Overview

Making a New World is a major rethinking of the role of the Americas in early world trade, the rise of capitalism, and the conflicts that reconfigured global power around 1800. At its center is the Bajio, a fertile basin extending across the modern-day Mexican states of Guanajuato and Queretaro, northwest of Mexico City. The Bajio became part of a new world in the 1530s, when Mesoamerican Otomis and Franciscan friars built Queretaro, a town that quickly thrived on agriculture and trade. Settlement accelerated as regional silver mines began to flourish in the 1550s. Silver tied the Bajio to Europe and China; it stimulated the development of an unprecedented commercial, patriarchal, Catholic society. A frontier extended north across vast expanses settled by people of European, Amerindian, and African ancestry. As mining, cloth making, and irrigated cultivation increased, inequities deepened and religious debates escalated. Analyzing the political economy, social relations, and cultural conflicts that animated the Bajio and Spanish North America from 1500 to 1800, John Tutino depicts an engine of global capitalism and the tensions that would lead to its collapse into revolution in 1810.

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9780822349891

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Reviews

Making a New World creates a compelling new history of world capitalism in the early modern era, with Mexico at its center. It also provides a comprehensive history of the Bajio, the dynamic mining and agricultural region crucial to understanding the socio-cultural, economic, and political history of Mexico. This exciting, well researched book makes us reconsider what we thought we knew about the Atlantic world. Steve J. Stern, University of Wisconsin-Madison Making a New World is a fascinating, bold, and challenging study. It is destined to be an indispensable source, the book of first resort on Mexico's most dynamic region in the years leading up to Independence. Braudelian in ambition and range, it offers a virtual histoire totale of the Bajio. Serious attention is given to power, patriarchy, capitalist production, labor, social relations, and culture; the powerful and the poor; and the rural and the urban. Provocative ideas and hypotheses abound. William B. Taylor, author of Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico John Tutino's book is a culminating achievement to more than thirty years of early New World social history. Yet it significantly improves on even the best of that work by framing New Spain in relation to North America and the wider world, showing how gender was crucial to the basic patterns of people's lives, and illuminating social formations that have remained largely unknown until now. --Peter Guardino, author of The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850

Making a New World creates a compelling new history of world capitalism in the early modern era, with Mexico at its center. It also provides a comprehensive history of the Bajio, the dynamic mining and agricultural region crucial to understanding the socio-cultural, economic, and political history of Mexico. This exciting, well researched book makes us reconsider what we thought we knew about the Atlantic world. Steve J. Stern, University of Wisconsin-Madison Making a New World is a fascinating, bold, and challenging study. It is destined to be an indispensable source, the book of first resort on Mexico's most dynamic region in the years leading up to Independence. Braudelian in ambition and range, it offers a virtual histoire totale of the Bajio. Serious attention is given to power, patriarchy, capitalist production, labor, social relations, and culture; the powerful and the poor; and the rural and the urban. Provocative ideas and hypotheses abound. William B. Taylor, author of Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico John Tutino's book is a culminating achievement to more than thirty years of early New World social history. Yet it significantly improves on even the best of that work by framing New Spain in relation to North America and the wider world, showing how gender was crucial to the basic patterns of people's lives, and illuminating social formations that have remained largely unknown until now. - Peter Guardino, author of The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850

Making a New World is a fascinating, bold, and challenging study. It is destined to be an indispensable source, the book of first resort on Mexico's most dynamic region in the years leading up to Independence. Braudelian in ambition and range, it offers a virtual histoire totale of the Bajio. Serious attention is given to power, patriarchy, capitalist production, labor, social relations, and culture; the powerful and the poor; and the rural and the urban. Provocative ideas and hypotheses abound. --William B. Taylor, author of Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Author Information

John Tutino teaches the history of Mexico and the Americas in the History Department and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940, and a co-editor of Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change: Crisis, Reform, and Revolution in Mexico, also published by Duke University Press.

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