New Countries. Capitalism, Revolutions, and Nations in the Americas, 1750–1870

In 2011 John Tutino published Making a New World, a provocative book that sought to de-center the role of Europe and Asia at the core of the debates about the “great divergence,” and to place instead the Bajío region of Mexico and its silver as the original hearth of capitalism in the modern world, prior to the emergence of industrial capitalism in Great Britain. The present volume is in many ways, in both time and place, an extension of that project. Tutino is now joined by nine other accomplished scholars who present here studies of other regions of the Americas, especially in the period from ca. 1820–1870, in light of the principal factors for change that Tutino emphasized. The principle theme of the volume is divergence in the Americas and how local conditions, natural endowments, and social organization produced different outcomes when confronted by similar global economic changes. Tutino begins the volume with an excellent synopsis of his argument in a review of the polycentric political economy of the world prior to the end of the eighteenth century. This is followed by a smashing essay by Roberto Breña on the Liberal Constitution of Cadiz of 1812, which set in motion the political and ideological changes in the Napoleonic period and eventually resulted (with the exception of monarchical Brazil and colonial Cuba) in the emergence of the Latin American republics. Next are case studies of the slave or formerly slave-based countries—the United States (Adam Rothman), Haiti (Carolyn Fick), Cuba (David Sartorius), and Brazil (Kirsten Schultz)—and of countries with indigenous population majorities—Mexico (Tutino and Alfredo Ávila), Guatemala (Jordana Dym), and Peru and Bolivia (Sarah C. Chambers). In a final chapter, Erick D. Langer departs from a “national” perspective to discuss how indigenous peoples within states of South America in the half century before ca. 1870 took advantage of political turmoil and weakened national states to regain lands or to lessen tax burdens, and how still-independent native peoples on national margins also flourished until about 1870 when new demands for American raw materials and products, the consolidation of national states, and, we can add, the technology of railroads, barbed wire, and the repeating rifle, led to final conquests. The timing of the final defeat of the Mapuche of Chile, the Pampa peoples of Argentina, as well as Comanches, Apaches, and Sioux was not coincidental.