When Alexander von Humboldt toured the Americas in the years just after 1800, he wrote a massive and detailed four volumes on the kingdom of New Spain -far more than he devoted to any other region of the New World. He portrayed a domain of economic dynamism and social complexity, inordinately wealthy, deeply unequal, socially stable -and important to the world (Humboldt, 1966). He reported with clarity and understanding, yet by the time his work reached global audiences, New Spain was deep into times of transforming change. It is essential to understand the powerful importance of New Spain in the Americas and the world before 1810, the New Spain Humboldt explored and reported, before turning to the transformations that had changed everything by 1821.

Through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, New Spain was the most populous kingdom in the Americas, its rich silver economy expanding to drive trades that linked Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Mexico City, its capital, was by far the largest city in the hemisphere, home to imperial and ecclesiastical authorities, and to an oligarchy of financial, commercial, and landed oligarchs who dominated New Spain and ruled trades that made the kingdom pivotal to the world. Great merchant financiers concentrated the capital that funded mining, while regularly investing in landed estates that were harbingers of an agrarian capitalism rare in the eighteenth-century world. Spain’s claims to imperial power depended on the productive dynamism of New Spain’s silver capitalism (Tutino, 2016b; 2018b).

Diverse regional societies, economies, and cultures shaped in different ways by silver capitalism combined to make New Spain. From the basins around Mexico City and extending south, communities rooted in the Mesoamerican past survived the devastating disease-driven depopulation of the 16^th century to revive as self-governing, landed indigenous republics -the foundation of a new Spanish Mesoamerica (Tutino, 2018a). From the Bajío north, historically sparse state-free peoples were decimated by war and disease after 1550, their homelands emptied and then repopulated by migrants from Mesoamerica and enslaved Africans who amalgamated to serve as the producing base of a new, thoroughly commercial world ruled by profit-seeking Spaniards -a domain I call Spanish North America (Tutino, 2011).

The two primary civilizations of New Spain were differentiated within by the impacts of the dynamic silver economy that energized change from the 1550s. The regions of Spanish Mesoamerica surrounding Mexico City and extending east toward Veracruz and west through Michoacán were deeply impacted by the silver economy financially centered in the capital and energized by mines at Taxco and Real del Monte (and in Michoacán by the Guanajuato mines just north in the Bajío). There, in regionally varied ways, landed republics lived in regular interactions with commercial estates. Haciendas produced mostly European goods (wheat, sugar, and livestock) to sustain urban and Hispanic consumers. Native republics raised native crops (maize, beans, chile) to sustain themselves, mines, and city markets -while providing essential seasonal labor to nearby estates. The result: regional societies grounded in indigenous republics keeping autonomous ways of production and cultural integration, sustained and limited a Mesoamerican silver capitalism (Castro Gutiérrez, 2004; García de León, 2011; Tutino, 2018a).

To the south, indigenous republics grounded in reconstituted Mesoamerican ways dominated Mixtec and Zapotec Oaxaca and the diverse Maya regions from Yucatán, through Chiapas, and into Guatemala. Silver was scarce, commercial stimuli limited, and commercial estates few. Production was mostly indigenous, urban markets remained small, yet indigenous produce, notably cloth and cochineal from Oaxaca, found markets in the economy stimulated by silver capitalism. In the south, Spanish Mesoamerica more Mesoamerican than Spanish -linked to New Spain by imperial and ecclesiastical institutions, and by trades that adapted to community ways of production and diverse ways of indigenous Christian devotion (Taylor, 1972; Farriss, 1984; García de León, 1985; Pastor, 1987; Baskes, 2000). Pivotally important, all of Spanish Mesoamerica was integrated and stabilized by institutions of mediating justice sanctioned and sustained by imperial regime with minimal coercive power on the land. People in indigenous republics -majorities approaching 90 percent across Spanish Mesoamerica- gained local justice under native magistrates (Lockhart, 1992; Yannakakis, 2008). When they faced conflicts with Hispanic outsiders, they claimed the attention of District Magistrates -with rights of appeal to the General Indigenous Court in Mexico City. Most resolutions aimed to conciliate competing claims; implementations came with limited coercive backing. Mediating justice for indigenous people and their self-governing landed communities, sustained by a regime that provided translators and advocates, underlay an enduring stability across the diverse regions of Spanish Mesoamerica even as social tensions escalated in the eighteenth century (Taylor, 1979; Borah, 1982; Owensby, 2008).

Spanish North America was fundamentally different, and also marked by regionally differing social relations and ways of integration. The dynamic North began in the Bajío, marked by the power of silver production at Guanajuato, the rise of Querétaro as a center of trade and textile production, and the spread of often-irrigated commercial cultivation across the rich bottomlands of the basin between the two cities and in nearby uplands from San Miguel to León. Beyond Querétaro, founded early by Otomí settlers, ruled by an indigenous council to the 1660s, and long fed by corporately held huertas (similar to Xochimilco chinampas), indigenous republics were scarce in the Bajío and regions north.

Spanish-owned, profit-seeking enterprises ruled mining, large-scale obrajes, and cultivation in the richest region of New Spain. Diverse migrants from Mesoamerica -Otomí, Mexica, and Purépecha- mixed in mining centers, towns, and estates, where they merged with enslaved Africans to form amalgamating communities, some classed as indios, some as free mulattoes, nearly all without republican rights to land and self-rule.

The Bajío prospered thanks to the dynamism of silver, strong from 1590 to 1640, steady to 1700, booming through the eighteenth century. Its producing majority lived in dependence in a commercial world, sustained in modest prosperity by their own scarcity relative to the rising demands of a profitable silver capitalism. They gained solid pay, maize rations, and land rentals for centuries -until population growth turned against them and they faced new more predatory impositions after 1780 (with limited access to judicial mediations). Still, production boomed and stability held to 1810 (Tutino, 2011).

