Studies of the Spanish Bourbon Reforms of the eighteenth century have largely focused on royal efforts to promote competition in overseas trade and, at the same time, establish crown monopolies over industries such as tobacco. Scholars have paid less attention to the anti-monopoly rhetoric that emerged in this era. As reformers sought a greater role for the state in the imperial economy, they took aim at the private monopolies that had flourished under Hapsburg rule, where key state functions had been outsourced to private actors as tax farms. Minting was one such function, which the Bourbon monarchy gradually brought under the direct control of the state over the course of the eighteenth century.
Yet in Spanish America the provision of small change remained largely in private hands. Shopkeepers made tokens to subdivide the smallest silver coins, which they issued as change for customers’ purchases and as loans on pawned goods. They were especially common in New Spain, the most economically dynamic region of Spanish America in the eighteenth century. Reformers sought to curtail the use of these tokens, claiming that the merchants were operating illegal monopolies that forced customers to return to their stores or else see the value of their tokens erased. Minting, these writers argued, was a royal prerogative and private actors had no business making money for individual profit.
This paper explores the use of anti-monopoly rhetoric in debates over the production and circulation of small change in late-colonial Mexico, from around 1750 to 1821, when the country obtained its independence from Spain. It interrogates a key distinction that Bourbon-era reformers made between private monopolies, which most viewed as pernicious, and public ones, which served the greater good. With independence and the ascendance of a liberal political economy in Mexico, that distinction gradually disappeared.