Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (review)

Despite the intense specialization that has fashioned historical research over the last four decades, which has often produced monographs narrow in scope and timid in conceptual reach, historians still relish big history that is empirically sound, theoretically innovative, and lyrically rendered. For historians of colonial Mexico, John Tutino’s long-awaited book on the foundations of early-modern capitalism in Spanish North America is precisely the kind of big history that shifts the paradigm to such a degree that historians in other fields—particularly world historians—will take notice and revisit the conventional wisdom that has shaped the direction of their own research. Tutino’s book is that good.

The author argues that the world became whole in the sixteenth century just about the time Hernán Cortés had toppled the Aztec confederation and Ming China developed a ferocious appetite for silver. Trade expansion linked Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, while European colonization of the Western Hemisphere, coupled with the rise of the African slave trade, initiated a global dynamic that facilitated capitalism. American silver—especially that which was mined in the Bajío region of Mexico, what Spaniards called New Spain—was key to global trade between 1550 and 1810; the vast quantities of the metal fashioned a protean capitalist society in Spanish North America composed of merchants, entrepreneurs, investors, miners, ranchers, and farmers—an ethnically and racially diverse lot, to be sure—most of whom looked to the Catholic Church for sanctifying power and grace. As Tutino makes quite clear in his tome, Catholicism provided an ample arena where religious piety comingled with debate and dissent, paving various pathways for these social groups to adapt, modify, alter, or discard what disrupted production, exchange, and social relations. In short, Tutino’s colonial Mexico is the corrective to an older Weberian model that explained change from an Anglo-Protestant-capitalist perspective.

Tutino’s work also complements quite nicely a larger body of knowledge that shows us that the Spanish colonial enterprise functioned primarily as a judicial mediator, one that sought to resolve disputes and soften the impact of colonialism on the indigenous and racially mixed populations, with an eye toward fostering equity and the common good among local communities and, in the process, maximize the revenues that come from stable commercial relationships. Moreover, Tutino mined the archives in Mexico City and the libraries at the University of Texas–Austin, and Washington State University, Pullman, to uncover a wide-range of primary source materials that speak to the commercial, political, social, and religious relationships that shaped, and were shaped by, early-modern capitalism. Those relationships took place in the breadbasket and mining center of New Spain—the Bajío—the most economically active and entrepreneurially savvy region of the colony where Spaniards, Indians, and castas created an economic engine that allowed capitalism to roar loudly in North America. The crisis in the larger Atlantic world following Napoleon’s rise to power, however, and the way it played out in Mexico, particularly in the Bajío, would unleash a violent movement for independence from Spain that would transform the most capitalist society in the Western Hemisphere into an insecure, inward-looking region devoid of entrepreneurial spirit and handsome profit margins.

Tutino’s book is indeed big history at its best. Compelling and provocative, thoughtful and well written, Making a New World is required reading for Mexicanists and world historians alike. Authors of world history textbooks will find themselves revising subsequent editions of their texts after reading Tutino’s persuasive arguments about the rise of early-modern capitalism and the role played by Spanish North America in its maturation, not to mention the Catholic dimensions of that process. Graduate students should review the author’s footnotes to see how he used certain primary...