Consumption and Control: The México City Business Community and Commodity Marketing in the 18th Century

Abstract

Scholars have long recognized that despite the a11ure of quick and substantial profits offered by investment in mining and commerce, agriculture and ranching in fact rendered the greatest part of New Spain's gross domestic product throughout much of the colonia1 period. Certainly such was the case in the eighteenth century, when such indicators as tithe income records note the rapid increase in agricultural out-put.