North of the Bajío, silver mining remained the engine of Spanish North America: Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí to 1640, Parral 1640 to 1700, Santa Eulalia near Chihuahua after 1700 -joined by revivals at Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí and new booms at Bolaños, Catorce, Sombrerete, and more. Regions north of the Bajío also saw most original state-free peoples eliminated after 1550 by disease and long conflicts, pressured to settle in missions in marginal uplands (without rights to land and self-rule). With the dearth of local native peoples, the north, too, was settled by migrants from Mesoamerica along with enslaved Africans, who again amalgamated to generate growing populations of free mulattoes who worked in mines and grazing estates. With the plateau north of the Bajío mostly dry, cultivation was limited, except at irrigable oases such as Aguascalientes, which fed Zacatecas.

The north did not develop major textile centers -its herds of sheep supplying wool to Bajío obrajes. Thus, while mining, immigrant populations, and thoroughly commercial ways characterized all of Spanish North America, the Bajío developed commercial cultivation and textile manufacturing to sustain itself and regions north -leaving the latter dependent on the Bajío as profit seekers drove deeper into the continent. Stability held in the north, as there too, population scarcity led to ample and secure remunerations -a situation that endured to 1810 and long after (Bakewell, 1971; Hadley, 1979; Langue, 1979; Martin, 1996; Tutino, 2011).

Mexico City integrated Spanish Mesoamerica, Spanish North America, and the larger silver capitalism that reached across the globe to energized everything. Judicial institutions in the capital oversaw the mediating justice that kept peace and social stability across Spanish Mesoamerica, in the regions of dynamic silver capitalism near the capital and across zones of indigenous primacy stretching south. Financial and commercial powers concentrated there, funded mines in the Mesoamerican heartland, the Bajío, and across the north. The capital’s merchant financiers ruled Atlantic and Pacific trades (Brading, 1973; Yuste, 2013), sending silver to fuel economies from Europe, through the Middle East to South Asia, and via Manila to China, too -where nearly all the silver eventually landed to fuel the world most dynamic economy (Pomeranz, 2000; Parthasarathi, 2011). The financial/commercial and administrative/judicial powers set in the capital made New Spain an integrated, prosperous, stable, and powerful kingdom, funded by locally generated capital -linking diverse ways of production, community, and culture to fund Spain’s empire and fuel global trades (Tutino, 2018b). A globally-linked silver capitalism -not mining alone- defined New Spain and its dynamism in the Americas and the world.

During the eighteenth century, global trade expansion, imperial rivalries, rising revenue demand, and population growth merged to create new pressures and deepening inequities in New Spain. Still, silver capitalism boomed and stability held. When population growth created new pressures on resources in indigenous republics, then mixed with rising land disputes and new commercial intrusions, judicial mediations held the social peace across Spanish Mesoamerica -in regions of dynamic silver capitalism near the capital, and in Oaxaca, too, far from its profits and pressures (Taylor, 1979).

The Seven Years War of 1757-63 brought Spain claims to the lands west of the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis, thus most of western North America. The conflict also brought massive debts. An attempt to impose new taxes and the militarized power to collect them provoked risings in key regions of silver capitalism, where Spanish Mesoamerica intersected Spanish North America. In 1766 and 1767, mine workers took the streets of Guanajuato to protest new levies and demands they join militias to enforce their collection; workers at Real del Monte took over mines to protest falling earnings and deadly conditions. Risings spread to mines around San Luis Potosí and indigenous communities near Pátzcuaro. Demands differed; the refusal to accept new impositions was shared. It quickly became clear that imperial demands and extractions threatened silver capitalism -the essential foundation of Spain’s imperial power. New Spain’s financial-commercial-mining- landed oligarchs, mobilized militias to curb the rioting, impose exemplary punishments -and press imperial visitor don José de Gálvez to relent on his impositions. Mediated settlements conceded to popular demands, enabling silver and the economies it drove to revive after 1770, then drive to new heights. The risings of 1767 were not preludes to independence. They demonstrated the essential importance of silver capitalism to Spain, New Spain, and a world of imperial conflicts and global trades. It had to persist (Castro Gutiérrez, 1996; Tutino, 2011, Ch. 4 and Part 2).

And persist it did -to 1810. That was seen clearly (in prejudiced British eyes) by Henry Ward, England’s first emissary to Mexico in the 1820s. Struggling to explain why British capital and technology could not revive Mexican mines, he wrote the following in 1828:

To 1810, New Spain was exceptionally rich, culturally diverse, socially stratified, judicially stabilized-and important to the world. Then, the world of silver capitalism fell apart.

Ward dated the revolution that broke silver capitalism as beginning in 1810. He was not wrong, for that was the year that mass insurgent violence assaulted everything. From a larger perspective, though, the core ways of New Spain and silver capitalism broke during four years of unprecedented imperial crisis, political conflict, and popular insurgencies that began in 1808. Earlier pressures had rattled the system -but it carried on, enabling production to peak in 1809. By 1812, everything was broken, even as social conflicts and political debates persisted under continuing Spanish oversight -until Iturbide’s Iguala movement led the break of 1821. The essence of New Spain dissolved in the years from 1808 to 1812. The once powerful, prosperous, stable, and globally pivotal kingdom was a memory when Mexico began in 1821, leaving nation builders to face persistent conflicts, debates, and uncertainties.

Theda Skocpol has argued that transforming revolutions begin in regime breakdowns, to be driven by risings of irate rural peoples (Skocpol, 1979). Her model, built on the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, captures key elements of the conflagration that transformed New Spain from 1808. It began in the regime collapse forced by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in the Spring of 1808, followed by the overthrow of the reigning Viceroy in Mexico City that September. The invasion and the coup militarized power in Spain and New Spain, setting off political conflicts that led to mass rural insurgencies in September of 1810 -insurgencies political leaders never controlled and struggled to contain. The merger of regime conflicts and popular risings destroyed silver had capitalism by 1812. The challenges that led to the regime break and the popular risings were separate, yet simultaneously. Their parallel development and eventual fusion made the revolution that broke New Spain.

