Making a New World is a major rethinking of the role of the Americas in early world trade, the rise of capitalism, and the conflicts that reconfigured global power around 1800. At its center is the BajÍo, a fertile basin extending across the modern-day Mexican states of Guanajuato and QuerÉtaro, northwest of Mexico City. The BajÍo became part of a new world in the 1530s, when Mesoamerican OtomÍs and Franciscan friars built QuerÉtaro, a town that quickly thrived on agriculture and trade. Settlement accelerated as regional silver mines began to flourish in the 1550s. Silver tied the BajÍo to Europe and China; it stimulated the development of an unprecedented commercial, patriarchal, Catholic society. A frontier extended north across vast expanses settled by people of European, Amerindian, and African ancestry. As mining, cloth making, and irrigated cultivation increased, inequities deepened and religious debates escalated. Analyzing the political economy, social relations, and cultural conflicts that animated the BajÍo and Spanish North America from 1500 to 1800, John Tutino depicts an engine of global capitalism and the tensions that would lead to its collapse into revolution in 1810.
List of Maps ix
Prologue: Making Global History in the Spanish Empire 1
A Note on Terminology 27
Introduction: A New World: The Bajío, Spanish North America, and Global Capitalism 29
Part I. Making A New World
The Bajío and Spanish North America, 1500–1770
1. Founding the Bajío: Otomí Expansion, Chichimeca War, and Commercial Querétaro, 1500–1660 65
2. Forging Spanish North America: Northward Expansion, Mining Amalgamations, and Patriarchal Communities, 1590–1700 121
3. New World Revivals: Silver Boom, City Lives, Awakenings, and Northward Drives, 1680–1760 159
4. Reforms, Riots, and Repressions: The Bajío in the Crisis of the 1760s 228
Part II. Forging Atlantic Capitalism
The Bajío, 1770–1810
5. Capitalist, Priest, and Patriarch: Don José Sánchez Espinosa and the Great Family Enterprises of Mexico City, 1780–1810 263
6. Production, Patriarchy, and Polarization in the Cities: Guanajuato, San Miguel, and Querétaro, 1770–1810 300
7. The Challenge of Capitalism in Rural Communities: Production, Ethnicity, and Patriarchy from La Griega to Puerto de Nieto, 1780–1810 352
8. Enlightened Reformers and Popular Religion: Polarizations and Mediations, 1770–1810 403
Conclusion: The Bajío and North America in the Atlantic Crucible 451
Epilogue: Toward Unimagined Revolutions 487
Acknowledgments 493
Appendix A: Employers and Workers at Querétaro, 1588–1699 499
Appendix B: Production, Patriarchy, and Ethnicity in the Bajío Bottomlands, 1670–1685 509
Appendix C: Bajío Population, 1600–1800 529
Appendix D: Eighteenth-Century Economic Indicators: Mining and Taxed Commerce 549
Appendix E: The Sierra Gorda and New Santander, 1740–1760 559
Appendix F: Population, Ethnicity, Family, and Work in Rural Communities, 1791–1792 573
Appendix G: Tribute and Tributaries in the Querétaro District, 1807 609
Notes 617
Bibliography 665
Index 685
