Andrew Konove

Andrew s research focuses on the relationship between monetary crises and social and economic change during Mexico's transition from colony to republic. By the second half of the eighteenth century, a crisis of small change had hit colonial Mexico. Because the Crown refused to allow the production of copper coins in New Spain, colonists had resorted to making their own currency, called tlacos, which the poor could use to purchase basic staples. Andrew s project follows the debates about copper coinage from the second half of the eighteenth-century, when Bourbon reformers first suggested that the lack of small change was preventing economic growth, to the mid-nineteenth century, when the republican government's disastrous experiment with copper coins, which had brought widespread inflation and deprivation, finally came to an end. By looking at money from the perspective of both policymakers and consumers, this project seeks to shed new light on Mexico's frustrated economic development in the nineteenth century.