Bankruptcy of Empire: Mexican Silver and the Wars between Spain, Britain and France, 1760-1810

摘要

Carlos Marichal is among the most significant scholars of late colonial Mexico, with an extensive and influential oeuvre. This book summarises, expands upon and makes readily accessible to an English-speaking readership major aspects of his work over the past 20 years, previously available mainly in the similarly titled La bancarrota del virreinato: Nueva Espana y las finanzas del imperio espanol, 1780-1810 (1999). It may be, in fact, that one of the chief contributions made by the book will be to make better known the work of Marichal and other Mexican scholars, which has transformed our understanding of how the Spanish empire actually worked in the late eighteenth century.