Rosa María Meyer Cosío, Mario Cerutti, and Carlos Marichal, originally appeared in Banca y poder en México, 1800-1925 (Mexico, 1986), an important collection long out of print. Since Grijalbo, the original publisher, is now part of the Mondadori publishing empire and given to producing translations of stuff like Dr. Atkins's latest diet revolution, this volume may be your last chance to catch up on the original. A valuable essay by Leonor Ludlow, "La formación del Banco Nacional de México: Aspectos institucionales y sociales," reprises and synthesizes a number of her previous publications, including an essay in Banca y poder.

For my part, I found extracts of several primary sources dealing with public finance in the early nineteenth century especially interesting. For example, the financier Manuel Escandón's 1852 proposal to establish a national bank is reproduced in part; if nothing else, the document is a tribute to the scale of Escandón's ambitions. Here was a bank that was, among other things, to take deposits, make loans, discount bills, issue money, and finance the central government to the tune of 9 million pesos per year. Ludlow and Marichal provide an expert commentary on Escandón's project in their introduction, but a curious reader might be forgiven for wondering why Escandón waited until 1852 to publish his proposal. The answer, of course, is that the government came out of the War of 1847 nearly broke, pressured relentlessly by creditors foreign and domestic, and unable to borrow. Its deficit in the aftermath of the war was, surprise, in the neighborhood of 8 to 9 million pesos. Escandón may have been many things, but he was certainly nobody's fool.

I would be remiss if I did not call attention to an extremely perceptive essay by Abdiel Oñate on the impact of the monetary reform of 1905. Oñate points out, quite rightly, that Mexico's going on the gold standard in 1905 was tantamount to moving to a fixed exchange rate in the face of deteriorating terms of trade, not a good idea. He concludes--and I think he is dead-on here--that the move exacerbated the impact of the financial crisis of 1907-1908 in Mexico and "coincided" with the labor unrest at Río Blanco and Cananea. If anyone else has made the connection between a fixed exchange rate, deteriorating terms of trade, and the outbreak of these "precursors" of the Revolution, I have missed it. Oñate's essay alone makes buying the volume a good investment...