Resumen de Braudel Comes to the New World: Rethinking the Evolution of Global Capitalism from the Americas
As is clear from the massive appendixes in this already massive tome, Making a New World is the product of prodigious research and reflection across a long period of time. Even more impressive, in a footnote to the epilogue the author promises a second volume, to be entitled Remaking the New World, that will begin where this one leaves off—with the impact of the Independence Wars on the Bajío. The size and depth of this project is best explained by its conceptual and empirical ambition. On the one hand, Tutino aims to provide us with a long-awaited, in-depth explanation of how and why the Mexican Independence Wars—which over the years have been seen by many Latin Americanist historians as a particularly interesting case of social revolution—began in the Bajío. On the other hand, he aims to demonstrate how the mining, industrial, commercial, and agricultural activities in the Bajío region generated capitalism, and then spread north to create the larger region he calls “Spanish North America” that would be transferred from Mexican to U.S. control after the U.S.-Mexican War, and subsequently provide one of the sources of power and wealth that fuelled the emergence of U.S. expansionism. Tutino also aims to place the development of capitalism in the Bajío in the context of a global economy that included not only the Atlantic World, but also the East Asian region then dominated by the Chinese Empire. It was, after all, the Chinese demand for silver, Tutino argues, that initially generated the boom in silver production in the Bajío.
