"A Pecuniary Epidemic: Counterfeit Copper and National Sovereignty in 1830s Mexico"

Between 1829 and 1836, Mexico’s national mint produced nearly five million petty copper coins. Like other nations in the nineteenth century, Mexico sought to integrate markets and extend the reach of the central government by replacing private tokens and locally-minted money with a copper coin that would circulate throughout the country—“territorializing” the nation’s currency, as Eric Helleiner has written. But Mexico’s government also needed revenue, and minting copper proved an attractive, if ephemeral, remedy. With face values set far higher than their intrinsic (or metallic) values, the coins were a profit center for the mint and the government, but they also invited counterfeiting. Mexico lacked the steam-powered minting technology that other nations, including Britain and the United States, had begun to implement to make their coins harder to copy. An epidemic of counterfeiting swept across Mexico in the latter half of the 1830s before the government finally removed them from circulation in 1842. A project that was designed to extend the reach of the state by monetizing the economies of the poor ultimately undermined the authority and credibility of Mexico’s government, which was already reeling from chronic political instability. The episode eroded public faith in the state’s ability to shape the economy through monetary designs.