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Material Life, Continuities, and Periodization: A Comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Murdo J. MacLeod
Murdo J. MacLeod*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
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Professor Carmagnani's essay consists of two parts. In the first three-quarters of the essay, he rapidly reviews historical writing on colonial Mexico from about 1970 until 1981, identifying major topics, tendencies, and prospects for the future. In the second part of the essay, Carmagnani turns to some of what he believes to be the shortcomings of this decade or more of writing, especially what he views as its failure to establish a new periodization for the Mexican colonial centuries. In discussing this “inertia” in the new generation of social historians, he proposes a periodization that he believes more accurately “fits” the general findings of this recent historical corpus.

Type
Commentary and Debate
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , 1985 , pp. 167 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Some scholars, for example, might perceive a new emphasis on socioeconomic and demographic history appearing in the following syntheses from the 1950s: Woodrow Borah, New Spain's Century of Depression, Ibero-Americana 35 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951); Lesley Byrd Simpson, Exploitation of Land in Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century, Ibero-Americana 36 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956); and Eric Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959). Other scholars, thinking of the pioneering work of José Miranda on the encomendero class or of Silvio Zavala's contribution on the origins of peonage, might push the beginnings of the age of enlightenment back into the primeval mists of the 1940s.

2. David A. Brading and Celia Wu, “Population Growth and Crisis: León, 1720–1860,” Journal of Latin American Studies 5, no. 1 (May 1973):1-36, especially pp. 27–29.

3. A point effectively and, for me, definitively made by Amartya Sen in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 154–66.

4. See for example Essays in the Political, Economic, and Social History of Colonial Latin America, edited by Kenneth Ackerman (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware, Latin American Studies Program, 1982), and especially in this context, the introduction by Karen Spalding and the essay by John N. Coatsworth. See also Richard Boyer, “Absolutism versus Corporation in New Spain: The Administration of the Marqués of Gelves, 1621–1624,” The International History Review 4, no. 4 (Nov. 1982):475-503; and Woodrow Borah, Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).

5. Lesley Byrd Simpson, “Mexico's Forgotten Century,” Pacific Historical Review 22 (1953):113–21.

6. For example, David A. Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío: León, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 175–77, 186–89.