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Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675-1820

Eric Van Young author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Rowman & Littlefield

Published:30th May '06

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Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico cover

This classic history of the Mexican hacienda from the colonial period through the nineteenth century has been reissued in a silver anniversary edition complete with a substantive new introduction and foreword. Eric Van Young explores 150 years of Mexico's economic and rural development, a period when one of history's great empires was trying to extract more resources from its most important colony, and when an arguably capitalist economy was both expanding and taking deeper root. The author explains the development of a regional agrarian system, centered on the landed estates of late colonial Mexico, the central economic and social institution of an overwhelmingly rural society. With rich empirical detail, he meticulously describes the features of the rural economy, including patterns of land ownership, credit and investment, labor relations, the structure of production, and the relationship of a major colonial city to its surrounding area. The book's most interesting and innovative element is its emphasis on the way the system of rural economy shaped, and was shaped by, the internal logic of a great spatial system, the region of Guadalajara. Van Young argues that Guadalajara's population growth progressively integrated the large geographical region surrounding the city through the mechanisms of the urban market for grain and meat, which in turn put pressure on local land and labor resources. Eventually this drove white and Indian landowners into increasingly sharp conflict and led to the progressive proletarianization of the region's peasantry during the last decades of the Spanish colonial era. It is no accident, given this history, that the Guadalajara region was one of the major areas of armed insurrection for most of the decade during Mexico's struggle for independence from Spain. By highlighting the way haciendas worked and changed over time, this indispensable study illuminates Mexico's economic and social history, the movement for independence, and the origins of the Mexican Revolution.

This is a monumental work that will influence colonial historians of Mexico in the same manner as Brading, Bakewell, and Taylor have.... Impeccable in its scholarship, this work is elegantly written. * Latin America In Books *
Eric Van Young has written a major study of late colonial economic development, urban markets, and haciendas as economic institutions in the regional setting of central Jalisco…Students of early Latin American history will use this book often for its solid, clearly presented findings and for its many ideas about specific economic and social changes. It is an admirable step beyond all previous regional studies of land systems and economic change. -- William B. Taylor, University of California, Berkeley * Hispanic American Historical Review *
As a case study, the book confirms much of what has recently been documented for other areas of Mexico while adding significant new details. In terms of technique and ideas it is an important contribution to the field of colonial economic and social history. -- Herman W. Konrad * American Historical Review *
This is an excellent book. Colonial historians will long consider it required reading. -- Keith A. Davis * Agricultural History *
A thoroughly satisfying book… Eric Van Young is the first author to attempt to analyze the colonial agricultural economy from the perspective of a regional marketing area rather than that of the local producing unit… an excellent contribution holding significance for all researchers interested in the economic and social history of Mexico. -- James D. Riley * The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History *
This is an important, meticulously researched and elegantly written study of a neglected region. Van Young is to be praised for providing a working geographical definition of what is an 'economic region,' and for looking at relations between city and countryside from both angles. -- G. P. C. Thomson * Times Literary Supplement *

ISBN: 9780742553590

Dimensions: 238mm x 164mm x 40mm

Weight: 898g

454 pages

Twenty fifth Edition