Sandra Kuntz Ficker (ed.), Historia económica general de México: de la colonia a nuestros días (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2010), pp. 834, $39.00, hb.
from the middle class: the author identifies doctors, lawyers, farmers, retired navy and army officers, clergymen, widows (and their unmarried daughters) and merchants, to give but some of the categories. Wealthier shareholders were bankers, brewers and stockbrokers, also very visible as directors. To some of these, he can give names, which enables him to discuss the speculative activities of a number of the shareholders. In general, he concludes that while there is no evidence of the deliberate ‘puffing up’ of the market in Mexican companies, it is equally clear that some individual shareholders did speculate, and that some did very well. But they were the exceptions; once the market settled down after the Bubble, there were no real opportunities for speculation; the best that could be hoped for was to sell on a (slightly) rising market. Those who stayed in for the long haul were to be disappointed. Mining was only the most visible, and by far the largest, of the areas of British investment in Mexico, and Costeloe looks more briefly at some of the other areas. One of these was running the regional mints, and here profits were made: the AngloMexican Mint Company was successful for nearly half a century. And there was always commerce. This was not organised in joint stock companies, and so does not appear as an investment, yet it seems clear that British firms and British merchants were the most successful in a very heterogeneous sector. Manning and Mackintosh in Mexico City are the most visible examples of this, yet they hardly appear in UK records. Indeed, it is in this area of non-mining activities that it is most clear that more research remains to be done, as the author makes clear. This work is one of arduous empirical research, and generally the author keeps his analyses to the micro-matters he is discussing – why invest in Mexico, why move out of consols, why companies failed, and so on. This is the nature of the work, and to be accepted as such. However, Costeloe does revisit, sensibly if briefly, almost in a throwaway manner, the old question of informal empire, and whether it existed. He finds that it did not. So this excellent book, so complete in itself, leaves us with two avenues for further research and debate: the noninvestment sector of British economic activity in Mexico, and the definition of informal empire.