Mexico: From Colonial Fiscal Regime to Liberal Financial Order, 1750–1912
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1776, on publishing his famous work, The Wealth of Nations , Adam Smith was convinced that the fiscal structure of the Spanish Empire in Central and South America was more efficient than that of the crumbling British colonial administration in North America. A quarter of a century later, in 1803, on his prolonged visit to Mexico, Alexander von Humboldt obtained a similar impression, which he registered in his widely read Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain , underlining the fact that the Mexican fiscal system was an extraordinarily successful tax machine. On the other hand, by the midnineteenth century, both domestic and foreign observers expressed a gloomy and pessimistic view of the finances of the independent Mexican republic, a fact ratified by its incapacity to defend its territory adequately against foreign invasion forces, whether from the United States or from Europe. These contrasting historical views are testimony to a singular and still unexplained transition of Mexico from rich colony to poor nation, at least from the point of view of state finance. This striking shift is particularly surprising given the fact that Mexico was the largest silver producer and exporter in the world in the late eighteenth century. The Mexican silver peso circulated everywhere – throughout the islands of the Caribbean, in Europe (generally being reminted or restamped), and as far away as China and India, where it had been used for centuries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".