These ‘seven interpretive essays on Mexican reality’ (pace Mariátegui, 1924), written over the last 30 years, offer a rare opportunity to view the intellectual development of a leading US historian of Mexico and also of the generation of Latin Americanists formed since the 1960s. This period witnessed the rise of history within area studies and the growth and professionalisation of the historical profession within post-colonial regions of study. European historiography, especially French and British, has remained an important source of inspiration for historians, but work at the ‘periphery’, combined with the erosion of disciplinary boundaries – particularly between anthropology and history – has ensured a lively exchange between historians in Europe and the United States and their counterparts in the post-colonial world. Eric Van Young, native of the twice conquered and colonised state of California, is a particularly appropriate medium for demonstrating these trends and exchanges.

Van Young's work is characterised by a zeal for theoretical reflection and a determination to allow primary sources to speak for themselves, although always under the narrator's gentle, ironic and sceptical prodding. Van Young agonises more than most of us over the value of the tribal boundaries that divide our discipline. These concerns are evident in each of the seven essays that comprise this volume, divided into four sections corresponding to stages in Van Young's evolution as a historian and his engagement with changes in the way the history of Mexico has been studied over the past 40 years. Historians of the same vintage as Van Young, such as this reviewer, will find the journey he maps – from economic, to social, to cultural, to political history – a familiar one, but few will have pondered quite so deeply on how these intellectual trends have shaped the way we study and write history. Hence, the collection offers students embarking upon primary research on Mexico and Latin America a frank and intimate autobiography of a historian and also a valuable set of object lessons.

Van Young takes us, stage by stage, from his apprenticeship under David Brading during the early 1970s to his current project to complete a biography of the Conservative statesman Lucas Alamán. Instructed to select a region (as we all were in the early 1970s, without much indication as to which), the young Californian doctoral student chose New Spain's north-west central province of Guadalajara, only to find that the available primary sources (rich notarial archives) would require him to sacrifice his preference for social history, and penchant for exploring ‘interiority’, to become an agrarian and economic historian. The result was a landmark study of the development of New Spain's most dynamic hacienda-based regional economy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Guadalajara's peculiar history has continued to shape the way that Van Young thinks about Mexico and the historian's craft.

Guadalajara's dynamism as a colonial agrarian economy not only contributed to the spectacular social and ethnic violence of Mexico's revolutions of independence, but also helps to explain the province's assertive, orthodox Catholicism that has tempered attempts by national leaders to achieve a liberal and laicising consensus throughout the republican period. This strikingly successful project of Hispanic Catholic colonisation and regional development brings Van Young back, in each essay, to the primacy of material factors in determining historical development. One wonders how different Van Young's development as a historian might have been had he chosen a region such as Oaxaca, Puebla or Yucatán, provinces that underwent less overwhelming processes of Spanish colonisation and capitalist agrarian development during the eighteenth century. In these south-eastern provinces the legacy of colonialism allowed for greater contingency and space for negotiation between rival ethnic, social and religious constituencies.

The primacy of the agrarian material factor is reflected in the first two essays, occupying a third of the book, which review the literature on the Mexican hacienda and the development of agrarian capitalism in Latin America. The second section explores the cultural turn in Anglophone writing on colonial Mexico and reviews the literature on Mexican independence, positing ideas we can expect to see developed in Van Young's forthcoming biography of Lucas Alamán. In the third section Van Young has revised a 1994 essay on regionalism in which Mexicanists are exhorted to define their regions with greater precision, an appeal for geographical rigour which will, I fear, with the onset of cultural and global history, fall for the time being on deaf ears. The second essay in the third section discusses the interpretative techniques Van Young employed in his second major research project on the basis of a single case of subaltern insurgency, which resulted in his book The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford University Press, 2001). In the single essay of the final section Van Young reflects thoughtfully on the value and hazards of the cultural turn in Mexican historiography. He shows how ruling canons vary widely according to particular national preoccupations. In Mexico, for instance, ‘subalterns’ have only recently begun to attract the attention they have long received from European and US historians, and economic history has bucked the decline it has experienced elsewhere.

This is a beautifully written and intellectually sparkling collection of essays. Van Young invites us to share his epistemological anxieties, urging scholars to be rigorous and sceptical in the interrogation of primary sources, in the selection of disciplinary boundaries and methodologies and in the consideration of the spatial context in which histories are told. Writing Mexican History will become a standard work for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates embarking upon independent research in Mexican and Latin American history.