The main difficulty of commenting on John Tutino's Making a New World lies in his own words: ‘I never planned to write this book’ (p. 493). What, then, was the motivation? Three possible explanations come to mind: first, for professional survival and as an intellectual effort to reposition economic and social history within the context of current academic interests, dominated by a ‘gelatinous’ cultural history and the retelling of old narratives dressed up in new intellectual clothes, as with the prism of globalisation; second, methodological concerns, born of Tutino's study of longue durée macro-spatial processes such as the history of social movements and politics in Mexico; and, third, as an intellectual provocation to the dominant forms of thinking, to Eurocentric approaches to historical overviews of modernity. As I regard the latter as the author's implicit purpose, I shall concentrate on those themes and debates in the book.

The first issue relates to the scope of the interpretation: how to incorporate the processes of the coming together, growth and rupture of American societies within a global scale? The aim is not new: the evangelical winning of souls in the sixteenth century had the same dilemma at its source, and the construction of a politics of economic utility by the Spanish crown reinforced the process, along with the subjection of these complex societies to a process of conquest and cultural intermingling in the unexpected construction of a new world. So, what else is new? Or in Tutino's terms, what unimagined coincidence made it possible and by means of which social institutions was an economically, demographically and culturally fragmented society reconstituted? An observation of this nature requires a broad overview encompassing long historical cycles. Here, the author puts forward the period from 1550 to 1770 and subsequently on to the ‘revolution of Hidalgo’. He considers, additionally, the cultural synchronicity of the socio-ethnic actors caught up in the construction of that society: Europeans of the Renaissance period, the post-classic Otomi people, African migrants moulded by the discipline of forced labour, the Oriental/Filipinos of Ming China (1368–1644), and the Chichimecas, as ‘untethered dogs’, in perpetual resistance to the civilising tempo of others. Tutino puts forward a model of integration in which adaptive forms and pacts of coexistence are erected on structures of patriarchal, hierarchical and political domination, through the collective action of social mediators and the inclusive and legitimising power of religious beliefs.

A second subject relates to the spatial constitution of a local/regional economy capable of resolving the conflict of diversity, ethnic complexity and the different cultural horizons as regards property, work regimes and production technologies, without ignoring issues of distribution: inequality and the polarisation of wealth and power. And so, the long formation of that mishmash of economic cultures that differentiated and gave rise to profit-seeking men of business, tax-generating states and religious orders keen to restrict abuses and enable viable subsistence economies gave rise to a complex pattern, as astonishingly changeable as the very dynamics of capitalism. The area covered runs from the interstices connecting Mesoamerica to Aridoamerica extending up through Santa Fe, in New Mexico, to the Pacific coast and the port of San Francisco. This great expanse, called Spanish North America, was the first and most dynamic capitalist region on Earth. How did this space come about, establish itself and develop as an embryo of market capitalism? How did it connect to the global economy? What commercial agency enabled its complex and diverse productive specialisation, its wealth distribution and profit absorption?

A third theme deals with trajectories of historical development and their difference from other models of prosperity. If the economy of the Spanish North America area found ways of integrating mining production and market agriculture, textile manufacture and a highly productive rural food-growing economy, the dynamism of the commercial capitalism of the Bajío tended to concentrate the profits of its regional economy and the external sector, mainly mining. The connection between the Bajío and the global market derived from the relationship between commercial profit, expressed in silver, but with its origins in the regional organisation of production. Everything indicated, then, that the ‘capitalist embryo’ of the Bajío would have the best conditions for achieving industrial prosperity, even taking into account the difficulties represented by a predatory state, monopolistic commerce and an unequal system of labour remuneration. What circumstances led it to fail?

