Mexico City, 1808: Power, Sovereignty, and Silver in an Age of War and Revolution by John Tutino (review)

Tutino conceived this study in dialogue with global and Atlantic history, and he developed it with tools, categories, and arguments from fiscal and economic history, as well as the history of political culture, social history, and even prosopography. He examines not only the functioning of the Hispanic monarchy and the crisis that led to its collapse but also the articulation of world capitalism and the construction of nation-states and liberal regimes. Tutino chooses the juncture of 1808 in Mexico City to analyze the transformations of global markets and their foundations in the so-called age of revolutions. Therefore, the intention of the study is to link the explanations of "silver capitalism" and the "pivotal importance of New Spain's silver"—regarding both Spain and the global trades—with the emergence of modern politics and its diverse notions and articulations of popular sovereignty.

The book proposes to understand the Spanish monarchy in America as a noncoercive regime of corporate negotiations, that is, of mediation dependent on its capacity to administer justice and negotiate. From this perspective, Tutino explains the political crisis of 1808 as the erosion of the legitimacy of a system that was essentially judicial. The historical laboratory in which Tutino examines this hypothesis is Mexico City, assumed as the capital of silver globalization. In this context, the regime of mediation becomes visible thanks to a delicate balance between dependence, social fragmentation, charity, and exploitation. In the passages of the book in which the social vision is more determinant, Mexico City appears as a fascinating (and fragmented) ethnic, economic, and political-judicial mural in which oligarchs, bureaucrats, merchants, artisans, weavers, saddlers, masons, shoemakers, and Indians coexist. For Tutino, the abdications of the Spanish Bourbons in favor of Napoleon fractured the regime's coalition between oligarchs (great financiers, mining entrepreneurs, and agrarian capitalists) provincial elites, and professionals.

In this sense, Tutino views the 1808 coup against the Viceroy of New Spain as an attempt to preserve silver capitalism in favor of leading merchant financiers, top mining entrepreneurs, and great landlords. Judging from the 1821 Independence Act, this alliance did not appear to lose. The military and political maneuver of 1808 kept New Spain's silver tied to the Spanish patriotic resistance of Seville and guaranteed that Mexico's "immigrant Spaniards" would remain at the head of the government. But it also opened the doors to popular mobilization, conspiracy, and a gradual militarization of justice. The 1808 coup constrained politics; the 1810 rebellion opened it exponentially: Throngs of people sought food, social justice, and independence in the countryside, thus beginning a decade of "armed political and social conflicts" that destroyed silver capitalism and exalted military power in the name of popular sovereignty.

This book has a thematic connection with Tutino's The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000 (Princeton, 2017), his Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham, 2011), and many other works.¹ However, it fails to make reference to various other studies that in 2008 analyzed the bicentennial of the Hispanic crisis in America, as well as to the flourishing conceptual history of the Ibero-American world for this period.²

The book may leave readers with a relatively idyllic view of the regime of mediation in which everything seems to have worked through institutional and corporate channels of negotiation and nothing or almost nothing through force and coercion. The perception of a rich, stable, and functional New Spain destroyed by the independence war to become a politically and socially violent Mexico evokes the conservative vision of Alamán.³ Moreover, the absence of the necessary Hispanic– American context (Caracas and Montevideo, 1808, and Quito and Upper Peru, 1809) weakens the book's global pretensions. Emphasis on Mexico's economic...