5 - Profits and rents: three haciendas

Summary

How many workers were employed on haciendas in León? What was the ratio of resident peons to the number of seasonal jornaleros? How many tenants were there and how much of the hacienda did they farm? What proportion of the harvest was actually sold each year? What was the rate of profit? As we argued above, answers to such questions can only come from an analysis of the accounts of particular haciendas. Unfortunately, there were no legal reasons why anyone should deposit his private papers in a public archive. Indeed only in cases of judicial embargo or when an estate was managed by a guardian was there any call for a public comprobation of accounts. In León summary returns were filed with the municipal magistrates for only three states – Duarte, Otates and Sauz de Armenta – which at the time were respectively managed by a legal executor or guardian on behalf of an elderly infirm spinster, a lunatic and a child. Clearly, the reasons which dictated the survival of these documents also biased their direction against any high yield of profit. The selection is also distorted, although the interest greatly heightened by the coincidence of our first two examples with the Insurgency of 1810–21. Despite these obvious defects, the records provide invaluable evidence about the internal organisation of agricultural production which cannot be found in any other type of source material of this period.