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Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2077153

1527-1900

Eric Van Young,

Historical Studies in Latin America

John Tutino has written a highly ambitious and provocative book to which it is impossible to do justice, either in praise or critical encounter, in a short review. The book has much to tell us about Mexican colonial and world history, even if it does not manage entirely to convince in all of its vast claims (“vast” being one of the author’s favorite words, along with “soaring,” “complex,” and “diverse,” so that descriptors and superlatives sometimes stand in for analysis and evidence). The main thesis is that the Bajío, a late- settled region in Mexico’s near north anchored by the commercial city of Querétaro and the great mining center of Guanajuato, became the motor of world capitalism by the mid- eighteenth century or so. The region’s influence extended to what Tutino calls “Spanish North America,” stretching from the Bajío into the distant reaches of what is now the American Southwest. The steady demand for the silver pouring out of Guana-juato and other nearby mining centers drove this development, linking New Spain not only with the Atlantic economy but also with East Asia, specifically China. Tutino does an impressive job of describing the commercial and entrepreneurial dynamism of this huge area in mining, commercial agriculture, trade, and, eventually, textile manufacture. But the mining and commercial dynamism, not surprisingly, produced a highly skewed distribution of income and wealth and an increasing social polarization, especially after 1750 or so. These were some of the preconditions for the explosion of the 1810 insurgency, whose history the author will explore in a subsequent volume.Among the book’s many virtues are Tutino’s acuity in tracking much of the vitality of this central node of the global economy to China and his compelling integration of indigenous people into the history of the Bajío, where they are often neglected. He shows how the Otomí Indian population supplied the labor to build Spanish towns and to cultivate haciendas. They formed much of the demographic base of the area from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward, even while Indian populations further south were shrinking quickly under the lash of epidemic disease. There are fascinating, skillfully integrated, and quite extended biographies of individuals key to these processes or emblematic of them, such as José de Escandón, “pacifier” of the Sierra Gorda (p. 213ff.), or José Sánchez Espinosa, priest and entrepreneur (chapter 5). Tutino gives us insightful discussions of the violent disturbances of the mid- 1760s (chapter 4) and unexpectedly, given his clearly materialist bent, of forms of popular religion (chapter 8). The seven statistical appendixes, with accompanying discussion, provide a wealth of information on labor relations, production, population, and ethnic composition.As with any work of this scale and ambition, however, there are problematic aspects of argument and evidence. The two key concepts of the book are capitalism and patriarchy, the first never defined with sufficient clarity, the second (except as a broad descriptive rubric) too vague to bear the explanatory weight placed upon it. Tutino seems to equate the presence of wage labor, a drive to optimize profits (rather than pure rent seeking) on the part of owners, and, above all, robust commercial relations, with capitalism. This is a rather baggy definition sure to provoke controversy, as will other aspects of this interesting book. Although he need not have glossed all the daunting literature on this subject (Karl Marx and Adam Smith have walk- on parts, while Fernand Braudel plays a starring role), one wonders at the absence from his bibliography of authors such as Carlos Sempat Assadourian, Ruggiero Romano, or even Cristóbal Kay (Andre Gunder Frank walks on and off near Marx and Smith), who have offered compelling discussions of the nature of capitalism specifically within the context of colonial Latin America. What we have in the Bajío, it seems to me, is a hybrid type, perhaps best described by the old model of articulated modes of production. In his otherwise admirable effort to hang New Spain between Europe and China, Tutino has substituted assumptions about globalization for a sharper conceptual approach to what advancing capitalism, and therefore the process of modernization, actually is.If 150 years of Marxist thought and writing on this issue, as well as a deep debate about the place of colonial Latin America in relation to it, had not established the terms of debate, perhaps this imprecision — or perhaps, conceptual generosity — would not matter very much. But patterns of reinvestment and technological innovation among landowners in the region (miners are another matter), rather than simply the expansion or vegetative growth of their enterprises, are fuzzy in Tutino’s text, and there existed forms of labor extraction that did not arise from or respond to market signals. Beyond this, it is the absence itself of some more transparent definition of what capitalism is and, in some instances, of empirical evidence to support the author’s claims that weaken his case not for economic dynamism as such, but for a certain kind of dynamism. And in relation to this entire question, Tutino’s insistence that the Bajío/Querétaro complex was the center of the world economy in the late eighteenth century is not very credible, at least on the basis of the evidence he presents here.As for patriarchy, after reading this long book one can only ask what the concept (of low specific gravity, in any case) was meant to explain. That powerful men, or even marginal ones, dominated households, politics, and production decisions is hardly a surprise and, with the exception of a few matriarchal societies, is just about the universal and transhistorical norm. At best, what we are seeing in Tutino’s Bajío are nested or hierarchical patriarchies — God is patriarch to the king, the king to the aristocratic landowners, the landowners to their renters, and so on down the line. So it’s hard to make out what these patriarchal relations explain about the nature of regional or international markets, labor recruitment practices, or even inheritance patterns, which were notoriously protean and subject to numerous exceptions and distortions outside the nominally prescriptive structures of male primogeniture, equal partible inheritance, and so forth. Patriarchy, then, becomes a very blunt instrument.The research deployed in the book is impressive, but in perusing the endnotes and list of sources one is struck by the fact that, with the exception of chapters 5 – 7, almost all the evidence is drawn from other authors’ monographs or published primary sources. Appendix A, for example, is exclusively based upon the work of the Querétaro historian José Ignacio Urquiola Permisán, appendix B on the work of two authors, and so forth. In view of this, it’s clear that John Tutino has done a heroic work of synthesis, analysis, and reworking of published data. Despite some important problems on the conceptual level, however, and some relating to methodology and style of exposition, this is a book well worth reading, one that will stimulate a good deal of discussion as it prompts us to rethink our assumptions about the roles of Mexico in general, and the Bajío specifically, in the development of the modern world.