| Summary: | This essay examines several interrelated themes and uses a variety of research strategies to explore the general topic of chocolate and the cacao trade in early seventeenth-century Mexico. Based primarily on the records of the Mexico Tribunal of the Inquisition, the essay attempts to expand our understanding of the beginning of large-scale chocolate consumption in Mexico, of the inner workings of the business of buying, transporting, and selling cacao beans, and the business of chocolate sold at retail. A central section attempts to estimate the profit that was made in the cacao trade, offering a careful analysis of prices, taxes, and shipping costs. The essay ends with a biographical sketch of a Portuguese slave trader turned cacao merchant, Antonio Méndez Chillón, whose arrest in the port of Veracruz for Jewish heresy in 1645 ended his successful career.
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