Our knowledge of commerce and industry in eighteenth-century New Spain has been greatly enriched by the recent studies of David Brading, Brian Hamnett, and José Joaquín Real Díaz. The new one by Dr. Christiana Renate Moreno is carefully designed to fit into these studies through an examination of the business affairs, origins, and family relationships of members of the Consulado of Mexico City in the years 1759-1778, that is, from the accession to the Spanish throne of Charles III to the ending of the fleet system for New Spain. The sources are the surviving records of the Consulado in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, substantial masses of notarial documents in Mexico City, and materials in the Archivo General de Indias, most notably reports on tax levies and yields. These are unfortunately too fragmentary to permit the kind of analysis that the author would have liked to carry out, for example, a detailed examination of membership, but they yield much information.
The monograph opens with a review of the Consulado itself. A major gap that Dr. Moreno is unable to fill, but mentions, is the judicial functioning of the Consulado, which handled suits on commercial matters by non-members as well as members. Dr. Moreno sheds fight on elections, officials, numbers of members, their origins, length of membership, residence in Mexico, militia service, and the financing of business activities, most notably through loans from obras pías. Approximately half of the membership resided in Mexico City, and of that half 87.9 percent had been born in Spain, largely in the north. The two factions that disputed control, the montañeses and vizcaínos, were both Peninsular in their core. The Consulado as a corporation frequently farmed the alcabala for Mexico City and the avería, both yielding substantial surpluses which went to the desagüe, donativos graciosos, loans, and some investments. Revenues were never enough to meet demands.
The basic strength of the Consulado members lay in the trans-Atlantic trade, funneled by the fleet system into the Jalapa fairs. Dr. Moreno makes a complex analysis: a substantial minority part of such activity was handled by non-Consulado members; the majority share of the Consulado was largely in the hands of a few wealthy members who profited from a quasi-monopoly and the distribution of the wares throughout New Spain, the mining areas of the North being especially important. She disagrees with Real Díaz, declaring that she cannot find evidence for a gradual ousting of larger dealers by smaller. On the basis of painstaking analysis of admittedly fragmentary evidence, Dr. Moreno finds partial but not dominant participation before 1778 in manufacturing, landholding particularly for agricultural production, and in mining. Landholding, in fact, largely resulted from inheritance. She does find the pattern first described by Lucas Alamán, and substantiated at some length by David Brading, of bringing in younger relatives from Spain to continue the family trading ventures, of marriage with Creole women, and of setting up male children as hacendados and professionals. The mayorazgos established by Consulado members for their children almost all had to be dissolved, only that of the Gómez de la Cortina having durability. In the end, Dr. Moreno admits frankly the need for far more information.
Tracing business and family connections through wills, taxation lists, and notarial transactions is a labor of Hercules. Whatever the limitations of the data that she could locate, Dr. Moreno has added notably to our knowledge of the Mexico City world of larger-scale trade just before sweeping reform changed its patterns.
One final matter worth mentioning is the form of publication of this book. The Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität has made plates directly from the typed doctoral dissertation, so eliminating many expensive steps that are merely occasion for error. For publication of a technical study of relatively limited diffusion this method is perhaps the least expensive and most efficient.
