“The Prelude to Our Dissolution”: Paper Money and National Sovereignty in Mexico's First Empire

This article examines Mexico's short-lived first experiment with paper money in the years immediately following the country's independence from Spain. Challenging the traditional explanation for the money's failure, which attributed it to the Mexican public's long-standing attachment to silver coins, it argues that the project ran aground because of its competing financial, political, and social objectives and the resistance that it encountered from the commercial sector. Using sources from Mexico's national archives, published proceedings of its constituent congress, newspapers, and pamphlet literature from the era, the study reveals a previously unrecognized nation-building agenda that sought to turn Mexico's citizens into lenders and to subordinate Spanish merchant capitalists to the fledgling state. It contributes to the history of early national Mexico and, comparing the project to other contemporaneous paper money experiments, to the interconnected histories of money and state formation.