This innovative and provocative volume focuses on the historical development of racial thinking and imagining in Mexico and the southwestern United States over a period of almost five centuries, from the earliest decades of Spanish colonial rule and the birth of a multiracial colonial population, to the present. The distinguished contributors to the volume bring into dialogue sophisticated new scholarship from an impressive range of disciplines, including social and cultural history, art history, legal studies, and performance art. The essays provide an engaging and original framework for understanding the development of racial thinking and classification in the region that was once New Spain and also shed new light on the history of the shifting ties between Mexico and the United States and the transnational condition of Latinos in the US today.

Honorable Mention, Bolton Memorial Prize, Conference on Latin American History A government monopoly provides an excellent case study of state-society relationships. This is especially true of the tobacco monopoly in colonial Mexico, whose revenues in the later half of the eighteenth century were second only to the silver tithe as the most valuable source of government income. This comprehensive study of the tobacco monopoly illuminates many of the most important themes of eighteenth-century Mexican social and economic history, from issues of economic growth and the supply of agricultural credit to rural relations, labor markets, urban protest and urban workers, class formation, work discipline, and late colonial political culture. Drawing on exhaustive research of previously unused archival sources, Susan Deans-Smith examines a wide range of new questions. Who were the bureaucrats who managed this colonial state enterprise and what policies did they adopt to develop it? How profitable were the tobacco manufactories, and how rational was their organization? What impact did the reorganization of the tobacco trade have upon those people it affected most-the tobacco planters and tobacco workers? This research uncovers much that was not previously known about the Bourbon government's management of the tobacco monopoly and the problems and limitations it faced. Deans-Smith finds that there was as much continuity as change after the monopoly's establishment, and that the popular response was characterized by accommodation, as well as defiance and resistance. She argues that the problems experienced by the monopoly at the beginning of the nineteenth century did not originate from any simmering, entrenched opposition. Rather, an emphasis upon political stability and short-term profits prevented any innovative reforms that might have improved the monopoly's long-term performance and productivity. With detailed quantitative data and rare material on the urban working poor of colonial Mexico, Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers will be important reading for all students of social, economic, and labor history, especially of Mexico and Latin America.

This innovative and provocative volume focuses on the historical development of racial thinking and imagining in Mexico and the southwestern United States over a period of almost five centuries, from the earliest decades of Spanish colonial rule and the birth of a multiracial colonial population, to the present. The distinguished contributors to the volume bring into dialogue sophisticated new scholarship from an impressive range of disciplines, including social and cultural history, art history, legal studies, and performance art. The essays provide an engaging and original framework for understanding the development of racial thinking and classification in the region that was once New Spain and also shed new light on the history of the shifting ties between Mexico and the United States and the transnational condition of Latinos in the US today.

David Brading is one of the foremost historians of Latin America in the United Kingdom. The essays in this volume convey the enduring nature of many of the questions raised by his work. They reflect the wide range of his interests: from Mexican Baroque and post-Tridentine Catholicism to studies of the dynamics of state building in nineteenth- century Mexico and of the problem of Mexican national identity. The contributions represent a wide chronological spread from the late seventeenth century to the twentieth century, as well as geographical diversity (Mexico City, Queretaro, and Puebla). Part I comprises an autobiographical essay by David Brading, an appreciation of him by Enrique Florescano, and an historiographical assessment of Brading's work by Eric Van Young. Part II gathers together six essays by former students (Susan Deans-Smith and Ellen Gunnarsdottir) and colleagues (Brian Hamnett, Marta Garcia Urgarte, Guy Thomson, and Alan Knight). David A. Brading recently retired from a chair in history at the University of Cambridge, UK where he directed the Latin American Centre. He is the author of dozens of articles and a number of widely praised volumes, including The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge University Press, 1991).