Home Markets in Spain and New Spain at the End of the Eighteenth Century

Juan Carlos Sola Corbacho

This work is a comparative study of the mercantile sectors of Madrid and Mexico City at the end of the eighteenth century, which held the most significant concentration of capital at that time in the Hispanic world. Drawing from notarial records, I have found information about more than one thousand merchants in Madrid and almost eight hundred in Mexico City. These documents include detailed inventories of their goods, shops, and property; bills, payment agreements, designation of proxies, and wills. They provide information about the structure of these two economic sectors and help us identify how merchants invested their capital, the commercial networks they used to trade within the home markets, and the rationale which determined their economic strategies. A study of the activities of the merchants from Madrid and Mexico City will provide some crucial elements to compare the main characteristics and the structure of the domestic markets of the two main parts of the Empire.

[WP # 99023]