Mexico and the United States: Ambivalent Vistas

5. From Pueblo to Global Village

91 5 From Pueblo to Global Village It was better that a little blood should be shed that much blood should be saved. The blood that was shed was bad blood; the blood that was saved was good blood. Porfirio Díaz British historian Eric Hobsbawm interpreted the history of what he called the “long nineteenth century” (1789–1914) in three works. The first, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, traces the double breakthrough of the first industrial revolution in Britain and the Franco-American political revolution. The former established the capitalist productive system that penetrated the globe and was rationalized by the ideas of classical political economy (economic liberalism or the doctrine of free trade). The latter created the model for bourgeois society and the creed of utilitarianism (or political liberalism). His second volume, The Age of Capital, covers the brief period between the 1848 revolutions and the onset of the 1870s depression. It examines themes introduced in the first book through the lens of the global march of capitalism and the victories of the bourgeoisie and their liberal ideology.1 The last work of the trilogy, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, recounts how the economic and military supremacy of the capitalist countries, the so-called new imperialism, transformed the different regions of the world. This was an era when most of the globe was divided into the informal territories of a handful of powerful states, primarily Great Britain , France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, and the United States. Although capital investments propelled some of this colonial expansion, the most important motive was a search for markets abroad. The overproduction of the 1870s and 1880s led to a widespread export drive throughout the world.2 It was also during the Age of Empire when the United States (and to a lesser extent Germany) was beginning to outpace Great Britain in 92 mexico and the united states terms of iron and steel, while Great Britain, with a slower rate of industrial growth relative to the United States and Germany, was showing the first signs of decline. World trade patterns were changing too. In 1860 over half of the exports of Latin America, Asia, and Africa went to Great Britain. By 1900 the British share had dropped to one-quarter, and non-Western exports to continental Europe were already larger than those to Britain (31 percent). For Americans, it was a time when the United States ceased to be on the semiperiphery of Europe.3 These global trends were an important backdrop to Mexico’s “long nineteenth century” (1765–1910). The economic gap that developed from 1765 to 1870 between Mexico and the United States (both as colonies and nation-states) was a microcosm epitomizing the events of the world in general. In 1750 the per capita levels of industrialization in Europe and the non-Western world were roughly the same, but by 1900 the latter was only one-eighteenth of the former, and only one-fiftieth of the United Kingdom. The respective positions of Europe and the rest of the world, before 1800 and after the industrial revolution, continue to remind us today the tremendous significance of industrialization for world history.4 The industrial revolution in Britain from 1770 to 1860 occurred in several economic sectors simultaneously. By 1820 the British population had increased to twelve million and was almost eighteen million in 1850. This massive demographic revival was caused in part by the use of intensive agriculture techniques in the countryside and the rise of industry. And industry was the outcome of technological innovations (for example, spinning mules, power looms, steam engines, and coke-smelting and iron-refining processes) that were adopted when demand and prices were favorable. Steam power accelerated the manufacture of cotton textiles, the spread of an inland transport system involving turnpikes and iron rails, and a foreign market facilitated by steamships. Iron (eventually steel) and cotton were the bases of Great Britain’s global commercial supremacy. The machine revolution in Britain had far-reaching implications for economic development worldwide.5 Throughout the century, Britain remained Europe’s foremost ex- 93 From Pueblo to Global Village porter of manufactured goods and exponent of free trade. Since British manufactures were not particularly competitive in the markets of the industrializing countries, it was of paramount importance that the United Kingdom preserve its privileged position vis-à-vis the nonEuropean world. Without a peasantry at home...