The regime break came first. The years after 1790 had brought mounting challenges. Imperial wars (and revolution in Saint Domingue) drove rising demand for silver to fund trade and sustain imperial treasuries while wartime disruptions rattled production and trade (Marichal, 1999). Despite disruptions, New Spain’s silver rose to peak in 1809. Spanish revenue needs led to the Royal Consolidation of 1804-1808, calling in Church mortgages held by New Spain’s estate operators, who struggled to pay. Still, leading oligarchs were least affected, the powerful negotiated settlements, and the weakest paid most in negotiated outcomes that fueled worries and resentments yet inhibited overt resistance (Wobeser, 2003; Valle Pavón, 2012, 2016; Tutino, 2018b). During the same decades, drives for profit led to predatory pressures on producing communities in key regions, notably the Bajío basin lands that sustained Guanajuato, and the Mezquital close by Real del Monte. There were local conflicts, but again productive stability held to 1810 (Tutino, 2011, Part 2; 2018a, Ch. 4).

Everything began with Napoleon. Having lost Saint Domingue to Haitian revolutionary ex-slaves in 1804, depriving France of key overseas revenues, Napoleon invaded Iberia in 1807, imagining taking Portugal and the revenues of Brazil from his British foe. When the British transported the Portuguese monarchy to Rio de Janeiro, in 1808 he invaded his Spanish ally -dreaming of claiming New Spain’s silver still flowing toward historic peaks. As French troops captured Madrid in early May, Spain’s monarchs, Carlos IV and Fernando VII, father and son, accepted comfortable imprisonment in Bayonne. People and power holders across Spain rose in resistance -invoking traditional Spanish rights of the sovereignty of the pueblos. Without a legitimate monarch (and few accepted Joseph Bonaparte as legitimate), the pueblos -towns with councils- regained the sovereignty delegated by God and met in juntas to reject the intruder and restore legitimate rule. They were soon backed by guerrilla forces that rose to challenge French armies in key regions (Stein and Stein, 2014; Tone, 1995).

The news of the fall of the monarchy in Madrid and the rise of resistance across Spain came to Mexico City as June became July. Debates in the City Council seeking rights to join the reconstitution of sovereignty quickly engaged Viceroy don José de Iturrigaray. A summer of mobilization saw men in the halls of power, and men and women in the streets and plazas of the capital, debate rights and ways to popular sovereignty: did it belong to the pueblos of Spanish traditions, the people of English assertions, or the nation imagined by French revolutionaries. All saw the link to Madrid as broken; all honored Fernando VII as a monarch deprived of sovereignty; all pressed for autonomies to shape New Spain’s response in an uncertain interim (Tutino, 2018b).

As August became September, Iturrigaray, allies in the city council and regime offices, and leading members of the Mexico City financial, commercial, and landed oligarchy, moved to call a junta or congress of New Spain. It would exercise sovereignty and rule silver capitalism in times of imperial break and peninsular war, empowered to adapt to changing uncertainties -in the interest of New Spain.

Then on the night of September 15-16, 1808, military emissaries sent by the Seville Junta that claimed supremacy in Spain, mobilized armed power to capture and depose the Viceroy, blocking any move toward autonomy for New Spain. Peninsular justices on the Audiencia backed a coup implemented by a section of the Mexico City merchants’ militia led by don Gabriel José de Yermo, a struggling merchant and aspiring landlord who had lost property to the Consolidation. The city was occupied by forces drawn from the provinces, including troops from San Luis Potosí led by don Félix Calleja, and militias from Michoacán led by don Agustín Iturbide. A military coup toppled a legitimate viceroy to block implementation of the sovereignty of the pueblos -to ensure that New Spain’s silver continued to flow to Seville and the fight against Napoleon. Coup leaders insisted that the force that toppled the Viceroy and rattled regime legitimacy acted as “the people” (Tutino, 2018b; Ortiz Escamilla, 2019).

The summer of political mobilization in Mexico City opened debates that would persist to 1821, and long after. The September 1808 coup ended an opening to autonomy for New Spain in times of imperial uncertainty and kept silver flowing to Spain. Less noted yet more transforming, it began the militarization of regime power in New Spain, corroding the rule by judicial mediation long pivotal to the stability and prosperity of silver capitalism -thus of the empire. Beyond key ports and northern frontiers, military force was scarce in New Spain, mandating and facilitating rule by mediation. In 1808, armed power claimed the regime in Mexico City and tied it to armed powers in Spain. New Spain would never be the same: militarized governance in Mexico would be radically different from its judicially mediating and stabilizing imperial predecessor (Tutino, 2018b).

Those who had mobilized in the capital seeking ways toward popular sovereignty and supporting calls for a congress, acquiesced in the coup. They had no armed means to oppose its imposition, and the powerful knew that any attempt at resistance would open conflicts that would rattle the silver economy -their primary interest. So, everyone continued to honor the captured Fernando as silver continued to flow to Seville and its British backers. Still, that funding failed to halt the march of French forces toward Seville, which fell in 1810 -sending a regency to call for a new regime at Cádiz (Tutino, 2018b, Ch. 10-11). As the old regime broke, legitimacy became a subject of widening debate.

During the same two years from 1808 to 1810, social predations that had been developing for decades in key regions deepened. In the Bajío, rising rents and evictions mixed with falling wages to make life uncertain. In the Mezquital, scarce lands in an arid basin without compensating access to labor spread painful insecurities. Then, beginning in the summer of 1810, while calls for popular sovereignty resonated widely, drought destroyed crops in the basins around the capital, across the Bajío, and regions beyond. Sustenance became scarce and expensive, while landed capitalists, many having joined public calls for participations grounded in popular sovereignty, profiteered in scarce maize while producing men struggled to provide and families struggled to survive (Tutino, 2011, Ch. 7, Epilogue; 2018a, Ch. 4). Crises of regime power and popular survival intensified simultaneously from 1808 into 1810.

