Landlords & Haciendas in Modernizing Mexico

Landlords & Haciendas in Modernizing Mexico PDF Author: Simon Miller
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The Mexican Revolution has been generally depicted and analyzed as a popular agrarian revolt against the oppressive hacienda. As a corollary it has also been characterised as the crucible of a new agrarian bourgeoisie which emerged to take the Mexican countryside out of the dark feudal ages bequeathed by Spain. In all such accounts the hacienda appears as an archaic institution responsible for both social repression and economic stagnation. This book turns such theses upside down and makes the argument that the Porfirian hacienda in central Mexico was a progressive adaptation to adverse circumstances that had accomplished much of the transition to agrarian capitalism by 1910.

Landlords & Haciendas in Modernizing Mexico

Landlords & Haciendas in Modernizing Mexico PDF Author: Simon Miller
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Mexican Revolution has been generally depicted and analyzed as a popular agrarian revolt against the oppressive hacienda. As a corollary it has also been characterised as the crucible of a new agrarian bourgeoisie which emerged to take the Mexican countryside out of the dark feudal ages bequeathed by Spain. In all such accounts the hacienda appears as an archaic institution responsible for both social repression and economic stagnation. This book turns such theses upside down and makes the argument that the Porfirian hacienda in central Mexico was a progressive adaptation to adverse circumstances that had accomplished much of the transition to agrarian capitalism by 1910.

Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico PDF Author: Eric Van Young
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461637171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
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.

Liberalism as Utopia

Liberalism as Utopia PDF Author: Timo H. Schaefer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107190738
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This book explores the legal culture of nineteenth-century Mexico and explains why liberal institutions flourished in some social settings but not others.

The Mexican Heartland

The Mexican Heartland PDF Author: John Tutino
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227314
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
The Mexican Heartland provides a new history of capitalism from the perspective of the landed communities surrounding Mexico City. In a sweeping analytical narrative spanning the sixteenth century to today, John Tutino challenges our basic assumptions about the forces that shaped global capitalism setting families and communities at the center of histories that transformed the world. Despite invasion, disease, and depopulation, Mexico's heartland communities held strong on the land, adapting to sustain and shape the dynamic silver capitalism so pivotal to Spain's empire and world trade for centuries after 1550. They joined in insurgencies that brought the collapse of silver and other key global trades after 1810 as Mexico became a nation, then struggled to keep land and self-rule in the face of liberal national projects. They drove Zapata's 1910 revolution a rising that rattled Mexico and the world of industrial capitalism. Although the revolt faced defeat, adamant communities forced a land reform that put them at the center of Mexico's experiment in national capitalism after 1920. Then, from the 1950s, population growth and technical innovations drove people from rural communities to a metropolis spreading across the land. The heartland urbanized, leaving people searching for new lives--dependent, often desperate, yet still pressing their needs in a globalizing world. --

Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change

Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change PDF Author: Elisa Servín
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822389932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
This important collection explores how Mexico’s tumultuous past informs its uncertain present and future. Cycles of crisis and reform, of conflict and change, have marked Mexico’s modern history. The final decades of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries each brought efforts to integrate Mexico into globalizing economies, pressures on the country’s diverse peoples, and attempts at reform. The crises of the late eighteenth century and the late nineteenth led to revolutionary mobilizations and violent regime changes. The wars for independence that began in 1810 triggered conflicts that endured for decades; the national revolution that began in 1910 shaped Mexico for most of the twentieth century. In 2000, the PRI, which had ruled for more than seventy years, was defeated in an election some hailed as “revolution by ballot.” Mexico now struggles with the legacies of a late-twentieth-century crisis defined by accelerating globalization and the breakdown of an authoritarian regime that was increasingly unresponsive to historic mandates and popular demands. Leading Mexicanists—historians and social scientists from Mexico, the United States, and Europe—examine the three fin-de-siècle eras of crisis. They focus on the role of the country’s communities in advocating change from the eighteenth century to the present. They compare Mexico’s revolutions of 1810 and 1910 and consider whether there might be a twenty-first-century recurrence or whether a globalizing, urbanizing, and democratizing world has so changed Mexico that revolution is improbable. Reflecting on the political changes and social challenges of the late twentieth century, the contributors ask if a democratic transition is possible and, if so, whether it is sufficient to address twenty-first-century demands for participation and justice. Contributors. Antonio Annino, Guillermo de la Peña, François-Xavier Guerra, Friedrich Katz, Alan Knight, Lorenzo Meyer, Leticia Reina, Enrique Semo, Elisa Servín, John Tutino, Eric Van Young

Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500-2000

Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500-2000 PDF Author: Hugo G. Nutini
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292778805
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
In Aztec and colonial Central Mexico, every individual was destined for lifelong placement in a legally defined social stratum or estate. Social mobility became possible after independence from Spain in 1821 and increased after the 1910–1920 Revolution. By 2000, the landed aristocracy that was for long Mexico's ruling class had been replaced by a plutocracy whose wealth derives from manufacturing, commerce, and finance—but rapid growth of the urban lower classes reveals the failure of the Mexican Revolution and subsequent agrarian reform to produce a middle-class majority. These evolutionary changes in Mexico's class system form the subject of Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500–2000, the first long-term, comprehensive overview of social stratification from the eve of the Spanish Conquest to the end of the twentieth century. The book is divided into two parts. Part One concerns the period from the Spanish Conquest of 1521 to the Revolution of 1910. The authors depict the main features of the estate system that existed both before and after the Spanish Conquest, the nature of stratification on the haciendas that dominated the countryside for roughly four centuries, and the importance of race and ethnicity in both the estate system and the class structures that accompanied and followed it. Part Two portrays the class structure of the post-revolutionary period (1920 onward), emphasizing the demise of the landed aristocracy, the formation of new upper and middle classes, the explosive growth of the urban lower classes, and the final phase of the Indian-mestizo transition in the countryside.

The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico

The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico PDF Author: Benjamin T. Smith
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826351735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The Roots of Conservatism is the first attempt to ask why over the past two centuries so many Mexican peasants have opted to ally with conservative groups rather than their radical counterparts. Blending socioeconomic history, cultural analysis, and political narrative, Smith’s study begins with the late Bourbon period and moves through the early republic, the mid-nineteenth-century Reforma, the Porfiriato, and the Revolution, when the Mixtecs rejected Zapatista offers of land distribution, ending with the armed religious uprising known as the “last Cristiada,” a desperate Cold War bid to rid the region of impious “communist” governance. In recounting this long tradition of regional conservatism, Smith emphasizes the influence of religious belief, church ritual, and lay-clerical relations both on social relations and on political affiliation. He posits that many Mexican peasants embraced provincial conservatism, a variant of elite or metropolitan conservatism, which not only comprised ideas on property, hierarchy, and the state, but also the overwhelming import of the church to maintaining this system.

Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion

Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion PDF Author: Matthew Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197262986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Dr Butler provides a new interpretation of the cristero war (1926-29) which divided Mexico's peasantry into rival camps loyal to the Catholic Church (cristero) or the Revolution (agrarista). This book puts religion at the heart of our understanding of the revolt by showing how peasant allegiances often resulted from genuinely popular cultural and religious antagonisms. It challenges the assumption that Mexican peasants in the 1920s shared religious outlooks and that their behaviour was mainly driven by political and material factors. Focusing on the state of Michoacán in western-central Mexico, the volume seeks to integrate both cultural and structural lines of inquiry. First charting the uneven character of Michoacán's historical formation in the late colonial period and the nineteenth century, Dr Butler shows how the emergence of distinct agrarian regimes and political cultures was later associated with varying popular responses to post-revolutionary state formation in the areas of educational and agrarian reform. At the same time, it is argued that these structural trends were accompanied by increasingly clear divergences in popular religious cultures, including lay attitudes to the clergy, patterns of religious devotion and deviancy, levels of sacramental participation, and commitment to militant 'social' Catholicism. As peasants in different communities developed distinct parish identities, so the institutional conflict between Church and state acquired diverse meanings and provoked violently contradictory popular responses. Thus the fires of revolt burned all the more fiercely because they inflamed a countryside which - then as now - was deeply divided in matters of faith as well as politics. Based on oral testimonies and careful searches of dozens of ecclesiastical and state archives, this study makes an important contribution to the religious history of the Mexican Revolution.

Writing Mexican History

Writing Mexican History PDF Author: Eric Van Young
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804780552
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Essential essays from “one of the most prolific, provocative, and pre-eminent historians working in the field of Mexican and Latin-American history today” (Susan Deans-Smith, author of Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers). 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. “Van Young is one of the two or three preeminent thinkers in the Mexican and Latin American field whose essays are of such pioneering and enduring value to warrant this kind of greatest hits collection. Not only does he cross fields and disciplines and integrate northern and southern intellectual currents, his essays are a pleasure to read and constitute a rare combination of analytical bite, erudition, and playfulness.” —Gilbert M. Joseph, Yale University

Land and Society in Colonial Mexico

Land and Society in Colonial Mexico PDF Author: François Chevalier
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description