Eric Van Young

Millennium on the Northern Marches: The Mad Messiah of Durango and Popular Rebellion in Mexico, 1800–1815

In September of 1810, with a sudden flash of violent rebellion (preceded by months and years of salon conspiracies), the white native-born provincial elite of New Spain began the protracted and painful process of winning political independence from Spain. Although by about 1816 much of the country had been pacified by royal arms, pockets of rebellion continued to smolder and flare throughout the following years. The birth of modern Mexico itself finally occurred in 1821, owing as much to fortuitous political circumstances in Spain as to the military and political manipulations of Agustin Iturbide, the Creole adventurer who consummated the countrys independence and briefly became its emperor. Programmatic pronouncements by the Creole and mestizo leadership of the independence movement abound in the form of pamphlets, constitutions, decrees, short-lived newspapers, captured correspondence, etcetera, and provide us with a reasonably clear view into the complex ideologi- cal process of political separatism from Spain. At least in the early years of the independence struggle, however, the insurrectionary armies were manned not primarily by Mexican-born whites or racially mixed groups, but by Indian peasants from rural villages all over the central parts of the country.

To See Someone Not Seeing: Historical Studies of Peasants and Politics in Mexico

From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence in Mexico, 1750-1940. By John Tutino. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Colonial bureaucrats and the Mexican economy : growth of a patrimonial state, 1763-1821

50.) Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750-1824. By Brian R. Hamnett. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

The Brink of Freedom: improvising life in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world

44.50) The Mexican Revolution, 2 volumes. By Alan Knight. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Adventures with Don Luquitas: Exploring Our Obligations as Biographers

54.50 each) Esperando a Lozada. By Jean Meyer. (Guadalajara: El Colegio de Michoacan and CONACYT, 1984) Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico. By Friedrich Katz, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Biography of a Hacienda: Work and Revolution in Rural Mexico

65.)

Bandits, Elvis, and Other Mystics: An Interview with Paul Vanderwood

Contents: This work describes how colonial bureaucrats and policy affected the growth and development of the Mexican economy during the late colonial period.

Cuauhtémoc's Bones: Forging National Identity in Modern Mexico (review)

productivity enhancing machinery. Owning slaves was a more flexible form of investment because they could be diverted to other purposes in wartime – to raising provisions, or undertaking labour-intensive improvements, such as irrigation works. New machinery, by contrast, produced only unmarketable sugar in wartime, while creditors bayed for their money. The ever present threat of international conflict also set a ceiling on specialization. In peacetime, it paid to specialize as fully as possible in cash crops. But given the threat of war, plantations needed to be capable of a degree of independence from the international division of labour to feed their inhabitants. In a climate of recurrent, unpredictable interimperial conflict, flexibility trumped productivity. The articulation of the sugar complex to a French empire which clashed repeatedly with its British rival, Cheney shows, was the source of many of the contradictions of SaintDominguan capitalism, and much of its fragility. But the imperial link was also the condition of its erratic prosperity – indeed of its continued existence. The imperial tie entailed a privileged commercial position for French merchants, which drove down prices for sugar and increased the cost of imports. This trade regime produced endless creole resentment at a ‘despotic’ government more interested in fostering the fortunes of metropolitan merchants than of distant planters. But this version of the mercantile system was the quid pro quo for a regime in which planters secured indispensable benefits at what, in retrospect, turned out to be a moderate price. The imperial administration supplied the system of governance that underpinned property rights in land and slaves; it resolved collective action problems, forcing planters to collaborate to build the irrigation works vital to the prosperity of the cane fields; above all it provided internal police, and defence from external threats. Moreover, notwithstanding the complaints of planters, it did so relatively cheaply. When planters and the new Haitian elite sought to reconstruct the sugar complex at the beginning of the nineteenth century without subsidies from a French imperial state, the costs of security and governance proved crushing. The indispensability of the imperial connection to the viability of the plantation complex quickly became evident when this protective integument shattered. Capitalism operates simultaneously in different spatial frames – at the level of the enterprise; at that of the state; and also globally or transnationally. The dynamics of this social system are different at these various levels, and it can be challenging to grasp the way modalities at one level condition those at others. One of the great virtues of this tightly written and intellectually incisive book is that it allows us to understand how eighteenthcentury capitalism was integrated – from the plantation, up through the imperial state, to the macropolitical realm of international competition and warfare.

Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic

What is our obligation, as biographers or historians, to the people we write about? I ask this question in the context of my own writing of a biography, a project in which I have been engaged for nearly 20 years, that is now, I thank God, drawing to a close. The subject of the book is Lucas Alamán, the nineteenth-century Mexican conservative statesman, historian, and entrepreneur. Born in 1792, he died in 1853, a few months into the last government of perennial president Antonio López de Santa Anna, of whose regime he had been the chief architect and whom he served in its early weeks as chief minister.

Madness in Buenos Aires: Patients, Psychiatrists, and the Argentine State, 1880–1983 (review)

disillusionment with Morales and MAS, especially with regard to unfulfilled expectations, empty rhetoric and poor economic performance, was widespread. The stunning electoral victory of MAS in the 2014 elections, after the publication of the book, suggests that either Sacabans are far from the Bolivian norm, or that talk is one thing, and voting preferences are another. What the book does do is reveal the conflicted nature of the ‘middling folk’, warts and all, and the complexity of a multiethnic and multiclass state in a period of rapid social and political change within a globalized and neoliberal world. This book is well worth reading.