Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675-1820

This classic history of the Mexican hacienda from the colonial period through the nineteenth century has been reissued in a silver anniversary edition complete with a substantive new introduction and foreword. Eric Van Young explores 150 years of Mexico's economic and rural development, a period when one of history's great empires was trying to extract more resources from its most important colony, and when an arguably capitalist economy was both expanding and taking deeper root. The author explains the development of a regional agrarian system, centered on the landed estates of late colonial Mexico, the central economic and social institution of an overwhelmingly rural society. By highlighting the way haciendas worked and changed over time, this indispensable study illuminates Mexico's economic and social history, the movement for independence, and the origins of the Mexican Revolution.

Eric Van Young is professor of Latin American history at the University of California, San Diego