Papermaking a la Mexicana: Technology, Commerce, and Autonomy After Independence

Historians and literary scholars have argued that alphabetic writing and printing played important roles in the colonization of the Americas and in the negotiated processes of empire building, yet we know surprisingly little about its material substrate or about how paper circulated before or after independence. Following the colonial-era commodity chain points toward the Iberian Peninsula but especially to European production centers like Genoa, whose merchants had secured a preeminent role as suppliers of American markets. But what happened after the contracts, monopolies, and networks brokered through Spanish intermediaries frayed with wars for independence? Where was the paper for supplying nascent governments, residents, and citizens supposed to come from? And did it/why did it matter?

My presentation answers these questions by examining efforts to turn the valley of Mexico into an early site of industrial papermaking. It focuses on the efforts of a British entrepreneur named Guillermo Benfield who built a successful mill in the western outskirts of Mexico City, benefitting from proximity to the local textile industry, access to precious water sources, and official patronage. It situates his activities in relation to other experimental industrial projects and to shifts in an Atlantic paper trade populated by emerging production hubs in the North Atlantic world, especially the Northeastern United States. And it considers the official and popular reception of Benfield’s local success to analyze the broader meanings that nineteenth-century Mexicans ascribed to paper within competing projects to achieve cultural and economic autonomy, thus shedding new light on the practical and symbolic struggles unleashed by independence.