Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico: Michoacan from the Late Colony to the Revolution (review)

Most of us regard it as a sociological truism that the economic and political spheres of life affect each other intimately. It is surprisingly rare, however, for a locally or regionally focused study actually to portray convincingly the relationship of ideology and public action to economic structure. Margaret Chowning’s excellent book on the economic elite of the state of Michoacán, in western-central Mexico, during the nineteenth century accomplishes this through deep research, judicious generalization, and graceful writing. Although highly quantitative in its approach, Chowning’s study is never offputting in the deployment of its technical apparatus, while the author is very honest about the limits of her data, even making a virtue of them. Among the many delights of the book, for example, are the passages in which she contrasts the often lugubrious views of contemporary observers of economic life—be they liberal politicians or famous travelers like Fanny Calderón de la Barca—with the actual facts as revealed by notary records, testaments, inventories, and other primary sources, making of the slippage itself an indicator of cultural and political attitudes. While the book does not make a breakthrough in a theoretical or methodological sense, it does represent a highly successful exemplar of a well established and fruitful genre in Latin American and Mexican history—the study of the economic, social, and political reproduction of a regional elite. Where it is most innovative, even playfully so, is in certain aspects of its narrative organization, in the periodization that frames the narrative, and in its portrayal of the cycles of Mexican economic history in the century after 1780 or so. It is a work of accomplished historical imagination, broad vision, and intellectual sophistication, well worth reading not only for specialists in the Latin American field, but also by students of elite groups, nineteenth-century politics, and economic and social history more broadly, especially within the Euro-Atlantic world.

Chowning opens her narrative with a delightful description of the regional capital of Valladolid (later rechristened Morelia, for an Independence-era hero) as it would have appeared in about 1800, two decades before independence from Spain, to a traveler coming from Mexico City, some 200 kilometers to the southeast. She portrays the easy rhythms of late colonial life in a major provincial city dominated by an elite of landowning and merchant families, mostly creole but with a substantial number of Old World-born members, situating these groups in the upper two-ninths of city’s population and justifying the boundary with reasonable criteria based on wealth. Chowning describes the well established social hierarchy, the place of the church as an institutional entity and of religious sensibility in the everyday lives of the city’s populace, a civil society dominated by the essentially conservative political values of the Iberian colonial world, and the burgeoning influence of Enlightenment ideas. Her description of the city and its region closes, and each of the following chapters is preceded and the book as a whole concluded, with a highly evocative essay based on the history of an important local family, the Huartes and their descendants, whose rising and falling fortunes exemplified with reasonable fidelity the ebb and flow of the region’s economic and political fortunes over the century 1780–1880 or so. This is a period more conventionally broken by historians at independence from Spain (1821), the advent of the great mid-century liberal Reform (1855), or the rise of the modernizing dictator Porfirio Díaz (1876), although in emphasizing cyclical movement and continuity Chowning by no means discounts the importance of political events. Alternating within them between economic and political matters, subsequent chapters deal with the Spanish imperial crisis eventuating in Mexican Independence, the substantial collapse of the regional economy in the fifteen years or so after Independence, the revival of the 1830s and 1840s, the political ferment, upward middle-class...