As with his prior work, historian John Tutino favors the longue durée in his most recent book, The Mexican Heartland. The book focuses on the basins surrounding Mexico City, the area he calls the heartland, emphasizing how its communities helped to sustain global capitalism while also struggling to maintain their autonomy over half a millennium, beginning around 1500. Tutino derives inspiration from a familiar set of scholars, among them Barrington Moore, James Scott, Eric Wolf, Immanuel Wallerstein, and above all the Annales theorist Fernand Braudel. He also draws from a primary source base that includes estate records, anthropological reports, personal papers of rural notables, and statistical data. Those statistics are replicated in an appendix for the quantitatively inclined. The book is divided into three parts, each organized around a distinct phase of capitalist development.

The first part concerns what he calls silver capitalism, which predominated throughout most of the Spanish colonial era and situated Mexico at the center of a world economy that demanded more and more of the precious mineral. Tutino asserts that the twin forces of patriarchy and symbiotic exploitation—the latter signifying the mutual dependency of the repúblicas de indios and estate owners—kept the countryside pacified. In this arrangement, owners could rely on a steady labor supply, while indigenous villagers were assured the means of subsistence and some guarantee of autonomy. Focusing on the arid Mezquital, Tutino demonstrates how the absence of symbiotic exploitation in that region threatened village autonomy and patriarchal family structures, leading to insurgencies that contributed to national independence.

The second part deals with Mexico's place in the era of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. As Tutino demonstrates, the collapse of the silver economy in some ways eased pressures on rural villages. He devotes a full chapter to ways in which the relative fortunes of ordinary people increased in this time of deprivation in the Chalco region. The most enjoyable part of the chapter is its four biographical sketches—of a pair of priests, one too entrepreneurial to carry out his clerical duties, the other too disdainful of the indigenous to function in his community, along with a European diplomat's wife who became unexpectedly enchanted with the everyday lives of humble people, and a liberal intellectual who wrote a smash serial based on a band of powerful female folk healers. Each represented a social inversion favoring nonelites. But by the end decades of the century, a concentration of negative forces—privatization and concentration of land, spurred by liberal reforms and accelerated by Porfirian development schemes; rapid population growth; labor-saving mechanization of agricultural production; and intracommunity social violence—dealt a heavy blow to native autonomy. Once again, when symbiotic exploitation declined, village autonomy and patriarchal norms were undone, and people lashed out. A hundred years after independence, that process came in the form of the explosive 1910 revolution.

The third part surveys what came in the wake of that revolution: the era of national capitalism. After a brief and incomplete flurry of land redistribution and other efforts carried out in the spirit of the revolution in the 1920s and 1930s, Mexico embarked on a process of state-led development characterized by the twin processes of rapid industrialization and agricultural mechanization. These processes were corrosive enough to indigenous autonomy, but, as Tutino demonstrates, by far the most disruptive process was rapid mass urbanization. Primary sources—in this case, life stories gathered by anthropologists Oscar Lewis, Arturo Warman, Lola Romanucci-Ross, Robert Redfield, and Guillermo de la Peña—breathe life into the narrative. Their stories demonstrate that in the transition from village to city life, the struggle to retain autonomy was monumental.

In a brief and rather grim epilogue, Tutino asserts that autonomy, a salient feature of heartland community life for centuries, collapsed under the weight of economic crisis, total globalization, and insufficient political reform (namely the superficial process of “democratization”) in the 1980s and 1990s. His points are not new and are largely shared by scholars of Mexico, but they also do not enjoy the benefit of historical distance that each of his other eras provides. Thus, the epilogue gives the narrative something of a teleological arc, as if a five-hundred-year effort to sustain indigenous autonomy was somehow destined to fall apart in just the last few decades.

This is an expansive work of synthesis, with the balance of positive and negative features that tends to come with similar efforts. If the book has one fault in its substance, it is that it does not offer enough of a definition of autonomy, especially since the meaning of that idea most likely changed over time. What autonomy meant in the colonial scheme of separate republics, the nineteenth-century system of indigenous corporate land, or the twentieth-century reality of suburban sprawl deserves clarification.

The book's intricacy is impressive, and it will serve as an invaluable reference for later scholars. It can also make for a dense and sometimes tedious read. Moreover, the book spends too much time covering known territory. The detailed background information on the nation's political development will be familiar to specialists in Mexico and irrelevant to the few nonspecialists who will plow through this substantial work. Considering this, the book could have been trimmed by a third. The bibliography also contains far too many partial citations. For a work of such ambition and depth, the number of endnotes with no page numbers, as well as the sometimes meandering and repetitive text, suggests a lack of editorial discipline.

These problems matter—they will most likely minimize the incentive for some to work through this challenging book—but they do not subtract from its merit as an important contribution to our understanding of Mexican history, nor do they undermine its central premise: that the local feeds the global, and the global in turn shapes the local, the two reinforcing each other in a cycle that seems to have no end.