Agrarian Change in Eighteenth-Century Yucatán

Abstract

IN the past two decades the historical interpretation of the colonial Spanish American hacienda has undergone substantial revision. The earlier view of the institution was based in part on firsthand acquaintance with the great estates as they existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the landowning aristocracy ruled over vast properties pieced together over the years at the expense of small holders and peasants. Through a methodology known in anthropology as up-streaming, this conception of the hacienda was projected backward in time and influenced the interpretation of the great estate in colonial Latin America. In retrospect Francois Chevalier's classic magnum opus,' the first full-scale analysis using archival sources, did not result in a reinterpretation of the hacienda, for the French scholar essentially accepted and reinforced the earlier view of the hacendados as rich and powerful, land-grabbing, resource-monopolizing, feudal lords. Chevalier's work represented not the beginning, but the end, of what David Brading has referred to as an entire cycle of research and interpretation. 2 Thirty years after the appearance of La formation des grandes domnaines au Mexique, historical revision has led to a different understanding of the colonial hacienda. Chevalier has been shown to have generalized too much from data derived primarily from one large and important region. Studies of other areas revealed that colonial haciendas were frequently quite small and burdened with debts, and that hacendados only

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