Mexico’s foreign trade, 1821–1870: a window to the Mexican economy

Abstract This paper presents a new series of Mexico’s foreign trade for the period 1821–1870, using foreign sources to reconstruct it, given the scarcity of Mexican-origin data. It then employs the new series with a twofold purpose: to indicate the type of economy and society that they reveal, showing the kind of articles that the country acquired and sent to the exterior, on the one hand, and building some of the measures used in the international literature to assess the performance of the external sector, on the other. In the end, the paper evaluates the functioning of the Mexican economy that those series expose.