What began in 1971, as a simple gathering of information on prices paid by one convent in Santiago for commodities, expanded into a remarkable examination of the Chilean economy from perhaps 1550 to 1808 and the most comprehensive price study to date for any part of colonial Latin America. A lengthy prologue by Rolando Mellafe summarizes the evolution of price studies in Western Europe and their shortcomings. In their own introduction, the authors sketch the development of their project and raise the more general question of the purpose of price studies. These, they indicate, must be a guide to the general nature and movement of the economy in which they occur, and must be based on a weighted index of popular consumption. Clearly, the inspiration is Earl Hamilton. The raison d’être of their study thus stated, they embark on a long examination of the Chilean economy in both qualitative and quantitative terms in order to arrive at properly weighted indexes of expenditure in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The development is rigidly logical. Part one of the book describes initial Spanish settlement in central Chile, the decay of gold placering as the principal industry, and the emergence of agriculture and stockraising, the latter providing the hides and tallow which became the principal export. Subsequent sections examine in detail internal and external demand, production, and supply; part two, food; part three, clothing, locally produced and imported; part four, housing; part five, production for export of hides and tallow, dominant in the seventeenth century, the emergence of the trade in wheat, and maritime traffic between Valparaiso and Callao. Exposition is detailed and rich, based on painstaking research in archives and libraries and the construction of numerous tables and graphs for each item. Even the possible impact of corsairs into the Pacific in the seventeenth century is examined in detail, placed against recorded annual sailings, and then dismissed as insignificant.
In part six, the authors concentrate on the general movement of prices as they calculate weighted general indices for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with greater expenditure on food and less on clothing in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the effect of cheapened, more abundant imports from Europe. For 1597 to 1659 they find a period of falling prices until 1647, when the disruption of the Santiago earthquake of that year, the business upheavals occasioned by bankruptcies in Lima, devaluation because of falsification of coinage in the Potosí mint, and the Araucanian eruption into the central zone in 1658-59 brought sharply rising prices that lasted until 1663. From 1663 to 1693, prices tended to be low. Poor crops in 1693, the disruption of wars in Europe, and the shift in emphasis to the export of wheat to Lima led to high prices until 1703. The eighteenth century was marked by relatively moderate prices until another sharp rise began in 1799 that was still under way in 1808. The authors furnish price averages and graphs to back their analysis.
The last section explains sources, weights and measures, and methodology. The authors have found a wealth of data in the records of purchases of convents, schools, and hospitals, supplemented by recourse to data in cabildo records and treasury accounts. Theirs is undoubtedly by far the most voluminous assemblage of such data for Latin America, and being astute scholars they examine all in terms of the historical circumstances in which they are embedded. The book is an extraordinarily rich and sophisticated contribution to price studies and to general economic history.
