Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajio and Spanish North America

摘要

The main difficulty of commenting on John Tutino's Making a New World lies in his own words: 'I never planned to write this book' (p. 493). What, then, was the motivation? Three possible explanations come to mind: first, for professional survival and as an intellectual effort to reposition economic and social history within the context of current academic interests, dominated by a 'gelatinous' cultural history and the retelling of old narratives dressed up in new intellectual clothes, as with the prism of globalisation; second, methodological concerns, born of Tutino's study of longue duree macro-spatial processes such as the history of social movements and politics in Mexico; and, third, as an intellectual provocation to the dominant forms of thinking, to Eurocentric approaches to historical overviews of modernity. As I regard the latter as the author's implicit purpose, I shall concentrate on those themes and debates in the book.