DOI: 10.7281/t1/b1qtxi
title: Estadística Agrícola de la República, 1899-1900/ Agricultural Statistics from Mexico, 1899-1900

description: In 1898, the Mexican Agricultural Society proposed a comprehensive survey of Mexico's agricultural properties to be presented at the Paris Exposition in 1900. In collaboration with the national Department of Fomento, or Development, they proposed and revised a table requesting information on agricultural activity across the country by property. Asserting that the Statistical Office already had much information to hand, Fomento officials removed numerous columns from the proposed table. They then circulated the resultant survey to every municipal president in Mexico in summer 1899. This dataset is built on transcriptions of the tables returned by municipal and state officials. It represents about 1,400 municipalities from 18 states and territories. The EstadisticaAgricola1899_AllData file includes all the transcribed data at the property level. The EstadisticaAgricola1899_SummaryStatistics file includes data summarized at the municipal level. The tables were transcribed as directly as possible, with the Annotation column containing any writing from outside the table itself. Transcriber notes regarding decisions made, illegible content, etc., is included in the Summary Statistics table, as is information on who signed the table and when they signed it. If information was written vertically across an entire column for a town, that information has been copied into the appropriate cell for each property within that town. Transcribers used their best judgment with regards to ditto marks versus indications that there was no information to include in a particular cell, as enumerators’ use of symbols to denote the two distinct options often looked similar. The codebook for each table contains additional information about how names, units of measure, and other information was standardized. It is important to note that enumerators responded to the table in very different ways. The data in this dataset is not commensurate and care must be taken in drawing comparisons beyond the municipal level. Lacking clear instructions, officials made different decisions about what kind of properties to include, how to note yield, whether to include information at the municipal or property level, and so on. For more analysis and detail about overall patterns in the dataset, see Casey Marina Lurtz, “A Confounded Statistic: Understanding Incommensurability in Turn of the Century Mexico,” The Americas, 80:2 (2023). Original transcriptions of the dataset are available by request from Casey Marina Lurtz (lurtz@jhu.edu). They were completed by Lurtz, Oriol Regue Sendros, and Lauren MacDonald. Students in Johns Hopkins University’s Making Maps of Mexico class in Spring 2021 and Fall 2022 contributed to decision making around how to standardize information in the columns. At the MSE Library at Johns Hopkins, Marley Kalt helped with data management, and Lena Denis and Reina Chano Murray provided advice and instruction on mapping the data. Visualizations of the data can be found at https://caseylurtz.com/agricultural-statistics. A shapefile for mapping data from Mexico in the late nineteenth century based on municipalities listed in the 1900 Census will be published there and to the ArcGIS Living Atlas soon. Photographs of the original manuscript tables are available by contacting Casey Marina Lurtz (lurtz@jhu.edu) or can be located at the Mexican Archivo General de la Nación, Fomento y Obras Publicas: Exposiciones Extranjeras y del País, cajas 51-53.