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

Notes

Notes Abbreviations agn Archivo General de la Nacíón, Mexico City Bn Ramo de Bienes Nacionales, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City Cpp Conde de Peñasco Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin Fen Don Francisco de Espinosa y Navarijo Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin (formerly a separate collection; now filed by date among Cpp) GM Gaceta de México Jse Don José Sánchez Espinosa Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin (formerly a separate collection; now filed by date among Cpp) pCr Papeles de los Condes de Regla, Washington State University, Pullman Prologue: Making Global History in the Spanish Empire 1. This is the essence of the argument made by Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez in “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon.’” 2. See Wallerstein, The Modern World-System; Wolf, Europe and the People without History; and Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism. 3. Flynn and Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’” and “Cycles of Silver”; Frank, ReOrient; and Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. 4. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, engages those debates effectively. 5. See Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain; Cole,The Potosí Mita; Spalding, Huarochirí; and Mangan, Trading Roles. 618 noTes 6. Notably Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, and Salvucci , Textiles and Capitalism in Mexico. 7. Such visions mark David Brading’s otherwise essential Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico and J. H. Elliott’s magisterial synthesis, Empires of the Atlantic World. 8. Much of this claims roots in Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 9. Flynn and Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’” and “Cycles of Silver,” make this case powerfully; William Schell opens an essential rethinking of Mexican history in “Silver Symbiosis.” 10. Read Kamen, Empire, in the context of Flynn and Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver.” 11. Read Bakewell, A History of Latin America, in the context of Braudel, The Mediterranean, and Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean. 12. Read Stein and Stein, Silver, War, and Trade, in the context of Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism (and Crosby, The Columbian Exchange). 13. This era of conflictive transformation opens C. H. Bayly’s magisterial The Birth of the Modern World. Like so many global analysts, Bayly sees Europe and Asia better than the Americas. To complement his analysis see Tutino, “The Revolution in Mexican Independence”; Dubois, Avengers of the New World; and Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. 14. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1. 15. Wolf, Europe and the People without History. Wolf early wrote a seminal essay famous among scholars of Mexico, “The Mexican Bajío in the Eighteenth Century,” showing the region as a center of capitalism. 16. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, maintained that Anglo-Protestant political and religious ways were pivotal to capitalism; Grafe and Irigoin, “The Spanish Empire and Its Legacy,” offers a strong critique. 17. Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, 229–30. 18. I make the point in a very different context in Tutino, “The Revolutionary Capacity of Rural Communities.” 19. Such emphases mark Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, and the debates that he engages so effectively. 20. The larger challenges of contemporary capitalism are discussed in a balanced way in my colleague John McNeill’s magisterial Something New under the Sun. 21. In a vast literature note Gibson,The Aztecs under Spanish Rule; Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest; and Spalding, Huarochirí. 22. See Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, and Blackburn,The Making of New World Slavery. 23. Kamen, Empire. 24. In Empires of the Atlantic World J. H. Elliot offers a sophisticated rendition of this vision. Such views face challenge in Pomeranz, The Great Divergence , which focuses on resources, production, social relations, and state powers, and shows that imperial interventions (so often blamed for Spain’s demise) were pivotal to Britain’s rise. noTes 619 25. Irigoin and Grafe, “Bargaining for Absolutism” and “A Stakeholder Empire .” Their view seems compatible with Pomeranz’s emphasis on imperial facilitation of Britain’s nineteenth-century rise. Mutually beneficial ties between an empire and its commercial stakeholders, broadly defined, operated there too. On the limits (or absence) of absolutism in its supposed home see my colleague James Collins’s The State in Early Modern France. 26. The inclusion of proprietary officeholders as stakeholders is based on the chapters that follow. 27. The limits of military power are...