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

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.

"“[A] sprawling and fascinating new book…. [A] critical intervention in the historiographies of Mexico and the larger Atlantic World…. [R]eaders of this journal will be handsomely rewarded for engaging with the initial installment of Tutino’s study, particularly those with interests in the histories of colonial North America, the region that became the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the advent of capitalism.”
" - Western Historical Quarterly

"“The author should be commended for engaging these conceptual issues…. [T]his is work of great imagination and exquisite detail that should shape the fields of Latin American history, world history, and Atlantic studies.”" - Itinerario

"“Tutino’s book is indeed big history at its best. Compelling and provocative, thoughtful and well written, Making a New World is required reading for Mexicanists and world historians alike. Authors of world history textbooks will find themselves revising subsequent editions of their texts after reading Tutino’s persuasive arguments... Tutino’s big history should give us pause to appreciate both the forest and the trees....[his] book is that good.”" - Catholic Historical Review

"“Tutino’s broad rethinking of capitalist development from a Spanish North American perspective forces us to decenter not only the Atlantic world of European colonialism, but also the origins of U.S. hegemony. Very much like the work of Fernand Braudel whom he admires so much, Tutino deploys massive amounts of data and of conceptual reflection to help us rethink the nature of the world economy.”" - A Contracorriente