Agriculture played a dominant role in the Mexican economy from precolonial times until well into the 20th century. In 1910 two-thirds of the population earned its livelihood from farming or farm work.

Agriculture's importance is perhaps matched only by the relative dearth of quantitative evidence about it. Because virtually all agricultural production took place in family-owned enterprises, there are no corporate financial data on which to draw. In addition, agricultural output was not subject to the excise taxes that were levied on producers in other sectors, so we cannot develop the range of firm-level data sets that we can for other sectors of the Mexican economy. We are, however, able to use U.S. and British trade records to put together data sets on Mexico's importation of capital and intermediate goods for agricultural use. We are also able to use those sources to estimate the net imports and exports of Mexican agricultural products to the United States. This means that we can develop data sets on the flow of new investment and on the economic performance of Mexican staple and export agriculture.

The data sets we have developed, when coupled with the extant secondary literature, allow us to capture the basic outlines of Mexico's agricultural history. Before the revolution, the federal government played an important role in the specification of agricultural property rights. The federal government played a very small role, however, in the enforcement of the property rights system.