Douglas Richmond recounts the political history of the Yucatán using a collection of documents from the legislative and executive branches of provincial government during the years of political turmoil under the liberal ascendency from 1855 to 1876. His objective is to demonstrate the deleterious effects of liberal government on the region and its people. In recent decades historians have carved out a ‘new political history’ of the nineteenth century elucidating new connections between society, politicians and government institutions. Richmond however belongs to an older historiographical tradition that sees its duty as recounting the stream of political events and assigning blame or praise according to the merits of the different politicians.
As a prologue, the opening chapter describes the Maya and colonial systems as ones based on constant conflict and notes that the Spanish introduced new forms of ‘oppression’. Unfortunately the account does not contribute much to explain what follows and is marred by gross generalisations about the peninsula's residents; for example, the Maya ‘veneration of death and its constant presence in daily life became oppressive in terms of an inclination toward fatalism and conflict’ (p. 3).
He divides his chapters by the usual signposts of Mexican history: 1821, 1861, 1867 and 1876, but this division fails to serve his purported object of study well and points to a basic conceptual problem in the book. It is unclear if he wants to study liberalism, as the broad set of values associated with the ‘modern’ order introduced with the Constitution of 1812, or if his real object is to critique the Liberal party that came to power in 1855. All that matters is that liberalism increased the ‘oppression’ of Maya peasants and caused the Caste War. He is not interested in liberalism's evolution or how Yucatecan politicians adapted its precepts to their local needs. Liberal anti-corporate policies are driven by ideology and so Richmond misses an opportunity to explore how politicians in the 1840s under the guise of progress sought to shore up their political support by rewarding followers with ‘vacant’ lands.
When he turns his attention to post-1855 Liberal governments his criticism is relentless yet vague. He affirms: ‘Poverty increased beginning in the mid-nineteenth century often because anticlerical policies decimated the religious institutional safety net with public organisations unable or unwilling to provide charity until after 1930’ (p. 30). He faults liberal tax policies for economic stagnation, seemingly oblivious to the fiscal dilemmas faced by all nineteenth-century governments, and relies exclusively on secondary sources, some of them quite out-dated, to describe the impact of land laws. Liberal authority was illegitimate, based on fraud-ridden elections to such a degree that by the Restored Republic bayonets were the principal pillar of the government (pp. 111–13). Richmond paints a picture of liberal outrages against communities and the Church provoking resistance. The dark picture he paints of a clueless, illegitimate cabal of nutjobs raises the question: how were they able to maintain power?
Richmond proposes that the Imperial government (January 1864 to June 1867) under ‘Yucatán's finest ruler’, José Salazar Ilarregui, began to address grievances of the beleaguered peasant and ecclesiastic institutions, generating economic growth (p. 88) and general well-being. However, he notes that while Salazar adopted a friendly attitude towards the clergy, liberal policies concerning land were not reversed. His government failed to make much headway against the Maya rebels and, when the imperial order collapsed in central Mexico, its acolytes in the peninsula fared no better. More interesting is his discussion of the Yucatecans (p. 59) who promoted the French intervention revealing that order was their main motivation while the justification given for the 1862 uprising that paved the way for the French cited the government's failure to pacify the Maya ‘Speaking Cross’ rebels, the Cruzob (p. 71).
The Restored Republic heightened all of the negative liberal trends: illegitimate elections, rampant despoliation of communal lands and excessive taxation. The war against the Maya rebels continued with little success and the government was forced to demand conscripts and money from the population to sustain the war. The principal beneficiaries of the Liberal restoration were the nascent henequen estates that responded to the growing market to appropriate more communal land and subordinate Maya peasants into a harsh labour regime on the agro-industrial complexes.
The book does make a contribution by demonstrating how the Caste War ate away at the authority and the budget of the successive governments that occupied Mérida. Even the Imperial administration, which Richmond argues enjoyed genuine support in the countryside, failed to pacify the Cruzob and experienced humiliating defeat on the Eastern frontier. However, in spite of the book's promise to consider ‘Maya Revolutionaries’, Richmond treats them as a negative force that frustrated government, but offers no new insights into the movement.
Richmond revels in dismissive adjectives for his targets: they are ‘crass’, ‘awful’ and ‘vengeful’ politicians. Evidently to put to rest the charge that Mexican imperialists were unpatriotic, he relates the story of Juárez's desperate offer to sell territory to the United States in the dark days of the Three Years War. The book belongs to an earlier revisionist literature that sought to undo the cult of personality surrounding Benito Juárez promoted by generations of public education textbooks. While Don Benito is still venerated in popular memory, the historiography has moved beyond the need to poke holes in the nationalist mythology and seeks to untangle the underpinnings of Mexico's divisive politics. Richmond does not participate in that discussion; rather he dismisses political conflict as a reflection of the venality of the Yucatecan political class.
The text exhibits frequent errors and a confused understanding of causality; to cite one example, he attributes the Campeche governor's resistance to the French in 1862 to his wariness concerning Maximilian's 1864 policies against debt peonage (p. 69). At other times he makes unsupported assertions, as when he proposes that privatisations fuelled the continuing Cruzob rebellion in the late 1860s (p. 116). This is a reasonable hypothesis, but needs to be proven with evidence of where the lands were privatised and how that sustained the rebellion.
