Eric Van Young

This collection brings together a group of important and influential essays on Mexican history and historiography by Eric Van Young, a leading scholar in the field. The essays, several of which appear here in English for the first time, are primarily historiographical; that is, they address the ways in which separate historical literatures have developed over time. They cover a wide range of topics: the historiography of the colonial and nineteenth-century Mexican and Latin American countryside; historical writing in English on the history of colonial Mexico; British, American, and Mexican historical writing on the Mexican Independence movement; the methodology of regional and cultural history; and the relationship of cultural to economic history. Some of the essays have been and will continue to be controversial, while others—for example, those on studies of the Mexican hacienda since 1980, on the theory and method of regional history, and on the "new cultural history" of Mexico—are widely considered classics of the genre.

Writing Mexican History

This classic history of the Mexican hacienda from the colonial period through the nineteenth century has been reissued in a silver anniversary edition complete with a substantive new introduction and foreword. Eric Van Young explores 150 years of Mexico's economic and rural development, a period when one of history's great empires was trying to extract more resources from its most important colony, and when an arguably capitalist economy was both expanding and taking deeper root. The author explains the development of a regional agrarian system, centered on the landed estates of late colonial Mexico, the central economic and social institution of an overwhelmingly rural society. With rich empirical detail, he meticulously describes the features of the rural economy, including patterns of land ownership, credit and investment, labor relations, the structure of production, and the relationship of a major colonial city to its surrounding area. The book's most interesting and innovative element is its emphasis on the way the system of rural economy shaped, and was shaped by, the internal logic of a great spatial system, the region of Guadalajara. Van Young argues that Guadalajara's population growth progressively integrated the large geographical region surrounding the city through the mechanisms of the urban market for grain and meat, which in turn put pressure on local land and labor resources. Eventually this drove white and Indian landowners into increasingly sharp conflict and led to the progressive proletarianization of the region's peasantry during the last decades of the Spanish colonial era. It is no accident, given this history, that the Guadalajara region was one of the major areas of armed insurrection for most of the decade during Mexico's struggle for independence from Spain. By highlighting the way haciendas worked and changed over time, this indispensable study illuminates Mexico's economic and social history, the movement for independence, and the origins of the Mexican Revolution.

The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675-1820

Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-century Mexico

Joseph Esherick

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Professor Joseph W Esherick

The fall of empires and the rise of nation-states was a defining political transition in the making of the modern world. As United States imperialism becomes a popular focus of debate, we must understand how empire, the nineteenth century's dominant form of large-scale political organization, had disappeared by the end of the twentieth century. Here, ten prominent specialists discuss the empire-to-nation transition in comparative perspective. Chapters on Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, and China illustrate both the common features and the diversity of the transition. Questioning the sharpness of the break implied by the empire/nation binary, the contributors explore the many ways in which empires were often nation-like and nations behaved imperially. While previous studies have focused on the rise and fall of empires or on nationalism and the process of nation-building, this intriguing volume concentrates on the empire-to-nation transition itself. Understanding this transition allows us to better interpret the contemporary political order and new forms of global hegemony.

Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World

Empire to Nation

"Superb guide to a collection of documents from 1746-1823 given to Univ. Iberoamericana by philanthropist Manuel Arango Arías. Volume contains many papers relating to Miguel Hidalgo and family, as well as a large group devoted to independence. Excellent indices make this work a model of its kind. Recommended"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Colección documental sobre la independencia mexicana

The fall of empires and the rise of nation-states was a defining political transition in the making of the modern world. Here, ten prominent specialists discuss the empire-to-nation transition in comparative perspective. Chapters on Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, and China illustrate both the common features and the diversity of the transition. While previous studies have focused on the rise and fall of empires or on nationalism and the process of nation-building, this intriguing volume concentrates on the empire-to-nation transition itself.

This book argues that in addition to being a war of national liberation, Mexico's movement toward independence from Spain was also an internal war pitting classes and ethnic groups against each other, an intensely localized struggle by rural people, especially Indians, for the preservation of their communities.

Eric Van Young

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