Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750-1821.

Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750-1821. By Jeremy Baskes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 306pp.).

Although many scholars of colonial regimes still acknowledge that European (and other) colonial enterprises, both in their construction and maintenance, were underwritten first and foremost by armed force, in recent years historians and anthropologists, in particular, have focused increasingly on forms of accommodation between colonizers and indigenous peoples. Not only has this trend opened interesting discussions about colonial legal and political systems, evangelization, ethnic intermarriage, and forms of social mobility, among other themes, but it has also somewhat redirected scholarly attention away from overt modes of domination, and toward the agency of subaltern, colonized peoples. Economic historian Jeremy Baskes has gone a considerable distance in convincingly rehabilitating one of the most vilified instruments of colonial domination in Spanish America, the notorious reparcimiento de mercancias, portraying it less as a tool of economic extraction from Indians, underwritten by the authority of Spanis h provincial officials and by the threat of imprisonment (or worse), than as an essential form of credit relationship that facilitated peasant commodity production and actually provided indigenous farmers with some economic leverage to better their standards of living. Along the way, Baskes provides a concise but highly detailed economic history of the cochineal industry during its heyday in southern Mexico, telling the fascinating story of the production and marketing of this brilliant natural carmine dye made from the dessicated bodies of tiny insects which spend their life-cycle on prickly pear (nopal) cactus leaves. What this excellent work in economic history lacks in stylistic panache or narrative sweep it makes up for in unusual clarity of exposition (which admittedly tips over into redundancy on occasion), force of argument, and skillful deployment of frankly sometimes patchy evidence. The intelligent, synoptic application of concepts drawn from the institutional economic history of Douglass North and other scholars, and the detailed empirical reconstruction of production costs, trade patterns, profit margins, and so forth add greatly to the credibility of Baskes' analysis.

The southwestern province of Oaxaca was during colonial times, and remains to this day, one of Mexico's most densely Indian and most strikingly rural regions. During the colonial period Oaxaca developed what was to become Mexico's second most valuable export commodity after the silver which poured out of the mines of more northerly areas: cochineal (grana cochinilla). Jeremy Baskes' study deals with the production and marketing of cochineal from the mid-eighteenth century until the industry went into a rapid decline near century's end. Because of its labor intensity and relatively small scale, production of cochineal was almost exclusively in the hands of indigenous peasants, most of whom also devoted their energies to wage labor and/or the raising of subsistence crops for household use. The vagaries of weather, pest infestations, market cycles, and the inherent variability of this sort of petty commodity production meant that Indian producers required constant access to credit to stay in the market. This cre dit was typically provided in the form of cash advances by local Spanish officials known as alcaldes mayores, for which repayment was contracted in the form of the dyestuff at rates which remained remarkably stable throughout the period. These same officials advanced goods--primarily livestock, but other items, as well--on credit to rural people outside the gravitational pull of this particular commodity nexus, but it was clearly the cochinilla industry that drove the regional economy and yielded the most substantial profits for both the ultimate producers and the Spanish intermediaries. The white officials were themselves under obligation to financial backers who helped them obtain their auctioned offices and supplied goods to them in their turn, and both groups perceived the need to realize as much profit as they could within the limited term of the alcalde mayor. Persisting virtually until the end of the colonial period (1821) despite having been outlawed by reformist legislation in 1786, this chain of cre dit linkages was known as the repartimiento de mercancias (literally, the sharing-out [on credit] of goods); it existed throughout Spanish America, but was particularly notorious in Mexico and the Andes (where it has often been cited by scholars as so abusive that it motivated the so-called great pan-Andean rebellion of 1780-82). As for the cochineal trade itself, Baskes traces its scaling of new heights during the later eighteenth century, as well as its decline after the mid-1780s, primarily under the impact of two factors. First, Spanish imperial legislation opened up the antiquated trading system linking Europe with the New World colonies, lowering monopsonistic rates of profit and forcing capital flight from commerce into other sectors of the economy, such as mining. Second, rising maritime insurance and transport costs (which Baskes traces in remarkably interesting detail in his long Chapter 8) attendant upon trans-Atlantic shipping during the period of chronic late eighteenth-century warfare simply und ercut the profitability of the trade to the point that the risks and costs were not justified by dwindling profits.

Baskes has his sights squarely on the conventional historiographical wisdom that the repartimiento not only facilitated the cochineal industry, but more generally forced reluctant indigenous peasants into colonial market relations which they preferred to avoid, for the sake of extortionately high profits garnered by official and mercantile middlemen. He finds little evidence of such extortion, however, pointing out that in remote rural areas supplying credit was a risky business whose vulnerability and volatility required adequate recompense if it was to continue; that rates of return to the Spanish officials and their backers on invested capital were only moderate, at an average 10-20 per cent; and that Indians often defaulted on their advances. Baskes also insists that Indian cochineal producers and other borrowers for the most part chose to seek credit from Spanish officials, that they found modes to resist what might have become abuses, and that as sellers of this valuable commodity they were able to maxi mize their position in the market within certain limits. Given the resonances of Baskes' findings with the old debate about moral economist peasants (James Scott) versus rational-optimizer peasants (Samuel Popkin), a reader might wish he had revisited that literature explicitly, but he makes his point clearly, nonetheless. It is interesting to note that an economic historian like Jeremy Baskes can approach the problem of market behavior from an essentially neo-classical point of view, arriving at conclusions about peasant agency and, therefore, about the capacity of conquered peoples to resist the colonial order, that are not too different from those of subalternist historians, but for quite different reasons. Neither tendency is particularly sensitive to the ways in which culture might condition market behavior or people's decisions about how to invest their economic resources in a larger historical framework, and one is ultimately a bit uneasy about coloring colonial institutions pink rather than red; but t he closely reasoned revisionism of Baskes' study is nonetheless very welcome.