6 - Landlords

Summary

In a frontier society such as eighteenth century León, where the development of haciendas depended on the financial resources of their owners, it was only to be expected that merchants and miners would play an important role in the transformation of the countryside. In a few cases hacendado families contrived to improve their estates over the course of the century. But in the years prior to 1760 it was mainly merchants who were responsible for the formation of new haciendas, either by financing the conversion of scrubland into arable, or through the purchase of entire series of ranchos and labores. Only in the last decades of the century did wealthy miners from Guanajuato and Catorce emerge as the leading landowners in the district. Obviously, these distinctions in period and occupation should not be pressed too hard, since from the start several merchants derived their profits from mining operations and they certainly did not disappear from the scene after 1780. Indeed, at all times, many proprietors were described as ‘merchants and landowners’. It is surely significant that in a group of ten leading merchants who contracted to farm the royal excise or alcabala, no less than six owned or were about to own haciendas. Then again, apart from a few absentee landlords, virtually all the hacendados in the district lived in León so that it would be quite false to present any radical dichotomy between the rural gentry and urban traders.