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

The repartimiento de mercancías in colonial Spanish America has long been something of an enigma. It is usually treated as a system of forced production and consumption in which a Spanish official loaned money or advanced goods to Indian peasant households, collecting the cash repayments or finished products several months later on terms that were very disadvantageous to the Indians. The volume and significance of this trade to the economies of Mexico and the Andean region in the eighteenth century is not in doubt. What has been harder to understand is why so many Indians participated in the system with apparently so little overt resistance. Jeremy Baskes addresses this question through a study of repartimientos of cochineal dyestuff in the Mexican province of Oaxaca. The locale and period are significant, for cochineal was a major export in eighteenth-century Mexico, and nearly all of it was produced by Indian communities of Oaxaca.

The author's revisionist argument is that repartimientos of cochineal--and by extension, those of other goods--administered by the Spanish alcaldes mayores and their merchant backers were accepted voluntarily by Indian households. Indeed, sometimes they were even requested, as Indians needed cash for their tribute payments and other necessities. It was not a system of forced production and consumption, so the argument goes, but a voluntary credit institution, often the only one available to the Indian population. Prices were high because they contained an implicit interest charge and also because they reflected conditions of high risk. As many as 70 per cent of debtor households were late in their payments--sometimes for two or three years--and up to a quarter defaulted outright. The book contains a good summary of the political controversies that surrounded the repartimiento, which was legalized in 1751, then banned again in 1786, after which time it went into decline. Baskes takes a positive view of the institution, arguing that "the repartimiento existed for rational economic reasons, [and] that it promoted growth by facilitating the provision of credit to poor peasants" (p. 61). Documentation is sparse on how the system actually worked at the local level, but the author sees the magistrates' sometimes violent methods of debt collection as more the exception than the rule. In general, the repartimiento compensated for weak market integration. It was designed to reduce the risks and transaction costs of the alcalde mayor, but it also, Baskes argues, reduced the economic uncertainties faced by the Indian producers. Profits were good for the Spanish officials (between 6 and 17.5% in one case), but not as high as some scholars have thought. There is also a suggestion that cochineal production may have been more profitable for some Indians than has previously been supposed.

The book concludes with a detailed analysis of prices and costs involved in each step of the cochineal trade between Oaxaca and London and Amsterdam. The author makes a strong case that the steep decline in cochineal production beginning in the 1780s was triggered primarily by decreased demand in Europe; the abolition of the repartimiento in 1786 was a contributing factor, but of secondary significance.

This volume is an important, well-researched addition to the small but growing literature on the repartimiento. Its microeconomic perspective helps us to understand the economic rationality of the system, both for Indian producers and Spanish middlemen. The political dimension of the repartimiento, how it was shaped by the exercise of power, receives less attention. Too much, I think, is made of the apparent fact that many peasants accepted repartimiento credit voluntarily, and too little of the political and economic circumstances that led them ("forced" them?) to make decisions that were not always in their best interests. Was the repartimiento a...