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

This massive study seeks to accomplish two highly ambitious goals. One is to lay out a Braudelian history of economy, society, gender relations, ethnicity, and religion in the Bajío, the fertile region of west-central Mexico that encompasses parts of the modern states of Guanajuato, Michoacán, and Querétaro) from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, with ramifications through the entire north of colonial New Spain. At the same time, Tutino offers a bold, sweeping and new interpretation of what he calls "Spanish North America" in the context of a rising world capitalist economy. He does so with a tantalizing mix of broad-stroke, dynamic, and often daring interpretations and finely chiseled, deeply researched empirical portraits of the changing lives in the towns, mines, workshops, estates, and communities of the region. It is a masterful panorama of three centuries of history with thought-provoking but in some regards troubling interpretive lines.

In a nutshell, Tutino proposes that the Bajío was at the center of constructing the world capitalist economy during the early modern period. The viceroyalty of New Spain for him was composed of "two distinct colonial orders" that he calls Spanish Meso-America (the region extending from just north of Mexico City into Central America) and Spanish North America, which gradually expanded northward from Querétaro all the way to Alta California and Texas. While in Spanish Meso-America commercial practices were grafted onto structurally dominant, segregated, and autonomous indigenous republics, Spanish North America was "thoroughly commercial, socially fluid, deeply patriarchal and persistently expansive." Spanish North America, with its more developed core in the Bajío, was the dynamic center of the construction of capitalism in the world, the center of trading circuits connecting East Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Its driving force was, in two cycles and up to the 1750s, the Chinese demand for Mexican silver. Even after Chinese demand slackened, silver drove the continuing growth of the region (after a steep crisis in the 1760s) all the way through the outbreak of the revolution of independence between 1808 and 1810; this time it was the newly rising Atlantic demand for silver. The Bajío mine owners, merchants, textile producers, and owners of livestock and cereal estates were increasingly driven by the quest for more profits. In the face of growing competition and adverse price/cost ratios they turned into "predatory capitalists," diminishing the livelihoods of their urban and rural workers and small independent producers. This was a dangerous strategy because it could undermine one of the two major social control mechanisms that allowed this capitalism to flourish. The first was a patriarchal order that gave stability to most (but not all) sectors of Bajío society, from the dominant capitalist patriarchs to "dependent patriarchs" of mine and hacienda workers, rancheros, and the few but locally important indigenous republicanos. The other major prop of social control was religion, and Tutino carefully traces the engagement and clashes between the "penitential, charitable, rational" devotions increasingly favored by most sectors of the capitalist elites during the eighteenth century, and the "propitiatory" devotions of most popular groups. Here, as in all other spheres of economy, society, and culture, Tutino discerns increasing polarization (tempered by attempts at mediation) in the Bajío, precisely as its capitalist economy reached a high-water mark between the 1770s and 1810.

Tutino develops these ideas through chronological chapters outlining the Bajío's evolution, from a sparsely populated frontier region between Mesoamerican states and the home of northern hunter and gatherer peoples dubbed Chichimecas by the Mexicas, to an expansive capitalist hub built by an amalgamation of indigenous, European, and African-descended peoples. He stresses the leading role of Otomí lords and their clans in the sixteenth-century development of the town of Querétaro and its hinterland...