Making a New World
Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America
Publication Year: 2011
Published by: Duke University Press
Contents
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pp. vi-viii
Maps and Illustrations
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pp. ix-x
Prologue: Making Global History in the Spanish Empire
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pp. 1-25
The world became whole in the sixteenth century. Population growth, rising trade, and tax collections mandated in silver set off a burgeoning demand for the metal in Ming China just as Spaniards conquered American dominions and found mountains of silver. From the 1550s rising streams of silver from Potos�, high in the Andes, and Zacatecas, far north of Mexico City, flowed west to Europe, to be ...
A Note on Terminology
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pp. 27-28
Some of the language used in this history will surprise even seasoned historians of New Spain. First, I use Mexico only to refer to the capital city and mexicano as an ethnic term for the Nahuatl speakers who lived in the basins around the capital. Mexico did not exist as a nation before 1821; Mexican did not serve as a national identity until after independence, for many not until long after. ...
Introduction: A New World: The Baj�o, Spanish North America, and Global Capitalism
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pp. 29-62
A new world began in the sixteenth century. For three centuries no region was more important to the creation of that world than the Baj�o, a fertile basin northwest of Mexico City. A little- settled and often contested frontier between Mesoamerican states to the south and independent peoples to the north, it saw everything change with the arrival of Europeans. Disease, war, and displacement ...
Part I: Making a New World: The Bajío and Spanish North America, 1500–1770
Before 1500 the Baj�o was a little-settled basin, a frontier between Mesoamerican states and independent peoples in the interior of North America. By 1750 the same region was a densely settled, increasingly urban, often irrigated, and ultimately commercial zone linked by silver, trade, Christianity, and a Spanish regime to people around the ...
Chapter 1: Founding the Bajío: Otomí Expansion, Chichimeca War, and Commercial Querétaro, 1500–1660
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pp. 65-120
The Bajío witnessed unprecedented encounters, enduring conflicts, and transforming changes in the sixteenth century. Once a place of towns and cultivators in Mesoamerica’s classic past, it was little inhabited and minimally cultivated around 1500. Mesoamerican states fought each other and mobile Chichimecas in a prolonged ...
Chapter 2: Forging Spanish North America: Northward Expansions, Mining Amalgamations, and Patriarchal Communities, 1590–1700
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pp. 121-158
The seventeenth century brought a second wave of northward expansion, driving the conflicts and opportunities that shaped Spanish North America far beyond the Baj�o. Silver mining boomed after 1590. Merchants based in Mexico City, mostly immigrants from Spain (and Portugal, a Hapsburg domain from 1580 to 1640), profited in trade with Seville, Manila, and European and Asian ...
Chapter 3: New World Revivals: Silver Boom, City Lives, Awakenings, and Northward Drives, 1680–1760
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pp. 159-227
After two centuries of commercial formation, social construction, ethnic adaptations, and religious innovations the Baj�o and Spanish North America surged as an American engine of the world economy after 1700. Guanajuato became a great mining city; Quer�taro and San Miguel boomed as centers of trade and textiles. Commercial agriculture expanded across the basin. Population grew ...
Chapter 4: Reforms, Riots, and Repressions: The Baj�o in the Crisis of the 1760s
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pp. 228-260
The 1760s saw unprecedented conflicts in the Baj�o and nearby provinces. Workers took over mines and plazas at Guanajuato, across San Luis Potos� to the north and at Real del Monte to the southeast. Indigenous women and men rioted at San Luis de la Paz at the edge of the Sierra Gorda. At Valladolid and P�tzcuaro, just south of the Baj�o, Tarascans and mulattoes challenged those who presumed to ...
Part II: Forging Atlantic Capitalism: The Bajío, 1770–1810
After 1770 silver mining soared to new heights and held them past 1800. An accelerating European economy, just beginning to industrialize, drew silver across the Atlantic; so did Spanish trade and revenue policies. Textile production also rose in the Baj�o, despite attempts by the regime to favor Iberian producers. A new tobacco factory became the largest employer at Quer�taro; soon a majority of its workers ...
