Description
This paper reconstructs the reconfiguration of colonial Mexico’s final century against the backdrop of the diverging trajectories of the Bourbon Spanish (mercantilist) and British (capitalist) empires. It examines the intensifying imperial rivalry reflected in two key 18th-century geopolitical events: the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), resolved through the Treaty of Utrecht, and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), concluded with the Treaty of Paris. These events shaped distinct foreign policy strategies towards colonial territories, impacting the reconfiguration of social property relations, sovereignty, and political authority.
Using a Geopolitical Marxist framework, the chapter analyses how domestic actors in New Spain responded creatively and often unexpectedly to the Bourbon Reforms, which imperial actors designed to counter British geopolitical advances. While the scholarly consensus tends to view these reforms as facilitators of socio-political and economic modernisation, this chapter argues instead that local actors renegotiated a mercantilist polity, reasserting their status predominantly through extra-economic means of appropriation.
First, it highlights the strategic manoeuvres of Mexico City’s merchant class in response to the formal and informal influx of British goods into New Spain’s markets, leading them to diversify into hacienda expansion. Secondly, it explores the merchants’ political solidarity with the Crown, negotiating their participation in a silver-based financial network (situados) that sustained the empire while yielding political benefits. Thirdly, it examines how changes to land ownership patterns under an intensified fiscal regime triggered spatial resistances and the formation of political leaderships that are key to understand the civil war in 1810, which led to postcolonial Mexico.