The failures of the Seville junta led to rising discontent among provincial elites in Michoacán in 1809, then in Querétaro in the summer of 1810. Meanwhile, desperation peaked among estate-dependent producers in Guanajuato, where profiteering in draught-driven scarcities layered onto decades of predations. Near the capital, in the northern basin of Mexico and across the Mezquital, villagers with limited arid lands and little access to labor at estates converted to pulque and now faced life-threatening predations driven by estate profiteering in time of drought (Tutino, 2018a, Ch. 4).

The summer of 1810 saw a confluence of crises, one political, the other of survival. Political discontent and debate focused in Querétaro, the key commercial center between the capital and the Guanajuato mines. Challenges to survival became most acute, or at least most resented, in the Guanajuato basin lands west of Querétaro, and in the dry Mezquital, close by the Real del Monte mines. As political provincials met in Querétaro to debate rights of participation and regional autonomy, they faced a sharp dilemma. Any challenge to the regime in Mexico City would bring a military response. Any call for a rising to confront that response would mobilize people angered by predations pressed by landed power holders -including many among those seeking political rights. Fear of provoking a popular rising prevented the Querétaro debaters (they were never conspirators) from calling a revolt -enabling Mexico City authorities to learn of the debates and to detain many participants (Herrejón, 2011).

Corregidor don Miguel Domínguez and his wife doña Josefa Ortiz had joined, at times hosted, Querétaro’s political debates. He acquiesced in the regime action; she sent the message that led don Ignacio Allende at San Miguel to join don Miguel Hidalgo in calling insurgency at Dolores on September 15-16, 1810 -exactly two years after the 1808 coup that militarized governance. The fears that stymied action at Querétaro proved true -immediately and massively. While a few provincial leaders joined the rising, backed by perhaps 1500 militiamen, within days tens of thousands of men from the countryside around Dolores, San Miguel, Celaya and beyond rose with machetes in hand. While leaders demanded political rights and targeted agents of Spanish power, insurgent throngs sacked estates, most owned and operated by American Spanish landed capitalists -often claiming crops they had planted but had no right to harvest to feed desperate families. The few fighting for political rights fueled hate against gachupines, aiming to deflect popular ire from landed men seen as potential political allies. As assaults on landed power spread despite anti-gachupín rhetoric, most landed provincials held back from the rising and Mexico City landed oligarchs mobilized to defend property and the regime (Tutino, in progress, Ch. 3).

From its explosive beginning, the Hidalgo revolt was defined by fundamental contradictions. Its angry throngs sacked Guanajuato, approached Mexico City through the Toluca basin (where it found little support in local indigenous republics), retreated to the Bajío, sacked Guanajuato again, then occupied Guadalajara -where it found a home for several weeks, to be defeated at Puente de Calderón in January of 1811 by troops and militias drawn from the north and led by don Félix Calleja. Hidalgo and Allende fled north, to be captured, tried and executed. Other political rebels including don José María Morelos and don Ignacio Rayón escaped to isolated regions where they carried on for years. The great mass of insurgents returned home to the Bajío, planted crops, then rose early in 1812 to claim the harvest, take the land for family production, and sustain guerrilla forces. Insurgent communities and guerrillas would rule rural Guanajuato for years -guaranteeing that mining could not revive. Silver production across New Spain in 1812 was half that of 1809-a level that held to 1820 and long after. Silver mining, the economic engine of New Spain, the primary support of Spain’s empire, and an essential stimulus to global trades, died in the conflicts of 1808-1812 (Tutino, 1998; forthcoming, Ch. 3-4; Herrejón, 2011; Granados, 2016).

So did the mediating regime that had stabilized the dynamic inequities that marked New Spain: the coup of 1808 militarized the heights of power; the risings of 1810 militarized political and popular resistance; the mobilization led by Calleja to defeat Hidalgo locked armed power at the foundation of a contested regime. That was plain for all to see when Calleja became Viceroy in 1813 -honored for the victory at Puente de Calderón, now recognized as essential to the survival of Spanish sovereignty (Ortíz Escamilla, 2013, 2017).

More than mining and the mediating regime broke from 1808 to 1812. Silver capitalism collapsed, too. That larger, globally linked system of finance and trade, mining and agriculture, not only broke -but did so in ways that blocked any revival. The key axis of silver capitalism tied New Spain’s silver to Chinese and South Asian textiles. The latter had led global cloth trades since the sixteenth century, purchased with silver drawn from New Spain that concentrated wealth, power, and capital in Mexico City. When New Spain’s silver exports fell by half from 1810 to 1812, and did not recover, Asian textile production and trades broke -just as rising production and exports of British industrial cottons surged into global markets. Indian cottons and British cottons held equal shares of global markets in 1810- as British merchants ruled trade in both. Without New Spain’s silver, Indian production and exports collapsed while British mills and merchants took control of global markets. China’s production and export of fine silks fell too -and soon British merchants were sending Indian opium to China, drugging too many Chinese, taking China’s historic stores of silver to fund British rule in India, ending centuries of Chinese economic and imperial eminence (Allen, 2009; Lin, 2006; Platt, 2018).

It is now clear that Indian dominance of global cotton trades and Chinese imperial eminence were tied to New Spain’s silver. When silver collapsed, so did Asian manufacturing and trades -breaking the axis that drive silver capitalism. The trades financed in Mexico City that accumulated the capital that funded silver mining and capitalist cultivation broke beyond revival or repair. By 1815, production, trade, and capital accumulation focused in England. As New Spain became Mexico, there was no capital ready and able to revive the mining and capitalist agriculture broken after 1810. The nation would search for a new economy for decades while its politics were destabilized by conflicts among militarized powers starved for revenues. Silver capitalism gone, the last years of New Spain saw militarized powers fighting to rule a future uncertain at best.

