The topological metaphor of Jonathan D. Amith's cryptic title suggests his ambitious goal of carrying out a total study of his chosen region in colonial Mexico. Rather than pursing any one path of analysis in isolation from others, he promises to keep all possible factors in conversation, all cast within a spatial analytical framework. The author's ability to keep so many themes in focus and to scale up and down, from an impoverished indigenous mule-skinner plying the parched roads of southwestern Mexico to the courts of kings, the worldwide price of sugar, or the moral implications of property rights, is dazzling.

Built on an extraordinary knowledge of relevant theoretical and historical literatures and an astounding level of archival documentation, the book illuminates three centuries of economic, administrative, and demographic development. As he traces the interconnected histories of the Guerrero region from first conquest to independence, Amith engages with particular debates and proposes stimulating and often iconoclastic interpretations. He critiques the dominance of the city in most paradigms for understanding urban-rural interactions, and he proposes an inverted model in which the rural dominates and out-maneuvers the urban, at least for a time. He explores standard categories of class, caste, and ethnicity, and demonstrates their instability, their complex blurring, redefinition, and deployment by particular actors. His close studies of particular commodities allow him to draw distinctions between European and New World production and distribution. For instance, the centrality of maize as opposed to wheat imposed different kinds of movement between producer and consumer and created a very different set of constraints on the state's ability to intervene, control, and tax. Amith argues that the direct exchange possible with maize, in combination with the Spanish alcabala taxation system, favored the primary producer, and allowed the agrarian sphere to exercise more economic clout than one might expect in an imperial structure so geared toward silver extraction.

Several analytical lines run through the book. Most compelling is the way that the intellectual-legal concepts of rights and property developed in Europe operated in the New World setting. The book traces two competing visions: a paternalistic one that dictated active control of and interference in the market in basic foodstuffs in order to guarantee subsistence to all, and a laissez-faire idea of absolute, individual rights of ownership. The push and pull between these two positions explains much of the dynamic of economic development traced in the book and underlies many of its most interesting arguments, particularly as it examines the spatial implications of these two contending legal philosophies.

In places, the spatial thread Amith tries to weave through the entire study proves marvelously revealing. For instance, in an effort to turn the protections of the moral economy to its own advantage by guaranteeing low prices and a secure supply of maize, the urban mining center of Taxco attempted to absorb the agrarian region to its south into its jurisdiction, thus redefining the “locality” within which protective controls on the exchange of provisions would apply. The chapter on “Place Making and Place Breaking” delves into the meanings poured into spaces by their inhabitants and claimants.

Elsewhere, however, space seems a less incisive category of analysis than its frequent invocation would suggest. For example, the large-scale movements of population that the early chapters document, while unarguably transpiring across space, reflected the environmental, economic, and political possibilities of one place over another, rather than any notions of space itself. In fact, on many occasions space seems to work as the dependent variable, with its meanings and uses responding to other predictive factors examined so well in the book: class and caste, moral visions, disease and destruction, environment and climate, technologies of production and transportation, world markets and commodity exchanges. Space offers enormous promise as a theoretical point of entrance and novel mode of analysis, but keeping its promise on track proves inordinately difficult. Amith succeeds marvelously in fulfilling much of the ambition of the book, and if the focus on space occasionally blurs, that seems forgivable in pursuit of a grand goal.