Everyone knows that anthologies are hard to review. “These essays have no common theme.” “The contributions are uneven.” “The editor was surely asleep.” Academic presses apparently ignore such boilerplate. After all, they keep on publishing the things. Evidently, there is a demand for books that are difficult to read and categorize. Or perhaps it’s just Say’s Law at work. The volume at hand is, alas, a worthy addition to this maligned genre. It exhibits all the conventional defects. Nevertheless, Empresarios, indios y estado is worth buying and reading. The contributions are, by and large, intelligent. Even the less compelling ones offer useful data and bibliography. And several of the essays are really outstanding.
Anyone who wants to understand the recent historiography of Bourbon Mexico should read Eric Van Young’s concluding essay. In essence, he suggests that population growth and the mining boom drove up rents and profits but reduced labor income. Opulence and misery grew side by side, as Humboldt perceptively remarked. Unfortunately, the other essays make no attempt to test the hypothesis. Manuel Miño’s paper on textiles would have been a good place to start. As popular incomes shrank, the demand for coarse woolens fell, and the consumption of cheaper cottons rose. But Miño, who is bent on paraphrasing Lucas Alamán, argues that mining demand drove industry and agriculture. If so, why did investment in woolens fall as silver production rose over the course of the eighteenth century? By the 1840s, even Don Lucas was singing a different song.
The essays by Danièle Dehouve and Horst Pietschmann are first-rate. Both are distinctly European in tone, and their emphasis on exchange is apt to irritate historians who find the peasant “propensity to truck and barter” an ideological inconvenience. They complement Cristina Torales Pacheco’s portrait of the domestic activities of Francisco Ignacio de Yraeta, whose involvement in the repartimiento helped commercialize peasant surpluses. P. L. G. van der Meer’s reexamination of Xochimancas and Barreto is nicely done. I cannot fault Arij Ouweneel’s analysis of the hacienda of Xaltipán, although commercial potential surely explains more than capitalist expropriation in accounting for the shape of social relations and land tenure.
Some of the papers are disappointing. Slicher van Bath’s is too obscure for me to fathom, and solipsistic to boot. The essays by Virginia García Acosta and Clara Elena Suárez Argüello are largely distillations of their important studies of wheat production, distribution, and use. The data on wheat prices and flour shipments in García Acosta’s contribution are especially valuable, but her interpretive framework (and Suárez Argüello’s as well) is a rehash of Enrique Florescano’s work on maize. In attacking what he calls the “myth of the North Mexican hacienda,” José Cuello is assaulting a corpse.
Graduate students and harried scholars will find the Teutonic footnotes a blessing. I cannot imagine a U.S. publisher permitting a 1,200-word bibliographical footnote (pp. 181-183)!
