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

Introduction: A New World: The Baj

Introduction A New World: The Bajío, Spanish North America, and Global Capitalism a new world Began in the sixteenth century. For three centuries no region was more important to the creation of that world than the Bajío, 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 removed most natives. Silver linked the region to rising global trade. Migrants from Mesoamerica and Europe arrived seeking gain; Africans arrived bound to labor. Production, labor, and communities were driven by pursuit of commercial profit. Diverse peoples mixed to forge new and changing identities. Patriarchy orchestrated social hierarchies . Catholicism defined and debated everything. By the eighteenth century the region was dynamically capitalist and socially polarized. Patriarchy persisted, yet faced new pressures and challenges. Catholicism endured while fundamental debates multiplied within its spacious domain. Then in 1810 the Bajío generated a mass insurgency that shook the Spanish empire and became a social revolution that helped create Mexico, transform North America, and redirect global capitalism. The world made in the Bajío, a basin beginning around Querétaro and extending west across Guanajuato, was new in three fundamental ways. First, immigrant residents, commercial dynamics, social amalgamations , and cultural reconstitutions combined to make life in the 30 inTroduCTion Bajío truly unprecedented locally or elsewhere. Second, while that new society developed in a defined region, it was powerfully and persistently created in response to global linkages: silver trade, the Spanish Empire, and Catholic Christianity. Third, the region, tied to the world by silver, shaped by commercial ways, reshaped by ethnic amalgamations , and integrated by patriarchal hierarchies during three centuries of change, became home to a society that was recognizably capitalist—driven by profit while integrating diverse peoples in commercial social relations that concentrated economic power and deepened exploitation with limited reliance on overt personal coercion.1 Globally linked commercial dynamism drove settlement and development in the Bajío. Mesoamericans and Africans built and Europeans usually (but not always) ruled the mines and refineries, cities and textile workshops, irrigated estates and livestock ranches that fueled a burgeoning world economy. Through centuries, silver production peaked, waned, and peaked again. Commercial power ruled throughout . The historic interaction of Europeans, Mesoamericans, Africans, and their mixed descendants produced a society of deep inequality and complex fluidity. Regional culture was ultimately Catholic, while diverse visions of Catholicism contested religious truth and the inequities created at the intersection of power and everyday life. After 1770 mining, textile production, and commercial cultivation reached historic peaks and held them into the early nineteenth century . By 1800 the Bajío population approached 500,000, its silver mines produced over 5 million pesos annually, its commercial cultivators , cloth makers, and artisans yearly generated taxable goods valued at nearly 6 million pesos. The Bajío was the richest region of the Americas. The mines at Guanajuato and others to the north (also sustained by Bajío grains and cloth) combined to yield most of the 23 million pesos of silver mined annually in New Spain.2 Silver fueled global trade; it provoked and financed imperial wars; it helped fund the independence of the United States, which adopted New Spain’s peso as its dollar. When France in republican revolution faced England in industrial revolution in wars that began in the 1790s and continued into the nineteenth century, Bajío silver helped finance both belligerents. Napoleon occupied Spain and usurped its monarchy in 1808, in important part aiming to claim New Spain’s silver.3 He set off a transatlantic crisis that led to insurgency in the Bajío in 1810—a rising that became a social revolution, transformed production and social relations across the region, set limits on the Mexican nation, and altered the trajectory of North America and global capitalism.4 This book offers a history of the Bajío from the arrival of Europeans after 1500 to the explosion of insurgency in 1810. It analyzes the ori- a new world 31 gins and development of the first fully commercial and eventually capitalist society in the Americas. It explores production, power, social relations, and cultural visions beginning in the sixteenth century; it focuses on the region’s eighteenth-century dynamism and deepening polarization. It sees that history as defined by global trade in...