A Concise History of Mexico (review)

To produce a readable, interesting, empirically dense, yet comprehensive history of Mexico in about 300 pages is no easy task, but Brian Hamnett has done it. Hamnett's text is replete with useful (indeed, sometimes overly ambitious) maps and interesting photographs. One physical peculiarity of the photos is that many of them are reversed, so that the identifications of people in the captions below are incorrect, as where Alvaro Obregón is identified as Adolfo de la Huerta and vice versa (p. 228). In an introductory overview and six chapters, Hamnett covers the pre-Columbian era, the period of the Spanish conquest up to the early seventeenth century, the mature colony (1620-1770), the century of what he calls "destabilisation and fragmentation" (1770-1867), the four generations of "reconstruction" and revolution (1867-1940), and the (now recently ended) era of the "monopoly party" (1940-2000). Although there is little in the book that can properly be described as surprising or innovative, and the work is strung together more around a chronological narrative and an approach (the interplay between state and economy) than an argument, Hamnett's own profound knowledge of Mexican history and his straightforward framing of large questions--the continuities of the century between Reform and the end of Lázaro Cárdenas's presidency, the social peculiarities of the Mexican north, or the deeply flawed history of the Mexican economic "miracle" of the period 1940-70, for example--makes it well worth reading by non-historians, non-Mexicanists, undergraduate students, or even tourists to Mexico, as well as by those already versed in the history of the country.

Hamnett's history of Mexico has many virtues worthy of note. One of these is the thoughtful periodization he employs, especially in problematizing within a concrete synoptic narrative the increasingly accepted "middle period" chronology for the last half-century of colonial rule and the first half-century of national life. Indeed, the book is particularly strong on this era, on whose complex history Hamnett himself has made notable scholarly contributions. Another of the book's virtues is the passing allusion made to contemporary historiographical debates and the scholars involved in them, thus helping interested readers access the works listed in the useful bibliography. Similarly, in the chapter on pre-Columbian cultures, Hamnett mentions the archaeological and anthropological pioneers by name, discussing (albeit briefly) their discoveries and the interpretation of their finds. There is also a sort of book-within-a-book here, since Hamnett provides pithy summaries before his major sections, which allow interested readers to review, review, and the text if they so desire.

Well done as it is, Hamnett's book nonetheless displays some peculiarities, if not precisely flaws. Despite his early assertion (p. 2) that "[w]e need to examine the way a distinct Mexican civilization has expressed itself through time," he seems to find the locus of that civilizational expression almost exclusively in the public and economic life of his major eras. With some exceptions (e.g., nice discussions of baroque culture and of the influence of the Catholic Church on politics and cultural life in the 1980s and 1990s), there is little here of social or cultural history. Although the treatment is packed with information, the relentless tacking back and forth between economics and politics in the final chapter becomes rather tedious at points, and one is left wondering what Mexico is "really like." This sort of imbalance shows up in Chapter 3, "The European Incursion," for example, where Hamnett suggests (quite correctly, it seems to me) that the Spanish disrupted a fragile political equilibrium in Mesoamerica; but he has devoted so much time in the previous chapter to discussing issues such as Zapotec resistance to Mexica imperialism, and so little to Aztec social structure, that his assertion rests on little foundation. Furthermore, perhaps because of its synoptic nature, the book is...