Comments on: Avid Trade and Five Hundred Years of Mexican Commerce https://www.mexperience.com/five-hundred-years-of-mexican-commerce/ Experience More of Mexico Thu, 04 Jul 2024 22:24:45 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 By: Becky O https://www.mexperience.com/five-hundred-years-of-mexican-commerce/#comment-24605 Wed, 27 Jun 2018 04:08:45 +0000 https://www.mexperience.com/?p=2133---8deaa614-2132-4c15-95ec-5af0ead2b879#comment-24605 Dear Sirs,

I love your newsletter! I particularly liked this article about Mexican commerce (and entrepreneurship). While you make the comment that this Mexican practice of the Tianguis (open markets) goes back 500 years, I would argue that it goes back perhaps a thousand years (if not more). The account you quote (similar to the one described in Bernal diaz del Castillo’s “True Hisotory of the Spanish Conquest”) only considers the years from the time the Spaniards documented what they saw. However, as Bernard del Castillo recounts, not only were the markets in Tenochtitlán massive with every ware one can imagine, but they were extremely well organized with market arbriters on hand to settle merchant disputes. Something like this (at this size, scale and level of complexity) doesn’t develop overnight. What the Spanish witnessed was something that had long existed many, many years before their arrival.

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