Inter-American Notes

In Memoriam

Michael Costeloe (1939-2011)

Michael Peter Costeloe, the eminent historian of Mexico, died of pancreatic cancer at home peacefully in Bristol, England, with his wife Eleanor and their daughter Sarah at his side on August 24, 2011, at the age of 72. He was the author of countless seminal articles and eight extraordinary monographs that changed the relevant historiography forever.¹

He was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, in the north of England, on March 12, 1939. He went to King's College Newcastle (then part of the University of Durham) for his undergraduate degree. Although his intention was to read French, he ended up studying Spanish. As well as being a particularly hardworking student, he was a fine cricketer and tennis player. He stayed on in Newcastle, in what after 1963 became the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation titled "The Financial Organization, Activities, and Interests of the Church in the Archbishopric of Mexico During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," under the supervision of Dr N. D. Shergold—and became hooked on Mexican history. It was while completing his Ph.D. that he married his lifelong wife Eleanor, whom he had met as an undergraduate, and together they spent significant time in Mexico. Costeloe joined the University of Bristol in 1965 as assistant lecturer, obtaining his doctorate a year later, and remained attached to this institution for his entire career. He became a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1976, Reader the same year at the age of 37, and Professor and Head of Department in 1981.

As Head of Department, Costeloe displayed tremendous leadership. In a context of Thatcherite cuts in which arts subjects such as modern languages and Latin American studies were under threat, Costeloe defended the interests of the subject and the department with great vigour and skill. It was under his headship, in fact, that the department was awarded a particularly high score in the 1989 national Research Selectivity Exercise (now the Research Assessment Exercise). He went on to serve as elected Dean of Arts from 1993 to 1996 and retired in 1998, although this did not stop him from researching and publishing three further major monographs, or achieving a handicap of 8 playing for the Henbury Golf Club. He was working on a biography of General Mariano Arista when he passed away.

Michael Costeloe was, without doubt, a formidable scholar. His research into the political history of nineteenth-century Mexico, church-state relations, and British investment in the region, as well as Spain's response to the Spanish American Wars of Independence, had a major impact on the relevant historiography. A period of history that was "forgotten," and greatly "unexplored," as Josefina Zoraida Vázquez and Eric Van Young have noted,² when Costeloe first started to research church activities and interests in Independent Mexico in the 1960s, has become, in great measure thanks to his exertions, far more accessible and intelligible to subsequent generations of historians. Costeloe was one of the leading voices of a small yet truly influential, inspired, and inspiring group of historians who, between 1960 and the present, rescued the Mexican early national period from oblivion. At the same time, he revised and qualified a wide range of misconceptions the historiography had inherited from a one-sided triumphant, liberal/PRI-tinted "official history" and, to a great extent, overcame the fact that, until then, historians had tended to avoid these years in preference for the colonial or the subsequent revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods.

Until Costeloe wrote La primera república federal and The Central Republic there were, quite simply, no books that offered a thorough chronological analysis of the two decades between 1824 and 1846. Similarly, until he wrote Bonds and Bondholders and Bubbles and Bonanzas (with William Bullock providing a highly entertaining biography of a British businessman with Mexican interests to accompany these monographs), we had very little knowledge of who in Britain invested in Mexico or why, and of how inaccurate the concept of Britain's "informal empire" in Mexico was. His book on the Spanish response to...