Tutino's thesis is that the history of America, in the light of its early commercial globalisation, deserves to be rethought in terms of both its dealings with Chinese demand for silver and its relations with Europe, as has been suggested by Ruggiero Romano in his studies of money in America. If American silver promoted the development of commercial empires, the profits were not concentrated in Spain; they were not even shared out by Atlantic Europe or Geneva, but rather generated a trading and productive network that had at its centre the producer regions of precious metals, first Potosí and then Zacatecas/Guadalajuato, the latter giving rise to a highly commercialised economy, an efficient commercial administration and a dynamic market, characteristic of market capitalism. From 1550 until 1770, the process of expansion of the Bajío economy coincided with the expansion of the northern area and the connection with the expanding demand from China alongside the European effort to construct a viable economy in America. After 1770, there came a new cycle of silver absorption by the Qing dynasty, during the prosperous reign of Emperor Qianlong (1735–96). As a result of European expansion towards the Far East alongside growing Bourbon tax pressure, the silver economy of the Bajío is shown to be the fulcrum of the globalisation of trade in the second half of the eighteenth century (p. 224).

The successive waves of mining production expanded the economic spaces constituted by the early Zacatecas complex, the Guanajuato boom and the rich pickings in Fresnillo, Sombrerete, Real de Catorce and San Luis Potosí, and moved the frontier of commercial crops, stockholding, food and manufactured goods from the original Bajío mixed economy to the northern stretch, incorporating the areas of Parral and Chihuahua into rural economies that reached New Mexico and California (pp. 456–66). The division between the capitalism of Mesoamerica and that of Spanish North America saw a divergence of processes: the former was managed from Spanish cities, dominated by commercial intermediaries, with lands cultivated by towns and villages extracting resources from indigenous communities, while the profits from silver were concentrated in the hands of financiers from the capital and the commercial dynamic was limited by the resistance of the Indian republics, which required judicial mediation and conciliation on the part of the Spanish state. This was a parting of the ways in which, paradoxically, the Spanish state showed itself to be too weak to control society through its structures and so had to make do with exerting its dominion based on the trading of income in return for privileges, loyalty for concessions and ad-hoc arrangements in the face of imperfect local administrations and judicial systems – a sort of ‘derived power’, as Richard Adams has suggested.

But this was a highly unequal society, though an integrated one, marked by a growing polarisation that detached it from the model of growth and prosperity but which was expressed through a system of power axes that maintained networks of domination, consensus and social hierarchy, in terms of social relations of production, judicial and administrative negotiation, socio-technical hierarchies, patriarchal supremacy and a religious culture that sanctioned and legitimated symbolic inequalities (pp. 53–4). This subjection model, heightened by polarisation in a time of prosperity, according to Tutino, was irrevocably sundered by the revolution of 1810, which saw the previously secular trajectory come to a head: the capitalism of Spanish North America did not have a solution for continuity, remaining as a truncated pathway, cut short by the unravelling of the Spanish empire and the establishment of the new Mexican nation. It is, without doubt, a persuasive and polemical reinterpretation that withstands other readings and invites us both to rethink existing models and to hold these arguments up against the light of the available evidence.

Yet there is a systematic explanation of the relationship of mining structures with areas of regional demand, which, if we accept the research of Carlos Sempat Assadourian, constituted to a high degree the decisive component of the circulation of mining capital, which in turn had a power of command over other sectors of the economy. Models of mining exploitation, from the great centre itself to short-term workings, deserve a differentiated treatment and perhaps a more complex explanation of the networks of demand that explain the relative success of small commercial property holdings, village livestock holdings and sheep-rearing in peasant communities. Additionally, we lack explanations of the decisive factors underlying the connection with China along with an estimate of the volume of metal exports, be these direct or indirect, as set out by Ruggiero Romano.

On the other hand, it is hard to consider this capitalist North without taking account of its strong ties to intermediate economies, which were also galvanised by mining, international trade and domestic demand, and could serve to explain the convergent cycles of prosperity. Guadalajara does not merit a mention in the text, despite its control over inland trade and that of the Pacific coast, by virtue of its supply of regional products and the onward exporting of European and Chinese goods, as well as the significant trading activity around the Feria de San Juan. There is a grey area between Mesoamerican capitalism and that of Spanish North America that does not allow a clear connection with the model as it is set out: namely the way in which the domestic novohispano market engaged with the space delineated by the author. Overall, Tutino's redrawing of capitalism in the Bajío offers us a bold, controversial and thought-provoking model that improves our understanding of the truncated development of capitalism and power in Mexico. Let the debates begin.