This slim volume makes a modest but useful contribution to the progress of Mexican agrarian studies. It opens with a chapter attempting to summarize the present state of hacienda scholarship, followed by another that synthesizes the development of the sugar industry of Morelos during the colonial era, both based primarily on published sources. The core of the book, and most of its original contribution, is the discussion of the evolving ownership and credit relations of a small sugar estate located near Yautepec.
Based on surviving estate records, the work details the origins of the property in the complex transfer of lands from an indigenous noble to a Spanish clergyman. It then traces the shifts in the estate’s ownership during the century from 1608 to 1729, focusing on the financial difficulties that developed after 1650 as a depressed sugar industry made growing indebtedness to the church an increasing burden. This estate history culminates with the bankruptcy of the owner and forced auction of the property by ecclesiastical creditors.
The book is useful for focusing on a small estate operated by struggling members of the Mexican colonial elite. We thus have a study in contrast to the estate operations of the Jesuits—increasingly well known, but perhaps not typical for their financial strength and large-scale operations. We also have here one of the few estate studies focusing on the era from the early seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, when the colonial economy was not entirely prosperous and many elite families faced persistent financial difficulties. Any scholar probing the complexities of colonial elite life, or aiming to synthesize colonial agrarian developments, will find this study worth consulting.
