Mexico: A History

The remarkable story of one of humankind’s most far-reaching, dynamic and brutal experiments


This superb book 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. The capture of the future Mexico City marked the collision of two long-separated worlds, radically different in everything from biota to urban planning. Spaniards discovered tomatoes, chocolate, and the most sophisticated city they had ever seen. Mexicans discovered horses, wheels, and lethal germs.

Gillingham chronicles the cataclysmic century of disease, brought from afar, that killed a majority of the indigenous population and led to a startling recombination of cultures. The industrial mining of Mexico’s silver transformed the wealth and trade of the world. Mexico’s independence from Spain went on to bring a calamitous war with the United States, one of the first great social revolutions and a one-party government that, whatever its shortcomings, brought peace for Mexicans throughout many of the global horrors of the twentieth century before the country itself collapsed into violence in the 2000s.

A pleasure to read, Mexico: A History uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often Mexico has been a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs.