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Book Review
Comparative/World
| John Mason Hart. Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 677. $39.95.
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John Mason Hart's in-depth study of the role of U.S. individuals,
small businesses, and huge corporations in the economy of Mexico
is a major contribution to our understanding of the history of both
countries. He begins his story with the years immediately following
the U.S. Civil War, when U.S. pressure combined with the guerrilla
efforts of Mexican President Benito Juárez led to the withdrawal
from Mexico of the French, who had sought to establish an emperor
there. U.S. capital began to flow into Mexico, and its importance
was established during the regime of Porfirio Díaz. The growth
of US economic power in Mexico was arrested and pushed back during
the violent years of the Mexican Revolution and the period of institutionalization
that followed, 1910–1940, in which Mexican regimes struggled
to regain sovereignty over land and natural resources. Between 1940
and 2000, US and Mexican representatives interacted in constant
renegotiations of these economic relationships, as US significance
in the Mexican economy began to grow again. Hart shows clearly that
this process was highly political, far from transparent, and dependent
not only on local conditions but also on global forces.
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Significant US involvement actually
began with the help that the US government and private citizens
provided to Juárez. After the French departed, major figures
such as Ulysses S. Grant, himself a veteran of not only the Civil
War but also the U.S.-Mexican War, took a great interest in the
country to the south. Land privatizations, affecting the peasantry
and the Roman Catholic Church, were instituted by the Juárez
government and greatly aided the process of expanding US influence
in the countryside. By 1876, American interests were ready to support
their own candidate for Mexican political power, and their choice
was Díaz. His regime was good to US investors; capital poured
in, and financial players such as J. P. Morgan, James Stillman,
and George Baker, known as "the Trio," became important in US investments
in Mexico. By 1910, US capital had stimulated the development of
communications and transportation in every area from railroads and
highways to the telegraph; US interests had acquired important mining
operations and were involved in the beginnings of oil operations;
US citizens and corporations owned huge tracts of land. However,
the Mexican labor involved in the operations of these businesses
was paid little compared with the huge profits being realized, and
this disparity was a factor in the enormous political upheaval that
would shortly follow.
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Hart shows clearly that the Mexican
Revolution led to "a broad-based cultural, political, and nationalist
rejection of the political elites in the nation's capital, the great
estate owners, and the foreign capitalists—for the most part,
Americans" (p. 271). Despite Mexican concerns about US intervention,
post-1917 governments immediately set about the task of regaining
national control over natural resources, although, particularly
under President Venustiano Carranza, the labor movement and land
reform made little headway. At the same time, US financial leaders,
taking advantage of the circumstances of World War I, developed
a global reach that was extraordinary. For Mexico, close to home
for the Americans, the struggle to assert its sovereignty would
not be easy.
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