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Around the year 1623 two Spaniards accompanied by their Mexicano servant set out to establish a sugar plantation in the new kingdom of Nuevo León, which for a generation had formed the northeastern frontier of New Spain. The place to which Pereyra and Pérez, the Spaniards, laid claim as their own happened to be occupied at the time by the ranchería of an Indian named Nacastlagua. Nacastlagua had his people help Pérez and Pereyra dig their irrigation ditches, prepare their fields, and plant their cane, as was expected of him and of them; yet, unexpectedly, Nacastlagua also assumed the right of sitting down first at the table every day when dinner was served. Pérez and Pereyra suffered from being so mocked by the shameless Nacastlagua, who seemed oblivious to his proper place in the Spanish scheme of things. Worse, they could think of no way to put him in that place. But the overseer they hired for the new plantation, Antonio Durán, a bold man with no doubt some small experience in these frontier Indian affairs, soon decided to settle the matter. The day after Durán arrived, he stood waiting when dinner was served, fingering a club cut especially for the occasion. As soon as Nacastlagua sat down as was his custom, Durán set about beating the surprised and confused Indian to a pulp. The next day Antonio Durán, suspecting the denouement, packed up his household and left for the provincial capital of Monterrey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American naturally did business, just as Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme did prose; and it was said that … business is … the triumph of America; any history, any description of the United States is also and above all the description of a colossal and unheard-of business, an agricultural, industrial, and commercial operation such as the world has never seen or dreamt of. So pervasive was the role of economics that the French felt that the Americans conducted politics as they conducted business, that their newspapers were managed like vulgar factories for making fertilizer or shoes, that their food was produced by businesses without concern for anything but profitability. So deeply marked was American life with the seal of economic activity that the famous dollar quite naturally had become its symbol; this was indeed the “King Dollar,” the almost uncontested standard for measuring the value of people and things. Such a state of affairs was bound to surprise a French opinion that had never known the absolute reign of the laws of economics and often distrusted the world of business, which it considered necessarily shady and inevitably suspect of graft and dangerous and useless speculation. One would think, therefore, that the French would have been particularly interested in the various sectors and the functioning of the American economy as a way to help them understand this strange behavior. But this was not the case; interest in the American economy was always rather marginal and rarely spread beyond the specialized circles of administrators, businessmen, and economic journalists. Their strictly technical approach contributed little to the formation of French opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]