During the past two decades, scholars have produced a steady flow of monographs, papers, and anthologies about this complex and important subject. Like the current volume, many works have been published by Mexican institutions such as the UNAM, the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, and the Fondo de Cultura Económica. This valuable collection of studies ranges widely across many of the uses, instruments, and impacts of credit in the economy of eighteenth-century New Spain. All of the essays are written by previously published authors, who weave together a variety of archival and secondary sources. They all agree that credit in its many forms encouraged colonial economic development and growth, a view that some would dispute.
The first essay, by editors María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano and Guillermina del Valle Pavón, reviews the progress made in documenting and analyzing ecclesiastical and commercial credit in colonial New Spain. This essay introduces...
