In 1904 Finance Minister José I. Limantour ordered a monetary census in preparation for Mexico’s conversion to the gold standard. In it, Porfirian bean counters found only one hundred million of the four billion-plus pesos of various sorts reportedly minted over the centuries. Even assuming a significant undercounting, in that time Mexico had exported at least 3.5 billion pesos; in short, the peso was the most widely circulated coin in history.1 In a previous study, I suggested that the economies of nineteenth-century Mexico and China were linked in what I termed a Sino-Mexican symbiosis in which Mexican miners seemed to coin silver in response to Chinese demand for specie.2 While commodity peso prices followed those of silver bullion, I cannot find a clear correspondence between peso exports and silver prices; rather peso exports increased when the Porfirian economy slowed and declined when it grew. This relationship is revealed...

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