Artigo Revisado por pares

Mexico City, 1808: Power, Sovereignty, and Silver in an Age of War and Revolution

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-7993386

ISSN

1527-1900

Autores

Andrew Konove,

Tópico(s)

Mexican Socioeconomic and Environmental Dynamics

Resumo

On September 15, 1808, more than 300 militiamen entered the royal palace in Mexico City and deposed the Spanish viceroy, José de Iturrigaray. The coup ended what John Tutino calls an unprecedented “summer of politics” in New Spain's capital. Upon learning that Napoleon had invaded Spain and sent its monarchs into exile, Iturrigaray called for a general junta of the viceroyalty's Spanish pueblos (towns) and most prominent subjects. As those events unfolded behind closed doors, Mexico City residents took to the streets to proclaim their loyalty to King Ferdinand VII and assert the sovereignty of “el pueblo”—the people. While other historians of Mexico's independence era have alternately pinpointed Napoleon's 1808 invasion of Spain, the outbreak of Miguel Hidalgo's rebellion in 1810, the passage of the Cádiz Constitution in 1812, or its restoration in 1820 as the decisive moment in New Spain's turn toward nationhood, Tutino asserts that the 1808 coup in Mexico City was no less important. He argues that the coup broke a nearly 300-year-old system of governance by consultation and mediation and marked the beginning of a new order in which military force, exercised in the name of popular sovereignty, dominated Mexican politics.The book is divided into two parts. The first provides an overview of Mexico City's society and economy from the Mexica era to the eighteenth century's end. Tutino argues that New Spain's “silver capitalism,” defined as “the economy focused on mining and the commercial, agricultural, and textile sectors that sustained it,” created networks of dependency that ameliorated the tensions of a highly unequal society and helped sustain the Spanish regime (p. xxiii). Tutino's most original contributions here are his detailed analyses of the capital's “integrated capitalist oligarchy”—the two dozen or so families of merchants, mineowners, and landowners who dominated New Spain's economy (p. 43). Using archival collections in Texas, Washington state, and Mexico City, he traces those families' relations with one another, the Spanish regime, and the lesser elites whom he calls “provincials”—the mostly American-born professionals, merchants, and estate operators who dominated the Mexico City town council. Tutino argues that despite the potential fault lines between European-born oligarchs, American provincials, and the city's diverse majority of artisans, laborers, and small-scale merchants, each group's dependence on silver capitalism helped limit social tensions and silence any murmurs of separatism before 1808.In part 2, Tutino shows how the regime of petition and mediation, which had survived the eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms intact, collapsed with the 1808 coup. In chapters 9 and 10, which deal specifically with the events of the summer of 1808, he reconstructs the incidents that led to Iturrigaray's sacking by a militia backed by the city's most powerful merchants, audiencia judges, and two emissaries from the Seville junta. The plotters worried that Iturrigaray's call for a broad-based junta threatened New Spain's ties to the metropole and the lucrative silver trade that sustained the economy and had made many of their families' fortunes. Appropriating the language of the crowds that had gathered on Mexico City's streets earlier that summer, the coup's architects claimed to act in the name of popular sovereignty. That decision, Tutino insists, established a precedent in Mexico for military interventions made in the name of the people but designed to preserve the power of the privileged.Tutino crafts a compelling argument, though it is not entirely convincing. Certainly, the book's first half conforms with the view of most modern-day historians of colonial Spanish America that Spain relied far more on consultation and negotiation than physical force to rule its American empire. Tutino offers less support for his contention that the 1808 coup began a new era of militarism veiled in the language of popular sovereignty. When he writes that after 1821 “politics and power were affairs of armed men,” he glosses over a more complicated national political landscape and misses the substantial scholarship on the municipal-level politics that continued after Mexico's independence (p. 4). A deeper engagement with that research and the work of other historians of Mexico's independence era, including Jaime Rodríguez O. and Timothy Anna, might have strengthened Tutino's argument by contextualizing it within the broader historiography of early nineteenth-century Mexico.The book raises important questions that its relatively narrow evidentiary base prevents it from fully answering. What, precisely, were the connections between the 1808 coup and the revolutionary violence that erupted in the Bajío exactly two years later? Why did the disruption of the silver trade, which Tutino argues was the glue that held Mexico City society together, not lead to revolution in the capital, too? And what, in the end, was the significance of the semantic and political relationship he identifies between “los pueblos,” as the historical locus of sovereignty in Spain, and “el pueblo,” as an emerging concept of popular sovereignty in Spanish America in the early nineteenth century? What role would towns play in Mexican conceptions of sovereignty after 1808? An engaging, provocative book, Mexico City, 1808 offers valuable insight into the Age of Revolutions in Mexico and the broader Atlantic world and should spark generative debates among historians of the era.

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