In this ambitious work, Jay Kinsbruner examines and compares the grocery stores of Puebla and Mexico City, Caracas, and Buenos Aires during the period from 1750 to 1850. His study focuses specifically on the entrepreneurship of grocers, the capitalization and profitability of their stores, and the problems attendant on their occupation. He consistently supports his conclusions with a wealth of archival material from all four cities as well as San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Those findings are quite startling, because they tend to contradict some hoary myths about capitalism in Latin America in the colonial and independent periods. For example, Kinsbruner shows that the storeowners were quite entrepreneurial, and, in fact, demonstrated more willingness to take risks than did their counterparts in New York City. Further, they depended on credit to a substantial degree and were required by law to accept personal possessions in pawn in exchange for goods. He contends that the grocers, however, lacked “class consciousness” and were not yet “bourgeois,” although they formed part of a “broad middle group” (p. 100). It will surprise no one who has lived in Latin America to learn that Kinsbruner’s storeowners consistently ran short of small change.
In one of his most interesting but all too brief sections, Kinsbruner compares Spanish American and New York grocers and discovers that they suffered from similar problems because of state intrusion. While the Manhattan merchants could sell the alcohol illegal in Spanish America, they were forbidden to purvey meat, which was the special domain of butchers. However, the New York grocer could invest his profits in a vast panoply of financial instruments whereas the Spanish American could only buy another store or put his gains into land. Therefore, Kinsbruner’s findings indicate that scholars should look more closely into banking and credit in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to find better explanations for regional underdevelopment.
Like all monographs featuring archival material, this study is dependent on the availability of its sources. As a result, Kinsbruner sometimes frustrates the reader with comparisons between grocers decades apart, unwittingly joining the argument in favor of the continuity of the period from 1750 to the 1850s and beyond. Nevertheless, his work contributes greatly to our knowledge of urban life in Latin America, and provides a wealth of detail to students of Puebla, Mexico City, Caracas, and Buenos Aires in those fascinating years.
