Ted Beatty is already well known for his meticulous research and publications on the gradual process of economic modernization in Mexico, particularly in the years of economic takeoff during the era known as the “Porfiriato” in Mexican historiography. This was the age when General Porfirio Díaz governed Mexico with an iron fist (1876–1910), assisted by a formidable army and a loyal Congress of well-paid deputies and senators in Mexico City, as well as by similarly loyal legislatures in the 20 states of the federal republic. There is still considerable debate among historians as to whether the government was truly responsible for spurring economic development or whether new enterprise and technology were the driving engines of growth. Beatty comes down firmly in favor of the second.

This new book by Professor Beatty is actually a sequel of his previous and original work on institutions in Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just before the outbreak of the Mexican revolution in 1910, which actually proved to be a major roadblock to the economic expansion already under way. This new book focuses explicitly on the introduction of modern technology into Mexico, particularly in industry, with case studies of the textile, beer, and mining sectors. The main thrust of the research is to identify specific, technological inputs that contributed to increases in productivity, both at a local and micro-enterprise level as well as in large industrial undertakings.

The first chapter of the book is an introduction which deals in general terms with the challenges confronted by Mexico in the process of “late development.” There then follow three sections to the volume. In the second chapter, the author provides what he calls a narrative summary of economic development and technology in nineteenth century Mexico. The focus is on the period following independence (1820–1870) in which Beatty offers a schematic view of why Mexico simply did not progress much in this half century. He provides evidence of low imports of iron and steel manufactures which serve as a proxy of overall imports of modern technology. He also underlines the limitations of the traditional energy paradigm of the Mexican economy, based on human and animal labor, wood for ovens, and generally inadequate waterfalls, which only allowed for small mills. The limits of these weak technological and energy foundations were complemented by a most traditional and inefficient transport system, based essentially on mules, which only allowed for slow transport of relatively small quantities of goods and slow integration of regional markets.

While these arguments are generally valid, Beatty does not consider it necessary to mention the immense literature on the Mexican economy during the colonial era, particularly in the late eighteenth century when Mexico was, in many regards, the richest economy in the Americas. It is also rather curious that he pays virtually no attention to the historiography on the burgeoning textile factories of Mexico in the 1830s and 1840s which have been very well studied by local and foreign scholars. Mexico was in those years at the forefront of early industrialization in Latin America, and a not inconsiderable amount of modern textile machinery was imported from abroad, particularly from England. Why this early industrial takeoff later sputtered and did not progress rapidly has not yet been conclusively explained, although it is at the center of much debate currently among Mexican economic historians, but there is no evidence of this in Beatty's book.

The reason may be his insistence on the importance of the introduction into Mexico of machinery in the late nineteenth century, which was much more voluminous and essential to early industrialization in several fields: not only textiles but also beer, glass, and iron and steel enterprises began then to expand fairly rapidly. So did manufacturing sectors linked to urban construction, railroads, and infrastructure. In this section, Beatty does cite much of the relevant literature, and adds his own new research in the second part of his book. Here he provides a workmanlike and detailed description of the impact of sewing engines in local manufacturing as well as home textile production. As he notes “By 1910 sewing machines could be found virtually everywhere in Mexico: in garment factories, in the shops of seamstresses and tailors, and in the homes of Mexicans at nearly all levels of society” (p. 99). There follows a chapter on beer and glass bottle industries, which also developed after 1890, but it is rather remarkable that little attention is paid to the path breaking work of the most prolific economic historian of Mexico, Mario Cerutti, who has studied in depth the trajectory of Juan Brittingham, who is the main figure in this chapter. This fault seems striking in a research project headed by Beatty which he affirms received very generous financing and involved at least a dozen assistants.

There follows a more original chapter on the mining industry which pays special attention to the introduction of new technology in silver mining, particularly the use of cyanide for processing and refining. Here initial resistance to technology was quite quickly overcome and by 1910 the Mexican sector was “a technological leader in the global adaptation of cyanide to silver ores” (p. 151). By that time there were some 112 cyanide-using refineries in the country with a total capacity of twenty-five thousand tons of ore per day.

The third and last part of Beatty's book provides the theoretical guidelines and conclusions of his research. Here the real punch line is that while Mexico imported increasing amounts of machinery and capital equipment, Mexicans were themselves generally weak at adaptation of the new technology and in development of research and innovation, a fact that is evidenced by the low level of new patents registered locally in the period under study. In contemporary economic history it is a generally accepted fact that the productivity of modern economies stems largely from technological innovation. But Beatty argues that it is not only the capacity to invent that is crucial but also the capacity to learn sufficiently about new technology and adapt it to the conditions of local enterprise. When technical educations at a very basic level are deficient, the obstacles to innovation become great indeed. He argues that this is precisely what happened in Porfirian Mexico and that it continued to occur in the early twentieth century. This hypothesis would seem to be applicable to other peripheral but expanding economies in the world at that time which industrialized slowly, and this makes Beatty's case studies relevant for comparative industrial and economic history.

The arguments advanced in this book are generally convincing and the research is based on multiple archives and a broad, if incomplete bibliography. The main hypotheses are quite original but leave the reader curiously unsatisfied. There is no doubt that that the inadequacy of technical education was one of the key conditions that determined slow economic progress in Mexico in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries. But, one may ask, what happened after 1940 when the modern industrial age flowered in this country? The industrial expansion was based largely on the manufacturing capacity already installed in the previous decades covered by Beatty. What happened after 1940? Did Mexicans learn to adapt technology better? Did they innovate more? Imports of new machinery remained relatively low until the late 1950s but the economy boomed and was able to respond both to rapid urbanization and to the extraordinary population boom, as total production and per capita income rose steadily. Here machinery clearly played a key role, but it was certainly not the only factor. The technology introduced from the late 1890s had become a mainstay of the Mexican economy and society, and Mexicans had clearly learned how to adapt it to multiply manufacturing firms, and to build roads, cities, dams and irrigation projects, schools, hospitals, and the infrastructure which characterizes modern society. The learning process was slow and inefficient but it took place. One would hope that in the future Beatty can address his talents in the history of economy and technology to help answer these questions of a later age and help understand the golden age of industrialization and modernization in Mexico which took place after 1940 and ran on into the early 1970s.