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

Although many scholars of colonial regimes still acknowledge that European (and other) colonial enterprises, both in their construction and maintenance, were underwritten first and foremost by armed force, in recent years historians and anthropologists, in particular, have focused increasingly on forms of accommodation between colonizers and indigenous peoples. Not only has this trend opened interesting discussions about colonial legal and political systems, evangelization, ethnic intermarriage, and forms of social mobility, among other themes, but it has also somewhat redirected scholarly attention away from overt modes of domination, and toward the agency of subaltern, colonized peoples. Economic historian Jeremy Baskes has gone a considerable distance in convincingly rehabilitating one of the most vilified instruments of colonial domination in Spanish America, the notorious repartimiento de mercancías, portraying it less as a tool of economic extraction from Indians, underwritten by the authority of Spanish provincial officials and by the threat of imprisonment (or worse), than as an essential form of credit relationship that facilitated peasant commodity production and actually provided indigenous farmers with some economic leverage to better their standards of living. Along the way, Baskes provides a concise but highly detailed economic history of the cochineal industry during its heyday in southern Mexico, telling the fascinating story of the production and marketing of this brilliant natural carmine dye made from the dessicated bodies of tiny insects which spend their life-cycle on prickly pear (nopal) cactus leaves. What this excellent work in economic history lacks in stylistic panache or narrative sweep it makes up for in unusual clarity of exposition (which admittedly tips over into redundancy on occasion), force of argument, and skillful deployment of frankly sometimes patchy evidence. The intelligent, synoptic application of concepts drawn from the institutional economic history of Douglass North and other scholars, and the detailed empirical reconstruction of production costs, trade patterns, profit margins, and so forth add greatly to the credibility of Baskes’ analysis.

The southwestern province of Oaxaca was during colonial times, and remains to this day, one of Mexico’s most densely Indian and most strikingly rural regions. During the colonial period Oaxaca developed what was to become Mexico’s second most valuable export commodity after the silver which poured out of the mines of more northerly areas: cochineal (grana cochinilla). Jeremy Baskes’ study deals with the production and marketing of cochineal from the mid-eighteenth century until the industry went into a rapid decline near century’s end. Because of its labor intensity and relatively small scale, production of cochineal was almost exclusively in the hands of indigenous peasants, most of whom also devoted their energies to wage labor and/or the raising of subsistence crops for household use. The vagaries of weather, pest infestations, market cycles, and the inherent variability of this sort of petty commodity production meant that Indian producers required constant access to credit to stay in the market. This credit was typically provided in the form of cash advances by local Spanish officials known as alcaldes mayores, for which repayment was contracted in the form of the dyestuff at rates which remained remarkably stable throughout the period. These same officials advanced goods—primarily livestock, but other items, as well—on credit to rural people outside the gravitational pull of this particular commodity nexus, but it was clearly the cochinilla industry that drove the regional economy and yielded the most substantial profits for both the ultimate producers and the Spanish intermediaries. The white officials were themselves under obligation to financial backers who helped them obtain their auctioned offices and supplied goods to them in their turn, and both groups perceived the need to realize as much profit as they could within the limited term of the alcalde mayor. Persisting virtually until the end of the colonial period (1821) despite having been outlawed by reformist legislation in 1786, this chain of credit linkages was known...