In one opening essay to this valuable collection of colonial price histories, John Coatsworth submits that in no other field of economic historical work is the analytical payoff from empirical research so high” (p. 30). How true. But much as this hook makes a needed initial investigatory investment, the long-term dividends are yet to be collected.
The twelve essays published here are a mixed bag in terms of regions, the kinds of prices gathered (mainly foodstuffs), approaches to price history, disciplinary focus, and quantitative and price-theoretical sophistication. To its credit, the hook provides readers with a broad representative sample of recent advances in Latin American price history, and its limitations. Superb introductory surveys by Herbert Klein/Stanley Engerman and Coatsworth illuminate such topics as the methodological challenges and pitfalls of price history and its plurality of possible research agendas. They also sort out some of the thorny regional and comparative findings that emerge from the studies as a whole. The research efforts that follow might have enjoyed greater cohesion if, somehow, such surveys had been available beforehand. Least helpful here is Ruggiero Romanos’s murky, at times downright mystical survey. Indeed, most of the essays dispel his notion of static “natural” colonial markets, though other dilemmas are found in late-colonial agrarian structures.
The concerns here range from social history and regional market development to econometric exercises. Social historians will profit from Lyman Johnson’s crafted study of the impact of inflation on popular welfare in urban Buenos Aires or from Brooke Larson’s suggestive exegesis of market and power relations in rural Cochabamba. Economic historians will benefit from José Larraín’s heroic attempt to estimate changing Chilean GNP via price data or from the rigor of Javier Cuenca-Esteban’s complex test of late-imperial export market behavior. All historians should appreciate the richer data base exhumed in Dauril Alden’s exhaustive study of Salvador, Brazil; in Kendall Brown’s diggings from Arequipa, Peru; from Richard Garner’s fuller set of regional Mexican prices; and in Enrique Tandeter and Nathan Wachtel’s Annalesque interpretation of the four market “conjunctures” of Potosí. Only sometimes do the explanations for the trends identified wax between convolution and reduction, and, save for Johnson’s and Brown’s attempts, none of the essays compute standard cost-of-living indices, one reason why the overall results remain so difficult to grasp.
The fare here is rich and varied and whets the appetite for a fuller menu of colonial prices. Editors Johnson and Tandeter are to be commended for bringing together such disparate new data and approaches to a woefully neglected field. And for their unusual intellectual humility: how many of us truly “look forward to the day when early efforts will be revised by our colleagues” (p. 6)?