Chapter 5: Capitalist, Priest, and Patriarch: Don José Sánchez Espinosa and the Great Family Enterprises of Mexico City, 1780–1810
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pp. 263-299
After 1770 the Baj�o and Spanish North America remained a dynamic engine of global capitalism. They were linked to world trades and the Spanish empire by Mexico City, seat of government and financial and commercial capital for all of New Spain. That capital ruled both Spanish Mesoamerica and Spanish North America, tying them to each other and to the world beyond. Financiers there funded mining, claimed profits, shaped trade, and invested in commercial estates ...
Chapter 6: Production, Patriarchy, and Polarization in the Cities: Guanajuato, San Miguel, and Querétaro, 1770–1810
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pp. 300-351
Most of the silver that drove the economy of New Spain came from Guanajuato, Zacatecas, San Luis Potos�, and regions north. Silver accelerated urbanization, stimulating markets for cloth and commercial crops. Powerful men in Mexico City along with mining, textile, and agricultural entrepreneurs in the Baj�o ruled a booming economy after 1770. ...
Chapter 7: The Challenge of Capitalism in Rural Communities: Production, Ethnicity, and Patriarchy from La Griega to Puerto de Nieto, 1780–1810
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pp. 352-402
In the Baj�o as across new Spain, power concentrated in cities while the population was mostly rural. The separation of city and country was never clear or simple, however. The huertas so important at Quer�taro gave the city a rural cast. And cities depended on estates and rural producers in many ways: profit for agricultural entrepreneurs; food for city markets; supplies for mines and ...
Chapter 8: Enlightened Reformers and Popular Religion: Polarizations and Mediations, 1770–1810
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pp. 403-450
After 1770 people across the Baj�o lived new polarizations in an accelerating capitalist economy, challenges they faced in communities shaped by patriarchy and fragmented by ethnic complexity. They interpreted times of change and uncertainty through deep religious understandings. Everyone was Christian. Everyone recognized the Church. Yet the Christianity that had developed during ...
Conclusion: The Baj�o and North America in the Atlantic Crucible
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pp. 451-486
Beginning in the sixteenth century the peoples of the Baj�o built a new society embedded in a new world of global interactions. Strategically located at the intersection of European expansion and Chinese demand for silver, they laid the foundations for a new world. The highland basin watered by a network of rivers ...
Epilogue: Toward Unimagined Revolution
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pp. 487-492
Before 1808 no one in the Baj�o imagined the breakdown of the Spanish empire, the Hidalgo revolt, or the social revolution that followed. While provincial elites resented escalating demands for revenues, including the recall of ecclesiastical mortgages in the consolidation that began in 1804, they grumbled, negotiated, ...
Acknowledgments
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pp. 493-498
I never planned to write this Book. When I began I thought I had an opportunity to offer a new analysis of popular participation in the decade of insurgency that reshaped life in the Baj�o after 1810. Thanks to detailed records of the life and business dealings of don Jos� S�nchez Espinosa from 1780 to 1827, and of production and ...
Appendix A: Employers and Workers at Querétaro, 1588–1609
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pp. 499-508
Appendix B: Production, Patriarchy, and Ethnicity in the Bajío Bottomlands, 1670–1685
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pp. 509-527
Appendix C: Bajío Population, 1600–1800
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pp. 529-548
Appendix D: Eighteenth-Century Economic Indicators: Mining and Taxed Commerce
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pp. 549-557
Appendix E: The Sierra Gorda and New Santander, 1740–1760
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pp. 559-571
Appendix F: Population, Ethnicity, Family, and Work in Rural Communities, 1791–1792
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pp. 573-607
Appendix G: Tributes and Tributaries in the Quer�taro District, 1807
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pp. 609-615
Notes
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pp. 617-664
Bibliography
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pp. 665-683
Index
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pp. 685-698
E-ISBN-13: 9780822394013
E-ISBN-10: 0822394014
Print-ISBN-13: 9780822349747
Print-ISBN-10: 0822349744
Page Count: 696
Illustrations: 28 illustrations, 164 tables
Publication Year: 2011