In 1812, no one in New Spain knew the global transformations then dissolving silver capitalism. They did know that mining had collapsed and that armed powers continued to contest power in Spain and governance, property, and social relations in New Spain. Then Cádiz liberalism offered new ways of rule that aimed to preserve restore Spanish rule in Spain and preserve it New Spain by backing military efforts with new rights and participations -while ending the mediating judicial rule that had defined New Spain and sustained silver capitalism. Contradictions proliferated.

The delegates that assembled in Cádiz claimed to represent Spain and its imperial domains. Yet most of Spain was held by Napoleon. Its cities and towns were “represented” by men exiled in Cádiz, while cities in New Spain and the Americas sent delegates chosen by local councils. Still, representation was designed to preserve peninsular priority, a goal implemented by recognizing only Hispanic cities and towns, denying representation to indigenous republics and their councils -a clear limit on the vaunted sovereignty of the pueblos. The Cortes that met at Cádiz did expand participations across the empire -and limited them, too. And new participations and new representations came in support of militarized powers engaged in military conflicts -the fight for independence from Napoleon in Spain and fights to preserve Spanish power across the empire. Cádiz offered new participations to support military powers fighting to revive an empire long dependent on the silver capitalism then collapsing in New Spain (Breña, 2013; Moreno Alonso, 2011; Tutino, 2016b).

The Cádiz project set off debates across an empire facing unprecedented challenges and deepening conflicts. Rights proclaimed liberal by the Constitution of 1812 were seen as liberating by some, limited by others, and assaultive by still others. Cádiz offered individual rights of citizenship, participation, and representation to men in the empire, Hispanic, indigenous, and mixed -while excluding those of African ancestry. The exclusion aimed to keep Cuba and its burgeoning sugar economy built on the labors of enslaved Africans in the empire; it thus curtailed the rights of New Spain’s mulattoes, pivotal producers from the Bajío north and along the coasts. Also divisive and potentially destructive in New Spain, the proclamation of individual rights to political participations ended the separate rule of indigenous councils and access to separate mediating indigenous justice -long key to stabilizing inequities across Spanish Mesoamerica (Guarisco, 2003; Tutino, 2018a, Ch. 4-5).

And Cádiz recognized only individual personal property, leaving Church holdings, oligarchs’ entailed patrimonies, and the corporate community lands of indigenous republics without clear sanction. The openings to political participations were implemented where the regime still ruled in New Spain. Amid armed conflicts in which the support of the Church, oligarchs, and indigenous republics was essential to loyalist forces, the threats to corporate properties and other rights (including justice) remained implicit and unimplemented. Still, the promises and inhibitions of Cádiz liberalism -proclaimed and partially implemented in 1813-14, abrogated to 1820, then revived under pressures from military forces mobilizing to fight in South America- guaranteed the persistence of militarized rule while challenging ways of governance and property rights that had long kept New Spain and Spain’s empire strong.

In many ways, Cádiz liberalism aimed to counter, perhaps conciliate, the political insurgents who carried on after the defeat of Hidalgo. It proved a difficult challenge. After all, Cádiz called for a union of European and American Spaniards, while political insurgents continued to inflame anti-gachupín sentiments. In August 1811, soon after Hidalgo’s execution far to the north, Rayón and key allies proclaimed a Junta Suprema de las Americas at Zitácuaro, denying recognition to the congress working at Cádiz.

Loyalists facing popular insurgents in the Bajío and the Mezquital waited until January 1812 to attack Zitácuaro, when Calleja left Guanajuato to oust the Junta -leaving it to carry on as a nomadic focus of political opposition, unable to hold key territories. Morelos led guerrilla forces that roamed southern and coastal zones, linked to the junta yet independent. His May 1812 defeat at the siege of Cuautla ensured that political insurgency would not challenge royalist power in the capital. In September, Rayón proposed Elementos Constitucionales, retaining loyalty to the captured Fernando VII while calling for “Independencia de la América.” Laden with contradiction, they were not proclaimed while popular insurgents continued to challenge property across the Bajío, the Mezquital, and beyond (Tutino, 2014).

By September 1813, the promises of Cádiz had resolved little in New Spain. Morelos then proclaimed his “Sentimientos de la Nación” at Chilpancingo -far from the power of Mexico City and the popular insurgents that still ruled much of the Bajío. He called for an America independent of Spain, and without Fernando. He promised to protect property -limiting any appeal to popular insurgents. Meanwhile, typhus spread across New Spain, killing perhaps 20,000 in the capital, 40,000 in surrounding regions (Molina del Villar, 2010). Arguably, the epidemic reinforced loyalists grounded in regime resources and popular insurgents sustained by local communities. Political insurgents without such bases saw support become uncertain and begin to wane.

1814 brought Fernando back to the throne in Spain and his abrogation of the Cádiz constitution written to sustain him. Caught between popular assaults on property in the Bajío and the Mezquital, and loyalist defenses led in the capital by Viceroy Calleja and in the Bajío by Iturbide, political insurgents continued to struggle (Hamnett, 1986; Van Young, 2001). In October, Morelos, Rayón, and others called for “la Libertad de la América Mexicana” in a new constitution proclaimed at Apatzingán -again, far from centers of power and production. No surge of support followed. Iturbide’s forces defeated, captured, and executed Morelos in 1815, leaving political insurgency to limp forward led by Vicente Guerrero, Morelos’ successor in Pacific lowlands (Tutino, 2014).

From 1814, the established regime pressed to rule New Spain, marked by militarization, constrained by the fall of silver capitalism, and surrounded by political debates propelled by Cádiz liberalism.

