Brief Description
This history of the political economy, social relations, and cultural debates that animated Spanish North America from 1500 until 1800 illuminates its centuries of capitalist dynamism and subsequent collapse into revolution.
Learn More about the Book
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."
Review Quotes
1. "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"
2. ""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 gives serious attention 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"
3. "[A] sprawling and fascinating new book.... [A] critical intervention in the historiographies of Mexico and the larger Atlantic World.... [R]eaders of this journal will be handsomely rewarded for engaging with the initial installment of Tutino's study, particularly those with interests in the histories of colonial North America, the region that became the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the advent of capitalism."
--Andrew R. Graybill ""Western Historical Quarterly" "
4. "The author should be commended for engaging these conceptual issues.... [T]his is work of great imagination and exquisite detail that should shape the fields of Latin American history, world history, and Atlantic studies."--Robert Alegre ""Itinerario" "
5. "Tutino's book is indeed big history at its best. Compelling and provocative, thoughtful and well written, "Making a New World" is required reading for Mexicanists and world historians alike. Authors of world history textbooks will find themselves revising subsequent editions of their texts after reading Tutino's persuasive arguments... Tutino's big history should give us pause to appreciate both the forest and the trees....[his] book is that good."--Michael M. Brescia ""Catholic Historical Review" "
6. "Tutino's broad rethinking of capitalist development from a Spanish North American perspective forces us to decenter not only the Atlantic world of European colonialism, but also the origins of U.S. hegemony. Very much like the work of Fernand Braudel whom he admires so much, Tutino deploys massive amounts of data and of conceptual reflection to help us rethink the nature of the world economy."--Florencia E. Mallon ""A Contracorriente" "
7. ""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 sociocultural, 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, Alberto Flores Galindo Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison
8. 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 sociocultural, 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, Alberto Flores Galindo Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison"
9. 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 gives serious attention 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"
10. 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"
11. [A] sprawling and fascinating new book . [A] critical intervention in the historiographies of Mexico and the larger Atlantic World . [R]eaders of this journal will be handsomely rewarded for engaging with the initial installment of Tutino s study, particularly those with interests in the histories of colonial North America, the region that became the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the advent of capitalism.
--Andrew R. Graybill "Western Historical Quarterly ""
12. The author should be commended for engaging these conceptual issues . [T]his is work of great imagination and exquisite detail that should shape the fields of Latin American history, world history, and Atlantic studies. --Robert Alegre "Itinerario ""
13. Tutino s book is indeed big history at its best. Compelling and provocative, thoughtful and well written, Making a New World is required reading forMexicanists and world historians alike. Authors of world history textbookswill find themselves revising subsequent editions of their texts after readingTutino s persuasive arguments... Tutino s big history should give us pause toappreciate both the forest and the trees....[his] book is that good. --Michael M. Brescia "Catholic Historical Review ""
14. Tutino s broad rethinking of capitalist development from a Spanish North American perspective forces us to decenter not only the Atlantic world of European colonialism, but also the origins of U.S. hegemony. Very much like the work of Fernand Braudel whom he admires so much, Tutino deploys massive amounts of data and of conceptual reflection to help us rethink the nature of the world economy. --Florencia E. Mallon "A Contracorriente ""
