In this engaging book, Eric Van Young traces the political, economic, and social development of Mexico through the crucial one hundred years of its remarkable transition from a relatively prosperous Spanish colony to a violently unstable republic marked by economic stagnation, political confrontation, and burgeoning efforts at modernization. Featuring primary sources from figures of the period, Van Young discusses the political instability of the period—internal warfare, military uprisings, intermittent dictatorships, sharp conflicts among political groupings—and attributes them to a belief by political actors in the fundamental lack of legitimacy in central government institutions after the sweeping away of the Bourbon imperial structure and its replacement first with a very short-lived Mexican empire followed by a series of increasingly authoritarian aspirational republican constitutions.

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Van Young, a noted Mexicanist, here details a century of Mexican history, spanning 1750–1850. He focuses on Mexico’s often stormy transition from colony to nation and posits that his contribution is more of an “extended interpretive synthetic essay” than a general survey text. This is an apt way to cast the title as it is expansive in scope yet offers significant insight from a noted scholar who has made a career of studying this period. The work is friendly to readers who may have minimal historical knowledge of Mexico’s past, and the analysis and compact nature of the narrative offers more advanced students and scholars new ways in which to interpret this critical period. There is much to unpack, ranging from decolonization and the impact on Mexican society to the successes and failures of modernization. Van Young’s work has a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in Latin American or Mexican history. It can also serve as a core or supplemental text for relevant courses. Recommended.

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This is an outstanding piece of synthesis. It offers a perfect introductory overview of everything that was important in Mexico between 1750 and 1850. This is, hands down, the best introduction to Mexico’s history from colony to republic that anyone can buy.

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Excitingly, Van Young’s book provides, for the very first time, a compelling overview of Mexico during the so-called Age of Democratic Revolutions (1750-1850). That he has been able to do this says much about how much attention the period in question has attracted since 1993, but it also speaks volumes of Van Young’s own lifelong career as a Mexicanist and a historian and his painstaking research into the hacienda economy of colonial Mexico, the crisis of the colonial order, the War of Independence (1810-21), and the eventful and remarkable career of so-called father of Mexican conservatism Lucas Alamán (1792-1853).[3] Without the last three decades of research into the period and Van Young’s own vast encyclopedic knowledge of it, this book could never have been written. This is an outstanding piece of synthesis. It offers a perfect introductory overview of everything that was important in Mexico between 1750 and 1850. Hands down, this is the best introduction to Mexico’s history from colony to republic that anyone can buy.