Stormy Passage: Mexico from Colony to Republic, 1750-1850

Review
This book is a wonderful, confident, readable interpretation of a period in Mexican history to which Eric Van Young has devoted his distinguished career. It could take the place of a textbook in any class on Mexican history because of its scope, even as its interpretive edges give students much to chew on and debate. It should also find an audience beyond the classroom among non-experts who are interested in Mexico. Scholars will have the greatest admiration for the depth of knowledge and the keen, mature historical sensibility that shines in every page. -- Margaret Chowning, University of California, Berkeley
Stormy Passage offers us a deeply thoughtful narrative about the enduring significance of Mexican history by one of its most committed scholars. Using the metaphors of tempests and storms, Eric Van Young addresses the dual problems of modernization and decolonization from the entwined perspectives of imperial hegemony, state formation, and the internal development of Mexican society. Organized in three parts, the book mirrors the life of statesman and historian Lucas Alamán during the crucial century of transition between colonialism and the Mexican nation, as subjects became citizens in a complex social mosaic of Indigenous peoples, Afro-Mexicans, and ethnically mixed strata of diverse economic and cultural lifeways. -- Cynthia Radding, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Elegant and incisive as ever, Eric Van Young takes his readers through the scarring wars, decapitalization, traumatic territorial loss, fiscal penury, and internal strife that marked Mexico’s century-long transition from Spanish colony to independent liberal republic. It is a magisterial narrative of a society’s struggle for an ever-elusive nationhood, political legitimacy, and internal development that rejects tired tropes of inevitable failure, corruption, and irrevocable colonial predestinations so often invoked in histories of Latin America and instead focuses on soberly analyzing what was sought and what was possible in the shadow of an expansive United States. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand the limits of decolonization in modern Mexico. -- Vera S. Candiani, Princeton University
In this engaging book, Eric Van Young traces the political, economic, and social development of Mexico through the crucial one hundred years of its remarkable transition from a relatively prosperous Spanish colony to a violently unstable republic marked by economic stagnation, political confrontation, and burgeoning efforts at modernization. Featuring primary sources from figures of the period, Van Young discusses the political instability of the period—internal warfare, military uprisings, intermittent dictatorships, sharp conflicts among political groupings—and attributes them to a belief by political actors in the fundamental lack of legitimacy in central government institutions after the sweeping away of the Bourbon imperial structure and its replacement first with a very short-lived Mexican empire followed by a series of increasingly authoritarian aspirational republican constitutions.
Book Description
Trace Mexico’s dramatic journey from colony to independent nation.