This book, based on a study of the credit market in Nueva Galicia during 1720–1820, reveals a number of the social characteristics of colonial Mexico, including social status, the role of women, the church, ethnicity, and the complexity of the family network in economic affairs.
The first century of Spanish colonization in Latin America witnessed the birth of cities that, while secondary to great metropolitan centers such as Mexico City and Lima, became important hubs for regional commerce. Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital of Central America, was one of these. A multiethnic and multicultural city from its beginning, Santiago grew into a vigorous trading center for agrarian goods such as cacao and cattle hides. With the wealth this commerce generated, Spaniards, natives, and African slaves built a city that any European of the period would have found familiar. This book provides a more complete picture of society, culture, and economy in sixteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala than has ever before been drawn. Robinson Herrera uses previously unstudied primary sources, including testaments, promissory notes, and work contracts, to recreate the lives and economic activities of the non-elite sectors of society, including natives, African slaves, economically marginal Europeans, and people of mixed descent. His focus on these groups sheds light on the functioning of the economy at the lower levels and reveals how people of different ethnic groups formed alliances to create a vibrant local and regional economy based on credit. This portrait of Santiago also increases our understanding of how secondary Spanish American cities contributed vitally to the growth of the colonies.
Research on the Central American colonial experience-long overshadowed by the scholarly focus on Mexico and Peru-has begun to blossom, greatly expanding our knowledge of land and life in the region under Spanish rule. The first bibliography of its kind, Demography and Empire offers a comprehensive survey of recent literature in Spanish and i
This book describes the established pattern of regional studies of colonial Spanish America with a study of the social history of colonial Quito rooted in the experience of its lower strata. It shows what the James Orton described as a colonial history "as lifeless as the history of Sahara".
This historical monograph examines the decline of the hacienda estates within Jalisco, Mexico, during the early decades of the twentieth century. The book also explores the impact of the land reform program of President Lázaro Cárdenas in transforming the agrarian economic structure of the region. This study contributes to an ongoing lively debate about the hacienda system and the meaning of Cárdenas’s reforms. This is an important work because it explores the evolution of a regional socioeconomic system that promoted urban industrial growth at the expense of the rural poor. The model of regional development described is applicable to other areas of Mexico and underdeveloped Third World nations with extensive peasant populations. The research for this investigation has wider implications regarding issues of global hunger and malnutrition.
Focusing on central Mexico and the Andes (colonial New Spain and Peru), the contributors deepen scholarly knowledge of colonial history and literature, emphasizing the different ways people became and lived their lives as "indios" in this new study.
"Shirley Flint explores the stories of three widows in Mexico City, giving us a glimpse at the structure of everyday life in colonial Mexico, especially the ways that women conducted business, practiced religion, and manipulated politics. Each of these widows' stories illustrates an often overlooked aspect of Spanish life in the New World"--Provided by publisher.
An eminent historian’s biography of one of Mexico’s most prominent statesmen, thinkers, and writers Lucas Alamán (1792–1853) was the most prominent statesman, political economist, and historian in nineteenth-century Mexico. Alamán served as the central ministerial figure in the national government on three occasions, founded the Conservative Party in the wake of the Mexican-American War, and authored the greatest historical work on Mexico’s struggle for independence. Though Mexican historiography has painted Alamán as a reactionary, Van Young’s balanced portrait draws upon fifteen years of research to argue that Alamán was a conservative modernizer, whose north star was always economic development and political stability as the means of drawing Mexico into the North Atlantic world of advanced nation-states. Van Young illuminates Alamán’s contribution to the course of industrialization, advocacy for scientific development, and unerring faith in private property and institutions such as church and army as anchors for social stability, as well as his less commendable views, such as his disdain for popular democracy.
One cannot understand Latin America without understanding the history of the Catholic Church in the region. Catholicism has been predominant in Latin America and it has played a definitive role in its development. It helped to spur the conquest of the New World with its emphasis on missions to the indigenous peoples, controlled many aspects of the colonial economy, and played key roles in the struggles for Independence. The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America offers a concise yet far-reaching synthesis of this institution’s role from the earliest contact between the Spanish and native tribes until the modern day, the first such historical overview available in English. John Frederick Schwaller looks broadly at the forces which formed the Church in Latin America and which caused it to develop in the unique manner in which it did. While the Church is often characterized as monolithic, the author carefully showcases its constituent parts—often in tension with one another—as well as its economic function and its role in the political conflicts within the Latin America republics. Organized in a chronological manner, the volume traces the changing dynamics within the Church as it moved from the period of the Reformation up through twentieth century arguments over Liberation Theology, offering a solid framework to approaching the massive literature on the Catholic Church in Latin America. Through his accessible prose, Schwaller offers a set of guideposts to lead the reader through this complex and fascinating history.
What lies at the center of the Mexican colonial experience? Should Mexican colonial society be construed as a theoretical monolith, capitalist from its inception, or was it essentially feudal, as traditional historiography viewed it? In this pathfinding study, Enrique Semo offers a fresh vision: that the conflicting social formations of capitalism, feudalism, and tributary despotism provided the basic dynamic of Mexico's social and economic development. Responding to questions raised by contemporary Mexican society, Semo sees the origin of both backwardness and development not in climate, race, or a heterogeneous set of unrelated traits, but rather in the historical interaction of each social formation. In his analysis, Mexico's history is conceived as a succession of socioeconomic formations, each growing within the "womb" of its predecessor. Semo sees the task of economic history to analyze each of these formations and to construct models that will help us understand the laws of its evolution. His premise is that economic history contributes to our understanding of the present not by formulating universal laws, but by studying the laws of development and progression of concrete economic systems. The History of Capitalism in Mexico opens with the Conquest and concludes with the onset of the profound socioeconomic transformation of the last fifty years of the colony, a period clearly representing the precapitalist phase of Mexican development. In the course of his discussion, Semo addresses the role of dependency—an important theoretical innovation—and introduces the concept of tributary despotism, relating it to the problems of Indian society and economy. He also provides a novel examination of the changing role of the church throughout Mexican colonial history. The result is a comprehensive picture, which offers a provocative alternative to the increasingly detailed and monographic approach that currently dominates the writing of history. Originally published as Historia del capitalismo en México in 1973, this classic work is now available for the first time in English. It will be of interest to specialists in Mexican colonial history, as well as to general readers.