8 - Agricultural prices and the demographic crises

Summary

At present our knowledge of Bourbon Mexico is partial and inconsistent. Although progressive increments of quantitative data have effaced the traditional image of this epoch, the new lines of research have yet to be framed within a general perspective. Since the salient opened by our work on León may prove difficult to capture, it behoves us to examine its implications for the current debate. In any case, the history of a particular locality rarely makes much sense without some consideration of its place within the overall context.

The conventional view of Bourbon Mexico as the golden age of the colonial regime was first propounded in the last century by the conservative historian, Lucas Alamán, who painted a bitter contrast between the economic retrogression and political disorder which followed the attainment of Independence and the enlightened government and diffusion of prosperity which characterised the last decades of the previous century. The burden of proof here rested on the array of statistics presented in the Essai Politique of Alexander von Humboldt. These figures showed that it was in the years after the general Inspection of José de Gálvez (1765–71) that silver output leapt forward from about II million pesos to a peak in 1805 of 25 million pesos. At much the same time overseas trade and government revenue registered substantial increases. Equally important, the Church tithe levied on agricultural production in the six leading dioceses rose by 60% from 1.19 million pesos in 1771 to 1.91 million in 1789.