The Weaver, the Baker, and the Candelabra Maker: Profit, Purity, and Visibility in Late Colonial Mexico City, 1765–1810

This paper discusses how economic culture in late-colonial Mexico City, influenced by the moral economy of colonial mercantilism, affected three local industries whose products were highly significant to the urban landscape. I discuss market controls over bread, cloth and silverwork in Mexico City from 1765 to 1810, analyzing how concerns about the quality, prices, and trajectories of these goods translated into policies to increase surveillance over local commerce. Bourbon-era officials persistently decried how such products traveled from carefully controlled sites of production into city marketplaces and the baskets and stalls of ambulatory vendors. The passing of these goods into local markets complicated officials' attempts to protect the “public good,” by controlling the production and sale of goods intended for public consumption. In addition, monitoring such goods prevented the unshackling of rampant individual interests in conflict with a mercantile body politic that conflated an individual's social station with his or her range of “moral,” or rather, “appropriate,” economic ambitions. I argue that the market controls reflected anxieties about the possible moral perils of the marketplace, as well as the heterogeneity of its products and participants. Using the records of the Fiel Ejecutoría, or market court, in Mexico City, it describes the performativity of municipal and imperial governance in controlling the marketplace and the commerce of everyday goods. Finally, the paper discusses the architectural and legal solutions introduced to alleviate these concerns and the ways in which merchants, vendors, and traders responded to these measures.