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.

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.