Mexican Junkers and Capitalist Haciendas, 1810–1910: The Arable Estate and the Transition to Capitalism between the Insurgency and the Revolution

Abstract

According to Barrington Moore ‘the process of modernization begins with peasant revolutions that fail’.1 Most historians of Mexico would agree that the nineteenth century opened with such an agrarian insurrection – the Insurgency – and yet it is indisputable that modernisation was a long time coming. Indeed, for many years the conventional view was that it took another such agrarian rising, the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, to finally break the ‘feudal’ hold on the countryside and usher in a belated phase of modernisation.