Making Mexico, Remaking Capitalism: Mexico, 1800-1880

Abstract:

John Tutino’s most recent book, The Bajío Revolution: Remaking Capitalism, Community, and Patriarchy in Mexico, North America, and the World (Duke 2025), explores how popular insurgents remade Mexico, the United States, and global capitalism after 1810. Through the eighteenth century, the rich Bajío basin mined silver that funded Asian-based global trades. Then amid the Atlantic wars and revolutions of 1790-1810, landed estate operators turned predatory upon rural producers, triggering insurgencies. By 1812, rebellion cut silver flows in half, breaking Asian trades and opening global markets to industrial cloth made in England of cotton raised by enslaved hands in the US. When Mexico gained independence in 1821, mining was broken while family growers made life-sustaining maize. During the 1820s British capital failed to revive silver, but in the 1830s, a new Mexican silver-industrial capitalism fed by family maize producers rose in the Bajío. Women continued to lead cultivating families; others took on mill labor; one became Mexico’s leading silver capitalist—the richest, most powerful woman in the Americas. Facing that competition, in the 1840s the United States invaded to claim Texas for cotton and slavery and California for gold. Still, Mexico’s silver-industrial capitalism held strong until the US joined a global gold standard in 1873, ending Mexico’s capital independence while families struggled on the land.

Short Bio:

John Tutino is Professor of History and International Affairs, and Director of the Americas Forum at Georgetown University. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. Among his books, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Duke 2011) won the Sharlin Award in Social Science History, the Bolton-Johnson Prize in Latin American History, and the Saravia Prize in Regional Mexican History. He also edits volumes seeking wider perspectives on the Americas, including: Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States (Texas 2012); New Countries: Capitalism, Revolutions, and Nations in the Americas, 1750-1870 (Duke 2016), and New World Cities: Challenges of Urbanization and Globalization in the Americas (UNC 2019).

Sponsors: 

Department of History, Center for Premodern Studies