Porfirio Diaz is a new biography of the controversial Mexican dictator who was toppled by the 1910 Revolution.

The fall of Porfirio Diaz has traditionally been presented as a watershed between old and new: an old style repressive and conservative government, and the more democratic and representative system that flowered in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Paul Garner looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the Diaz regime from two very different perspectives: that of the nineteenth century, and of the twentieth century.

The fall of Porfirio Diaz has traditionally been presented as a watershed between old and new: an old style repressive and conservative government, and the more democratic and representative system that flowered in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Now this view is being challenged by a new generation of historians, who point out that Diaz originally rose to power in alliance with anti-conservative forces and was a modernising force as well as a dictator. Drawing together the threads of this revisionist reading of the Porfiriato, Garner reassesses a political career that spanned more than forty years, and examines the claims that post-revolutionary Mexico was not the break with the past that the revolutionary inheritors claimed.

Between 1889 and 1919, Weetman Pearson became one of the world's most important engineering contractors, a pioneer in the international oil industry, and one of Britain's wealthiest men. At the center of his global business empire were his interests in Mexico.
While Pearson's extraordinary success in Mexico took place within the context of unprecedented levels of British trade with and investment in Latin America, Garner argues that Pearson should be understood less as an agent of British imperialism than as an agent of Porfirian state building and modernization. Pearson was able to secure contracts for some of nineteenth-century Mexico's most important public works projects in large part because of his reliability, his empathy with the developmentalist project of Mexican President Porfirio Diaz, and his assiduous cultivation of a clientelist network within the Mexican political elite. His success thus provides an opportunity to reappraise the role played by overseas interests in the national development of Mexico.

This book explores the impact of globalisation, economic policies, war and violence, trade and reproductive ideologies on global health and health services. It offers examples, both successful and unsuccessful, of international co-operative efforts to address these multiple issues, citing international collaboration of health professional organisations such as Jubilee 2000. It questions the efficacy, ideology and scope of several of the leading players, such as WHO, World Bank and many NGOs that are trying to address these issues, as well as pointing out the emergence of international organisations whose activities harm health, such as arms and tobacco traders. International Co-operation and Health focuses on those public health issues that cross national boundaries. In order to put effective policy into place, considerable international co- operation is necessary. It is primarily about international collaboration to promote health of the world's population. This book looks at the how international collaboration can and does help to tackle current and emerging public health problems. It covers issues such as emerging and re-emerging infectious disease; health consequences of global environment change; trade, public health and food; war: from humanitarian relief to prevention; the global tobacco epidemic; migration, equity and health and international co-operation for reproductive health. The overall thrust is to suggest that health professionals are uniquely placed to help develop organisations and policies, which by capitalising on their good track record on international co-operation, they would be in a relatively strong position to implement to the benefit of global health. The book is directed at a broad group of health policy makers and (public) health professionals internationally, especially those working in NGOs and international organisations but also those interested in the impact of global issues in their own country. This is an area of great interest and importance. It is seen as a priority area for a number of international bodies e.g. WHO. The contributors are of international standing. There is no book on the market, which addresses the issues as proposed in this book. Professor Martin McKee is chief editor of the European Journal of Public Health (OUP).

The twin focus of this book is on the importance of the Spanish heritage on nation and state building in nineteenth-century Spanish-speaking Latin America, alongside processes of nation and state building in Spain and Latin America. Rather than concentrating purely on nationalism and national identity, the book explores the linkages that remained or were re-established between Spain and her former colonies; as has increasingly been recognised in recent decades, the nineteenth century world was marked by the rise of the modern nation state, but also by the development of new transnational connections, and this book accounts for these processes within a Hispanic context.