On Good Books and Good Questions, Regardless of What Is “Cool” in Atlantic Historiographies (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries)

José Sánchez Espinoza ran a landholding empire in late eighteenth-century central and northern New Spain, specialized in crops and cattle to feed the mining towns and cities of the valley of Mexico, the Bajío, and Northern Mexico. He had tenants, slaves, and salaried workers to whom he advanced wages in produce. He was a ruthless entrepreneur who would manipulate the prices of crops, cut worker rations and wages, displace laborers, sell slaves, and marginalize his kin in an effort to pump up profits. He was also a devout priest who supported hospitals, nunneries, religious orders, and lay priests. Sánchez Espinoza was like his uncle, the priest Francisco de Espinoza y Bejarano, from whom he inherited estates in the Bajío and San Luis Potosí. We have often been told that capitalism was born out of the anxieties generated by notions of grace and salvation among the members of the European Reformed churches.¹ We have also been told that capitalism first flourished in the English Midlands in the mid-eighteenth century among middle-class dissenters: Unitarian and Deist entrepreneurs who transformed the new sciences of Newton and Bacon into machinery for industrial production.² But can one tell the story of the origins of capitalism from the perspective of the likes of Sánchez Espinoza?

In Making a New World John Tutino does just that, locating the origins of capitalism in the Bajío and Northern Mexico, which specialized in the production of a critical staple in early modern globalization: silver. Beginning in the sixteenth century, silver opened Ming and Qing China to European merchants and globalized the world. The Bajío was at the center of these global changes. Silver was extracted and refined in shafts and patios that employed tens of thousands of laborers in mining towns like Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, and Parral. The farmers and textile workers of Querétaro, San Miguel de Allende, and countless other towns fed and clothed these workers. The mines and refining centers, in turn, required animals to move mills that crushed ores and pumped water out of the ever-deeper shafts. Mules moved commodities across rugged terrain; the grease from cattle oiled the mills and lighted the shafts; sheep produced the wool for the textile mills. The Bajío enjoyed dozens of well-capitalized banks to keep the economy going: endowments and gifts willed to nunneries and religious orders over generations transformed the church into a large urban property owner and the main source of credit and lending.

This new world of piety and cutthroat entrepreneurship developed in lands that had been in the hands of nomadic indigenous groups for centuries, the Chichimecas. Facing the onslaught, the Chichimecas either withdrew further north or were incorporated into the emerging economy as slave laborers. The conquered land then received thousands of natives from Central Mexico, who arrived as allies of the Spaniards; they were Otomis and Tlaxcalans. Otomis created the first sixteenth-century town in the Bajío, called Querétaro, which they owned both politically and literally. Spaniards followed and tried to wrestle Querétaro away from the Otomis, but because the crown had introduced laws that allowed the natives to litigate Spanish encroachments to a halt, Spaniards failed to take over and instead moved on to...