Coatsworth brings to his analysis of early Mexican railroads a thorough knowledge of secondary literature and documentary sources. He has also mastered the econometric techniques that Robert W. Fogel and Albert Fishlow have applied to the history of United States railroads. While the development and influence of railroads in the United States and Mexico probably present more differences than similarities, the adaptation of these techniques to the Porfiriato makes possible more penetrating and confident analysis than ever before. Old-school historians may shy away from Coatsworth’s extensive comparisons between the actual Mexico of 1910 with railroads and a hypothetical Mexico without railroads, dependent on an incongruous mixture of highways, carriages, telephones, and telegraphs, even though he always keeps clearly in mind the dividing line between the real and the imaginary.
Any study based on nineteenth-century Mexican statistics faces inherent obstacles, especially the incompleteness or inaccuracy of some figures, the irregular inflation of the peso, which complicates price computations, and the presence of intangibles such as pleasure, reduced weariness, and other psychological benefits of railroads. Coatsworth acknowledges inadequacies in statistical bases. Also he goes to great lengths to allow for variations in the peso and describes unmeasurable factors in some detail. Nevertheless, his conclusions will probably attract many of the same criticisms as those of Fogel and Fishlow.
On the one hand, Coatsworth finds that in passenger travel the Porfirian railroad system made a relatively small contribution to economic development, although he recognizes the importance of increased popular mobility, which made new jobs more accessible to the lower classes, face-to-face consultations easier for businessmen and politicians, and national unity more real. On the other hand, he sees in freight haulage the truly significant contribution of the railroads, attributing to them perhaps half of the per capita increase in economic activity between 1877 and 1910. When he compares freight haulage by railroads in 1910 with any conceivable alternative (assuming no railroad construction), he finds that as a minimum the railroads made possible “social saving” between 10.8 and 11.5 percent of Mexican gross national product—a proportion over twice as large as the maximums computed for the United States, Britain, and Russia.
The economic and social costs of this great stimulus were considerable. The railroads were designed to favor export products over those intended for the domestic market, and they did almost nothing to develop Mexican manufacturing industries. Also, they so stimulated the commercialization of agriculture as to extend and even revive the age-old latifundismo. This, in turn, caused a rash of uprisings in the late 1870s (which Coatsworth plots revealingly on maps of the developing railroad grid) and helped to bring on the great revolution beginning in 1910. Despite the “democratic impulses” of this revolution, the railroads “bound the country’s future . . . to the contradictory processes of modern capitalistic dependent underdevelopment” (II, 94).
Much of this interpretation is familiar, and some of its unfamiliar details are doubtless open to challenge. Nevertheless, Coatsworth has exorcised myths about the railroads, shrunk the area of conjecture, and placed hitherto largely narrative and descriptive accounts on a foundation of statistics and modern econometry. Future historians of the Porfiriato must consult his monograph; future writers on other Latin American economies may well use it as a model.
