Climate and Crisis in Eighteenth Century Mexico

Abstract

Signals of social and economic growth and prosperity in late colonial Mexico, and especially in the eighteenth century, masked a number of deeper, longer-standing structural problems. Drives towards market integration and the development of international trade associated with the Bourbon reforms stimulated a phase of remarkably rapid economic and administrative change, but also exacerbated a growing social inequality. Some groups benefitted from the economic developments of the 1700s, others suffered serious economic deprivation. This article suggests that repeated periods of anomalous weather and subsistence crisis between the 1690s through to the early 1800s might have served to at once reveal and compound these inequalities and may have also contributed to local and collective social unrest at different points throughout this period.