Popular insurgents attacking power and property were pivotal to taking down silver capitalism by 1812, and many kept fighting for years afterwards. Loyalists fought on to defend power and property. Political insurgents struggled in between, challenging the regime while defending property. The liberal Cádiz Constitution defended property, too -while challenging corporate community rights. During New Spain’s long war of 1810 to 1820, all the forces defending, seeking, or aiming to transform ways of regime power staunchly defended property. Popular insurgents did not rise everywhere, but where they did, they challenged property -not by programmatic visions, but by taking necessities of sustenance and survival, at first to meet desperate needs, over time to sustain resistance and forge new more autonomous communities. They proved the most enduring and impactful of insurgents, first breaking silver capitalism, then the agrarian capitalism that sustained it. In the efforts, they created new lives for themselves and many others struggling to survive across the countryside (this is the key focus of Tutino, in progress).

Napoleon and those who fought against him in Spain and New Spain broke mediating rule and militarized power in 1810. The combined challenges of political and popular insurgents broke silver capitalism from 1810 to 1812. Persistent popular insurgents that took down agrarian capitalism in the pivotal Bajío bottomlands, transforming rural life and production there and far beyond. If the regime break and the militarization of power transformed the possibilities of political rule, and the fall of silver capitalism undermined chances for wealth-seekers to create and keep capital, profits, and power, popular assaults on agrarian capitalism completed the collapse of silver capitalism -and led to new ways of independent life on the land, opening new possibilities for communities and cultures across the diverse countrysides that would become Mexico.

While political insurgencies waned after 1812, popular insurgencies held strong -in different ways in key regions long pivotal to New Spain’s power and prosperity. In other regions, producing communities remained at home, at work, and in peace- sustaining established powers and ways of production into the years of insurgency. Key examples are revealing.

From October 1810 into January 1811, Guadalajara and its surrounding countryside became the home of the Hidalgo revolt, an uneasy mix of political rebels seeking provincial participations and popular insurgents claiming sustenance however they could. The city had been the seat of an Audiencia since the sixteenth century, a center of mediating justice for New Spain’s northwest. The late eighteenth century brought a commercial boon linked to the rise of mines at nearby Bolaños, the creation of a Consulado giving corporate organization to local merchants, and the opening of Pacific trade via the port of San Blas. The consolidation of a provincial elite merging peninsular merchants and American landed entrepreneurs led to rising pressures on a countryside that mixed indigenous republics and estate communities. Resentments of political isolation led some elites to welcome Hidalgo, while others fled. A mix of community grievances and predations on estate dependents drove popular risings.

After Hidalgo’s defeat, local elites reassembled to claim power in the city, revive trade through San Blas (as access to Gulf ports and blocked), and stay loyal to the regime through the decade that followed. Meanwhile, rural communities around Lake Chapala and regions south, and dispersed groups elsewhere kept attacking property -earning labels as bandits while keeping popular pressures alive. Guadalajara, San Blas, and the route that linked them to trades to Panama, Manila, Sonora, and the Californias held peaceful, loyal, and prosperous. Guadalajara’s countryside saw persistent popular insurgencies that waned around 1815, yet continued to 1820 (Olveda, 2011).

A different mix of power and loyalty, insurgency and persistence marked the basins around Mexico City, the heartland of silver capitalism. In zones of fertile well-watered lands -temperate and maize (and wheat) growing from the Toluca basin to the Chalco plain, tropical and sugar producing south around Cuernavaca- pressures of population growth on community lands had been compensated by access to seasonal wage work at nearby estates, negotiated by communitybased labor captains, keeping community-based family lives sustainable past 1800. Pueblos around Toluca showed no interest in rising with Hidalgo when he arrived in the fall of 1810; most around Cuernavaca held aloof from Morelos when he came to Cuautla in 1810. Most heartland indigenous republics remained at peace and at work from 1810 to 1820 -a key to sustaining loyal power in Mexico City as silver capitalism collapsed.

The dry basins of the northern heartland faced greater challenges during the last years of silver capitalism, leading many to years of insurgency after 1810. The arid lands around Otumba and extending into the Mezquital lay between the capital and the mines at Real del Monte. Estates there raised maize where irrigational allowed, grazed hogs, and focused on making pulque to supply taverns in the capital and at the mines. The richest of oligarchs profited: the Conde de Regla who ruled mining at Real del Monte and his wife, Condesa de Jala, all but monopolized the provision of pulque to the capital. The turn to pulque in the eighteenth century served landed oligarchs well, generating profit while employing little labor. When population growth left the region’s Otomí communities short of land to sustain growing populations around 1800, conflicts escalated. In the wake of Hidalgo’s revolt, which passed just west, in 1811 Mezquital villagers turned to rebellion, attacking estates, taking produce and land, undermining commercial production, bringing mining to a halt at Real del Monte. Silver production and the revenues it generated plummeted, as did the earnings of key landed oligarchs -a challenge from below that began to wane in 1815, with full pacification delayed to 1816 (Tutino, 2018, Ch.4).

If Mexico City was the financial and commercial pivot of silver capitalism, and the surrounding basins mixing mines at Taxco and Real del Monte and commercial estates and indigenous republics everywhere, was its heartland -the Bajío was the productive engine of silver capitalism, with the mines of Guanajuato sustained by manufacturing at Querétaro, San Miguel, and other towns, all fed by capitalist estates worked by resident families without rights to land or self-rule. After centuries of dynamic stability, recent predations mixing evictions and wage cuts deepened in the face of draught and profiteering from 1808 to 1810 -driving the popular risings that began in September of 1810 and lasted into 1820. Yet insurgency was not everywhere. Peace and production held just east around Querétaro, where estate -dependent communities, more Otomí than mixed, had faced parallel predations- cushioned by informal community organizations. Most stayed at work, claiming gains in land use and wages too, while sustaining the regime (Tutino, forthcoming, Ch. 4 on Guanajuato; Ch. 5 on Querétaro).

