Trading Cacao : a View from Veracruz, 1629 – 1645
Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: This essay examines several interrelated themes and uses a variety of research strategies to explore the general topic of chocolate and the cacao trade in early seventeenth-century Mexico. Based primarily on the records of the Mexico Tribunal of the Inquisition, the essay attempts to expand our understanding of the beginning of large-scale chocolate consumption in Mexico, of the inner workings of the business of buying, transporting, and selling cacao beans, and the business of chocolate sold at retail. A central section attempts to estimate the profit that was made in the cacao trade, offering a careful analysis of prices, taxes, and shipping costs. The essay ends with a biographical sketch of a Portuguese slave trader turned cacao merchant, Antonio Méndez Chillón, whose arrest in the port of Veracruz for Jewish heresy in 1645 ended his successful career.
Source: Nuevo mundo mundos nuevos
Author: Robert Ferry
Language: Spanish
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2000406807