William Schell

Silver Symbiosis: ReOrienting Mexican Economic History

In 1904 Finance Minister José I. Limantour ordered a monetary census in preparation for Mexico’s conversion to the gold standard. In it, Porfirian bean counters found only one hundred million of the four billion-plus pesos of various sorts reportedly minted over the centuries. Even assuming a significant undercounting, in that time Mexico had exported at least 3.5 billion pesos; in short, the peso was the most widely circulated coin in history.1 In a previous study, I suggested that the economies of nineteenth-century Mexico and China were linked in what I termed a Sino-Mexican symbiosis in which Mexican miners seemed to coin silver in response to Chinese demand for specie.2 While commodity peso prices followed those of silver bullion, I cannot find a clear correspondence between peso exports and silver prices; rather peso exports increased when the Porfirian economy slowed and declined when it grew. This relationship is revealed in figure 1.

Empresas y modernización en México desde las reformas borbónicas hasta el Porfiriato (review)

In his brief Introduction to Empresas y modernization en Mexico editor Richard Liehr tells us that the collections four essays deal with the creation of modern Mexico by entrepreneurial families over generations from the Bourbon Reform and through the Porfiriato. Using the traditional tactics of campadrazgo, strategic marriages, entail, and political alliances, such families dealt with often hostile business environs to survive and transition to more modern forms of organization, the partnership and later the sociedad anonima (joint stock corporation). Unfortunately Liehrs Introduction describes only two of the essays—puzzling given that he adequately summarizes each one.

Desastre económico o debilidad federal en los primeros gobiernos postrevolucionarios. Edited by Rocío Castañeda González, Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, and Jorge A. Andrade Galindo. Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social et. al., 2005. Pp. 250. Notes.

This book is a compilation of documents from the Archivo Historico del Agua with commentary assembled by the editors to address a topic they feel has been neglected, namely the damage done to hacienda, ranch, and industrial hydraulic infrastructure by various armed movements from 1917-1929. The documents were selected and arranged in forty-two sets by three criteria: those reporting damage done by revolutionary and insurrectional violence and requesting immunity from water fees, those complaining about obstacles to rebuilding, and those requesting military assistance. The thrust of the project is framed in the books title as an unfortunate either/or question: Did the Mexican governments failure to implement rational water management policies result from economic disaster and destruction arising from revolutionary violence, or from federal weakness? They conclude the latter.

Race, Nation, and Market: Economic Culture in Porfirian Mexico (review)

The reverse order of his title notwithstanding, Richard Weiner focuses his study on the market as the dominant symbol of Porfirian political discourse. He frames his “central premise” that “politics, ethics, and society are fundamental components of market discourse” (p. 102) with two “central questions.” “What sociopolitical powers did Porfirian liberals, radicals, and conservatives ascribe to the market,” he asks, “and what impact did their discourses have on the formation of their identities, platforms, programs, and policies” (p. 7)? Weiner’s market “is not a physical place where goods are exchanged, but a symbolic site where identities and programs of social movements are constructed” (p. 5). It is an ambiguous symbol, a “multifarious signifier” (pp. 7-8). To científicos, and other developmentalist liberals, it signified positive material progress that contributed to political peace; to radicals of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and social Catholics (conservatives?) it signified capitalist exploitation of the poor and working classes that eroded the moral social order. Because this concept of the market is so malleable and subjective, Weiner functionally defines it as broadly as capitalism throughout most of the book.