Across the rural basins surrounding the Guanajuato mines, the richest estates in the kingdom saw tens of thousands rise with Hidalgo in 1810, then return home to rule rich irrigated bottomlands and nearby upland basins through 1818 -with final pacifications in 1820. Communities took over estates, claimed land for family production, and sustained guerrilla bands. The limited mining that continued at Guanajuato after 1812, was carried on by independent workers who gave small shares to mine owners, then sold ore to refiners -all sustained by the produce of insurgent communities. Mine workers and rural families claimed productive autonomies as silver capitalism fell (Tutino, 1998, and forthcoming, Ch. 3).

When rural pacification began in 1818, loyalist commanders learned that Bajío communities would only accept amnesties when guaranteed rights to cultivate lands they had claimed in insurgency and worked for most of a decade. They recognized proprietors’ rights and agreed to pay small rents if they were sanctioned to retain arms to “defend the king” -and the right to family production. Accepting landed property, they refused any persistence of agrarian capitalism. Notably, women emerged from the decade of insurgency as leading tenants in prosperous ranchero communities on estate lands. Pacification across rural Guanajuato -a recognition of insurgent transformations more than a loyalist victory- was not completed until the summer of 1820 (Tutino, 1998 and forthcoming).

Meanwhile, limited mining ruled by workers during a decade without investment in drainage and infrastructure, culminated in the flooding of the great Valenciana mine in 1820 just as rural Guanajuato communities consolidated family control of production. Silver output held below half the levels before 1810 (Romero Sotelo, 1997). Silver capitalism had drowned; the agrarian capitalism that once sustained it was gone. It might revive only with great capital investment, which was not available as the trades linking Europe, China, and India that had long driven and sustained silver capitalism collapsed after collapsed with the loss of silver after 1812 -enabling British industrial textiles made of US slave-grown cotton to rule global markets and trade (Lin, 2007; Parthasarathi, 2011; Tutino, 2016b). By 1820, the merchants of Mexico City no longer drew capital from global trades tied to China, India, and Africa; they could no longer send capital to fund mines now in need of costly drainage and reconstruction. Global silver capitalism and the agrarian capitalism that sustained it in the Bajío were gone by 1820, both brought down by adamant insurgents taking relief from predations the two capitalisms had forced upon them.

By 1820, the essential elements that made New Spain rich and powerful, stable and sustainable despite deep inequities, and pivotal to Spain’s empire and global trade, were gone. The regime of mediating justice broke in the coup of 1808. Military power deepened and consolidated in the decade of conflicts beginning in 1810. The insurgencies that exploded that year broke silver capitalism, the agrarian capitalism that sustained it, and everything they sustained. In 1812, Cádiz liberalism promised individual electoral rights to all men (but mulattoes), while challenging corporate rights: entails for oligarchs, Church properties, and the community domains of indigenous republics -all to sustain military powers. After Fernando’s return in 1814, political insurgency waned while popular insurgents fought on and nothing could revive silver capitalism.

Amid the pacifications of 1820, a political jolt arrived from Spain. As the year began, the leaders of military forces assembling to sail to defend the empire in South America, refused to embark unless Fernando restored the Cádiz Constitution. Officers led by Colonel Rafael Riego pressed the demand, making clear, again, the link between military power and liberal political promises (Stites, 2014). By March, the empire revived the constitution. Yet Spanish liberalism had changed since 1814; no longer needing popular backing to fight Napoleon, peninsular liberals became increasingly anticlerical -while the regime pacifying New Spain kept commitments to Catholicism and the Church (Breña, 2013).

On receipt of the news, deep divisions revived among men seeking to re-establish power and silver capitalism in New Spain. Many among the once powerful and recently pummeled aimed to keep established ways backed by armed power. Many seeking new possibilities welcomed the new liberalism. Traditionalists gathered at la Profesa, once a Jesuit church, calling on Viceroy Apodaca to reject the constitution and recruiting Iturbide to gather military forces to back their program. Meanwhile, Iturbide -removed from the field in 1816 in response to his fame for brutality against insurgents and profiteering with funding for mining and military operations- regained a command, assigned to pursue Vicente Guerrero and the political rebels still in Pacific lowlands. They opened negotiations that led to the Plan de Iguala in February 1821 -uniting loyalist and insurgent commanders in a call for a Mexican monarchy with a constitution appropriate to Mexican realities. Both opposed the return to Cádiz -for different reasons: Iturbide mobilized struggling oligarchs and high Church officials against liberal threats to corporate property and clerical precedence; Guerrero, a mulatto leading mulattos, could not abide Cádiz’ denial of citizenship to people of African ancestry. Armed forces long opposed to each other forged an alliance against Cádiz while claiming loyalty to Fernando -making Iguala, too, a movement laden with contradictions (Arenal Fenocchio, 2002; Olveda, 2011; Moreno Gutiérrez, 2016).

Addressed to the don Juan Ruíz de Apodaca, Conde de Venadito, Viceroy of New Spain, the Plan called for a Junta Suprema de América Septentrional to found an Imperio Mexicano. The first article protected Catholicism and the Church; the second declared New Spain independent of Spain; the third mandated a monarchy moderated by a constitution appropriate to Mexico; the fourth offered the throne to Fernando, or another Spanish Bourbon. The text went on to guarantee rights to all, regardless of origins -key to Guerrero’s support. It guaranteed the persons and properties of all citizens -leaving the status of indigenous republics and their corporate holdings unprotected. It guaranteed the separate judicial rights of the clergy, essential to Iturbide’s clerical backers. And it declared the Army protector of three essential guarantees: the institutional and religious monopoly of the Church (again); independence (while offering the throne to Fernando); and the “unión íntima de Americanos y Europeos” -seeking to revive the ties between immigrant merchants and American oligarchs that had long driven silver capitalism (Plan de Iguala, 1821). Yet silver capitalism was broken, while Spanish immigrants, proclaimed hated gachupines by political insurgents, had become a focus of anger aiming to deflect popular assaults on the landed properties of American Spaniards. Contradiction layered on contradiction.

