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Lucas Alamán (1792-1853) was arguably the greatest statesman and certainly the greatest historian of Mexico in the three decades or so following the country’s achievement of its independence from Spain (1821) after a tremendously violent and destructive decade-long rebellion against the colonial power. Dubbed “a Metternich among Indians” by one contemporary, he was a conservative modernizer rather than the ruthless reactionary he has been branded. Several times chief minister in the national government but never president of the young republic, Alamán’s efforts to impose political stability on the country through implacable measures of state centralization, repression of political dissent, and the anti-democratic limitation of the popular electoral franchise were not aimed at building an authoritarian regime as such, but at establishing the conditions for the economic development--principally industrialization--that he believed would modernize the country and bring prosperity. This biography of Alamán portrays him against the chaotic background of nearly continual military and popular uprisings, a frail and stagnating economy, and a perennially bankrupt national treasury, and interacting with major political figures of the time, among them the ever-restive, swashbuckling Antonio López de Santa Anna. Alamán struggled as a politician against the swirling currents of liberalism, the federalism that threatened intermittently to tear the country into pieces, and the nation’s tragic confrontation with the territorial ambitions of the United States. His career as statesman, public intellectual, entrepreneur, and historian brightly illuminates the history of Mexico during a period when its very existence was imperiled.

Unrevolutionary Mexico addresses how the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) turned into a capitalist dictatorship of exceptional resilience. While soldiers seized power across the rest of Latin America, in modern Mexico the civilians of a single party moved punctiliously in and out of office for seventy-one years. The book uses the histories of the states of Guerrero and Veracruz as entry points to explore the origins and consolidation of this unique authoritarian state on both provincial and national levels. An empirically rich reconstruction of over sixty years of modernization and revolution (1880-1945) revises prevailing ideas of a pacified Mexico and establishes the 1940s as a decade of faltering governments and enduring violence. The book then assesses the pivotal changes of the mid-twentieth century, when a new generation of lawyers, bureaucrats and businessmen joined with surviving revolutionaries to form the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which held uninterrupted power until 2000. Thematic chapters analyse elections, development, corruption and high and low culture in the period. The central role of military and private violence is explored in two further chapters that measure the weight of hidden coercion in keeping the party in power. In conclusion, the combination of provincial and national histories reveals Mexico as a place where soldiers prevented coups, a single party lost its own rigged elections, corruption fostered legitimacy, violence was concealed but decisive, and ambitious cultural control co-existed with a critical press and a disbelieving public. In conclusion, the book demonstrates how this strange dictatorship thrived not despite but because of its contradictions.

Latin American governments systematically fail to provide the key public goods for their societies to prosper. This book argues this is because nineteenth-century Latin American state-formation occurred in a period when commerce, rather than war, was the key driver forging countries. Latin American leaders pursued the benefits of international trade at the cost of long-term liabilities built into the countries they forged, notably patrimonial administrations and dysfunctional regional combinations. The book begins with a background on comparative state-formation, introducing the idea that the timing of state-formation in world history is crucial. It develops a theory that explains cases of state-formation with and without state building. It also lays the groundwork for the study of comparative state-formation and highlights the difference between state-formation and smaller-scale political processes. The book examines the two processes of state-formation: territory consolidation and violence monopolization. It then considers how the state-formation in Latin America occurred under extremely auspicious international economic and geopolitical conditions. The book concludes that the nineteenth-century state-formation is a key to understanding some of the most pressing issues in contemporary Latin America. It suggests that some paths of state-formation do not lead to state building, and a subset of them create durable obstacles it.

This innovative study explores the transition in Brazil from a hegemonically Catholic society to a religiously pluralistic society. The book shows that the rise of religious pluralism was fraught with conflict and violence, as Catholic bishops, priests, and friars organized intense campaigns against Protestantism. These episodes of religious violence were not isolated outbursts of reactionary rage, but rather formed part of a longer process through which religious groups articulated their vision for Brazil's national future. The book begins with a background on Catholic–Protestant relations in the Brazilian Northeast. It suggests a new religious history of modern Latin America that puts religious pluralism at the center rather than at the margins of historical analysis. In doing so it seeks to understand the ways in which religious competition and conflict redefined traditional relationships between church and state, lay and clergy, popular and official religion, and local and national interests.

Going against the grain of most existing scholarship, this book explores the archives of colonial Mexico to uncover a history of “futuremaking.” While historians and historical anthropologists of Latin America have long focused on historical memory, this book rejects this approach and its assumptions about time experience. Ranging widely across economic, political, and cultural practices, the book reveals how colonial subjects used the resources of tradition and Catholicism to craft new futures.

George I. Sánchez is the most important intellectual and one of the most important activists of the “Mexican American Generation” between the New Deal and the Great Society. From humble New Mexico beginnings, Sánchez used education as a means of advancement first as a teacher, then as an educational bureaucrat, and finally as a professor. Intimately connected to some of the leading national philanthropies with regard to civil rights and with different levels of government in the U.S. and abroad, George Sánchez made bettering humankind his life's work. While he was involved in many issues, Sánchez was most invested in the idea of integration. He sought to unleash the revolutionary potential of schools by abolishing the school segregation of Mexican Americans in the United States. He was an academic activist interested in the integration of Mexican Americans in all facets of national life. Through this biography, the author will not only tell the life and work of a fascinating individual, but also relate much of the twentieth-century Chicana/o experience. Despite enduring serious professional difficulties, particularly over his civil rights activism, as well as major challenges his personal life, George Sánchez still fought racial prejudice as if he had nothing to lose. He did. And yet he continued for decades to fight those good fights.

This book on the Yaqui people of the north Mexican state of Sonora examines the history of Yaqui-Spanish interactions from first contact in 1533 through Mexican independence in 1821. It deals with the colonial history of the Yaqui people and presents a portrait of the colonial experience of the indigenous peoples of Mexico's Yaqui River Valley. In examining native engagement with the forces of the Spanish empire, the book identifies three ironies that emerged from the dynamic and ambiguous relationship of the Yaquis and their conquerors: the strategic use by the Yaquis of both resistance and collaboration; the intertwined roles of violence and negotiation in the colonial pact; and the surprising ability of the imperial power to remain effective despite its general weakness.

Among the magnificent gems and jewels left behind by the great Islamic empires, emeralds stand out for their size and prominence. For the Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids green was—as it remains for all Muslims—the color of Paradise, reserved for the Prophet Muhammad and his descendants. Tapping a wide range of sources, this book traces the complex web of global trading networks that funneled emeralds from backland South America to populous Asian capitals between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This book reveals the bloody conquest wars and forced labor regimes that accompanied their production. It is a story of trade, but also of transformations—how members of profoundly different societies at opposite ends of the globe assigned value to a few thousand pounds of imperfectly shiny green rocks.

From 1850 to 1914, Brazil enjoyed a long period of political and financial stability that was interrupted just once. During this rupture in 1889–1894, the country suffered two successful coups-d'etat, military government, civil war, and a disastrous decline in the value of the national currency. The five years of disorder and crisis came in the wake of the nation's abolition of slavery and related financial repercussions. This book examines Brazil's crisis years, for the first time setting post-slavery financial decisions within their international and local historical contexts. Arguing against the “European dependency” interpretation of Brazil's history, this book explains how planters' demands for easy credit after abolition were met with shortsighted economic policies. The failure of the expansionary monetary policy of the 1890s not only illuminates Brazil's history, it also suggests lessons relevant to financial and political decisions being made today.