In 1800 Mexico City was the largest, richest, most powerful city in the Americas, its vibrant silver economy an engine of world trade. Then Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, desperate to gain New Spain’s silver. He broke Spain’s monarchy, setting off a summer of ferment in Mexico City. People took to the streets, dreaming of an absent king, seeking popular sovereignty, and imagining that the wealth of silver should serve New Spain and its people—until a military coup closed public debate. Political ferment continued while drought and famine stalked the land. Together they fueled the political and popular risings that exploded north of the capital in 1810. Tutino offers a new vision of the political violence and social conflicts that led to the fall of silver capitalism and Mexican independence in 1821. People demanding rights faced military defenders of power and privilege—the legacy of 1808 that shaped Mexican history.

Tutino offers a new vision of the political violence and social conflicts that led to the fall of silver capitalism and Mexican independence in 1821.

This book is a radical reinterpretation of the process that led to Mexican independence in 1821—one that emphasizes Mexico's continuity with Spanish political culture. During its final decades under Spanish rule, New Spain was the most populous, richest, and most developed part of the worldwide Spanish Monarchy, and most novohispanos (people of New Spain) believed that their religious, social, economic, and political ties to the Monarchy made union preferable to separation. Neither the American nor the French Revolution convinced the novohispanos to sever ties with the Spanish Monarchy; nor did the Hidalgo Revolt of September 1810 and subsequent insurgencies cause Mexican independence. It was Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 that led to the Hispanic Constitution of 1812. When the government in Spain rejected those new constituted arrangements, Mexico declared independence. The Mexican Constitution of 1824 affirms both the new state's independence and its continuance of Spanish political culture.

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. --

This acclaimed book explores popular politics during Mexico's tumultuous post-independence decades. Focusing on Mexico City during the chaotic early years of the nineteenth century, Richard A. Warren offers a compelling narrative of the defining period from King Ferdinand VII's abdication of the Spanish crown in 1808 to the end of Mexico's first federal republic in 1836. Clearly written and meticulously researched, this book is the first to demonstrate that the relationship between elites and the urban masses was central to Mexico's political evolution during the fight for independence and after. Mexico City, capital of both the old viceroyalty and the new nation, often witnessed the first wave of "public opinion" to respond to competing political proposals in both traditional and new forms that ranged from riots to electoral campaigns. Warren explains the direct effects of these actions on political outcomes, as well as their influence on elite perceptions of the new nation's problems and potential solutions. Vagrants and Citizens explores the impact of urban mass mobilization on crucial issues of the era, such as the evolution of electoral practices, the conflict between federalists and centralists, and social control programs. Shedding new light on a poorly understood era, Warren demonstrates the importance of the urban masses both as actors in their own right and as objects of elite discourse and programs. His compelling narrative offers an ideal supplement for courses on Mexican and Latin American history.

This book provides a new interpretation of Spanish American independence, emphasising political processes.

The description for this book, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940, will be forthcoming.