REFORM AND RECOVERY 139
crops for local markets, notably wheat, which the
European population preferred over maize. Tithe
collections offer an index of agricultural growth:
in the decade from 1779 to 1789, tithe collections
in the principal agricultural areas were 40 percent
greater than in the previous decade.
It appears, however, that agricultural pros-
perity was largely limited to areas that produced
export crops or had easy access to domestic mar-
kets. David Brading paints a gloomy picture of the
fi nancial condition of the Mexican haciendas in the
eighteenth century. Except in the Valley of Mexico,
the Bajío,^3 and the Guadalajara region, markets
were too small to yield satisfactory returns. Great
distances, poor roads, and high freight costs pre-
vented haciendas from developing their produc-
tive capacity beyond the requirements of the local
market. Private estates were even worse off than
church haciendas because they had to pay tithes
and sales taxes and bore the double burden of ab-
sentee landowners and resident administrators.
Great landed families who possessed numerous
estates in different regions, producing varied prod-
ucts for multiple markets, were more fortunate;
their profi ts averaged from 6 to 9 percent of capi-
tal value in the late eighteenth century. Thanks
to cheap labor, however, even a low productivity
yielded large revenues, which enabled hacendados
to maintain a lavish, seigneurial style of life. Many
haciendas were heavily indebted to ecclesiastical
institutions, the principal bankers of the time.
The increase in agricultural production, it
should be noted, resulted from more extensive use
of land and labor than from the use of improved im-
plements or techniques. The ineffi cient latifundio
(great estate), which used poorly paid peon labor,
and the slave plantation accounted for the bulk of
commercial agricultural production. The Prussian
traveler Alexander von Humboldt, commenting
on the semifeudal land tenure system of Mexico,
observed that “the property of New Spain, like that
of Old Spain, is in a great measure in the hands of
(^3) A relatively urbanized area with a diversifi ed economy
(agriculture, mining, manufacturing) lying within the
modern Mexican states of Guanajuato and Querétaro.
a few powerful families, who have gradually ab-
sorbed the smaller estates. In America, as well as
in Europe, large commons are condemned to the
pasturage of cattle and to perpetual sterility.”
The increasing concentration of landowner-
ship in Mexico and the central Andes in the second
half of the eighteenth century refl ected the desire of
hacendados to eliminate the competition of small
producers in restricted markets and to maintain
prices at a high level. To help achieve this end,
great landowners hoarded their harvests in their
granaries and sent grain to market at that time of
the year when it was scarcest and prices were at
their highest. Given the low productivity of colo-
nial agriculture, however, such natural disasters
as drought, premature frosts, or excessive rains
easily upset the precarious balance between food
supplies and population, producing frightful fam-
ines like that of 1785–1787 in central Mexico.
Thousands died of hunger or diseases induced by
that famine.
What sugar, cacao, and coffee were for the
Caribbean area, hides were for the Río de la Plata.
The rising European demand for leather for foot-
wear and industrial purposes and the permission
given in 1735 for direct trade with Spain in reg-
ister ships sparked an economic upsurge in the
Plata area. The unregulated hunting of wild cattle
on the open pampa soon gave way to the herding
of cattle on established estancias (cattle ranches).
By the end of the century, these ranches were of-
ten huge, measuring 15 to 20 square leagues and
having as many as eighty or a hundred thousand
head of cattle. By 1790, Buenos Aires was export-
ing nearly a million and a half hides annually. The
meat of the animal, hitherto almost worthless ex-
cept for the small quantity that could be consumed
immediately, now gained in value as a result of the
demand for salt beef, processed in large-scale sal-
aderos(salting plants). Markets for salt beef were
found above all in the Caribbean area, especially
Cuba, where it was chiefl y used for feeding the
slave population. The growth of cattle raising in La
Plata, however, was attended by the concentration
of land in ever fewer hands and took place at the
expense of agriculture, which remained in a very
depressed state.