The Iguala Plan, backed by a union of armed forces unchallenged in political primacy, offered dreams marked by contradictions in times social pacification, political uncertainty, and economic collapse. Iturbide took the capital in the summer of 1821, negotiating the Treaty of Córdoba to confirm the break with Spain. Fernando soon rejected the Mexican throne, and Iturbide emerged emperor by default (or plan?). Iturbide and the Iguala alliance imagined reviving New Spain and silver capitalism. But silver capitalism was gone, along with mediating regime broken by the military powers Iturbide led. Behind a promise of unity and dreams of prosperity -Iguala led to impossibilities. Insurgent-driven transformations had broken New Spain before Iguala cut ties with Spain. Mexico’s future was uncertain (Tutino, forthcoming).

Iguala and 1821 marked the beginnings of a search for a nation marked by contradictions and conflicts. The monarchy mandated by Iguala carried the name of New Spain’s long dominant capital city: Mexico. Those struggling to revive powers once concentrated there were honored.

Could the name comfort those who had pursued provincial autonomies since 1810 or draw the allegiance of people focused on family production, community rights, and local religious cultures? The latter generally stayed home, focused on family, community, and local cultures. Provincial interests seeking republican rights soon mobilized military power led by Veracruz-based Antonio López de Santa Anna to topple the monarchy and send Iturbide to exile (Ávila, 2005).

Silver capitalism and the economy it powered were gone. The Spanish empire that had mediated and stabilized social, cultural, and legal diversities was gone. Iturbide’s empire had fallen, leaving mounting debts -and scarce revenues on the horizon. Another contradiction became clear: without silver capitalism, regime revenues were half those of 1800 to 1809 -while the military remained entrenched and empowered, and had to be paid (Ward, 1828, I, 360-408; Hernández Jaimes, 2013). The transition to federalism still underway, the founders of the Federal Republic turned to British capital to repair a broken treasury while mine owners recruited British partners, seeking British capital to revive silver production.

Henry Ward, on the scene in Mexico City and key mining centers from 1825 through 1827, detailed how British capital provided but a brief and costly respite for regime finances -and failed to revive Mexico’s mines. He saw the corrosion of shafts and tunnels after a decade of scavenging without investment in infrastructure. He knew the flooding that had turned the great Valenciana and other mines Guanajuato into wells that required expensive new drainage. He and British investors learned that the vaunted pumps of industrial Britain were of little use in regions long stripped of timber -and without coal. And they learned that local mine operators’ long emphasis on building adits, long tunnels to drain mines from below, was more effective -but costly and time consuming in the face of current challenges.

And seeing a long, costly, and uncertain process of revival, Ward recognized that capital raised in London would not easily lead to success. That capital was recruited to pay regular earnings to Mexican mine operators, the Reglas at Real del Monte, the Obregón’s of Valenciana, and more, who entered into joint ventures. British investors contracted expecting regular dividends. Such immediate and regular payments cut into the capital available for the long and expensive process of renovation. And British contract capital lacked the fluidity (emphasized by Ward as characteristic of New Spain’s merchant financiers) to surmount challenges of unknown length and risk. By 1828 when Ward wrote, it was clear that ventures funded by British capital had yet to raise output and failed to generate profits or dividends (Ward, 1828, II, pp. 3-164).

The underlying problem, which Ward described in detail, but would not recognize, was the collapse of silver capitalism and its integration of trade, capital accumulation, and mining investment. New Spain’s silver had fueled global trades in Chinese silks and Indian cottons, extracting capital that was invested in multiple mines over long years, limiting risks while sustaining steady silver flows -and periodically leading to renowned bonanzas (see Brading, 1973; complemented by Yuste, 2007). With silver capitalism gone, British capital was not structured with the fluidity to surmount the risks and uncertainties of mining over the long term -and terms were longer after revolutionary era destructions, which Ward emphasized. What he saw and could not say was that the primary interest of British capital was the monopolization of global textile markets. That shift was well underway in the 1820s, and neither Ward nor British investors could imagine slowing that process. He emphasized that Mexican textile manufacturing had to end, no matter how many workers and families were displaced. The goal of reviving Mexican silver was to pay for textile imports from Britain. It would cease to be the engine of a globally dynamic silver capitalism and become a branch of a British-centered industrial capitalism. Yet without the capital generated by silver capitalism, revival as an appendage of industrial Britain was not to be.

Through the 1820s, 30s, and beyond, British cloth rose to dominate global markets, driving plantations raising cotton with enslaved hands across the U.S. South (Findlay and O’Rourke, 2007; Baptist, 2014; Beckert, 2014). In Mexico, communities consolidated on the land in the 1820s, while regime builders struggled without revenues, and profit-seekers dreamed of a silver revival and new economic ways. In the 1830s, mining still depressed (except at Zacatecas), Lucas Alamán (who had participated in British mining ventures in the 1820s) turned to promote state-backed investment in Mexican mechanized textile factories -only to see Anglo-Texans secede from Mexico to protect their rule of cotton and slavery, taking the great potential source of cotton in Mexico into the orbit of the expanding United States. Mexican industrial textiles took off in the 1840s, just as mining began a slow revival -only to face the U.S. invasion that took Texas and all of Mexico’s north including California into the imperial nation mixing industry and slavery. All the while, Mexican communities, former indigenous republics in the center and south, often tenants on estate lands in the Bajío and regions north, held strong (Tutino, 2018a, Ch. 6; Van Young, 2021; Tutino, forthcoming).

The revolution that wracked New Spain from 1808 to 1820 broke silver capitalism and the mediating regime that had sustained it. In 1821, military powers forged in that revolution broke with Spain in an attempt to revive silver capitalism. The revival proved impossible, even with the turn to British capital -as that capital and its Anglo-American slave-owning allies were committed to a very different new world. Mexican regime builders and profit seekers would struggle for decades to find new ways to power. When they did after 1870, they pressed new predations on producing communities, this time most destructive in the southern heartland, provoking a Mexican revolution (Tutino, 2018a, Part 2).