This volume on Mexico’s foreign debt is part of a series devoted to Mexico’s economic history, and both students and the general public will find it useful, since the previously published articles reprinted here are difficult to access. The first two articles analyze the impact of the 1820 financial bubble on Mexico’s economy. Reinhard Liehr’s 1983 article concerning merchant bank houses offers an excellent analysis of the role they played in the negotiations of Mexico’s first British loan; Liehr inter-wines this with a discussion of loans and trade. The following article, published in 1980 by Jaime E. Rodríguez, focuses on the impact that foreign loans had on the Mexican political arena. Guadalupe Nava’s essay (originally published in 1971), as well as Geneviève Gilles’s 1965 article, contain precise information on the evolution of Mexico’s internal and foreign debt in the second third of nineteenth century.
The last two essays offer explanations...
