Mexico: A History

This sweeping new history of Mexico spans 500 dramatic years of conquest, innovation and revolution

'A one-of-a-kind book, populated by large and small characters, spanning five hundred years of conflict and resilience, all in a masterful prose and a sharp, intelligent dialogue with the reader' - Pablo Piccato, author of A Brief History of Violence in Mexico and Professor of History, Columbia University

'A rollicking and stereotype-busting tour through five centuries of Mexican history... Sweeping from the Sonoran copper mines to the rainforests of Chiapas to Mexico City’s mansions, Gillingham dissects the country's politics, ideas, and contradictions with flair. The rare book that is as entertaining as it is learned and ingeniously argued' - Deborah Cohen, author of Last Call at the Hotel Imperial and Director of the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

It begins in 1511 with the shipwreck of two Spanish sailors in Yucatán. Only ten years later, an army of European adventurers and indigenous rebels seized the island city of Tenochtitlán, seat of one of the world’s great empires. It would become Mexico City, and marked the collision of two radically different worlds. Spaniards discovered tomatoes, chocolate and the most sophisticated city they had ever seen. For Mexicans the encounter brought horses, wheels, but also lethal germs – sparking a cataclysmic century of disease that would kill a majority of the indigenous population.

Paul Gillingham’s superb history chronicles how this convulsion led to a startling recombination of cultures. He shows how the industrial mining of Mexico’s silver transformed the wealth and trade of the world, making it the centre of the first truly global economy. We then see how independence from Spain went on to bring calamitous wars with the United States and France. One of the world’s great social revolutions then remade Mexico and ushered in a one-party state that, whatever its shortcomings, brought peace throughout many of the global horrors of the twentieth century – before the country collapsed into violence in the drug wars of the 2000s.

Mexico: A History uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often Mexico has been one of the world’s great innovators; a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs.