Pesos and Politics extends the longstanding view that political deals were central to both the economic growth and political stability that characterized the “Porfiriato,” that late–nineteenth-century era in Mexico governed by President Porfirio Díaz from 1876 to 1911. Moreover, Wasserman extends the argument through the next thirty years—roughly ten of revolution and civil conflict, and twenty of reconstruction and reconsolidation, running to 1940. This, too, follows recent trends among at least some scholars, who have argued that the revolution, dramatic and traumatic as it was, changed the dominant system less than we might have supposed. Whatever changes the revolution wrought (and they were substantial), there was much that did not change, and at the center of this lay “an evolving elite-foreign enterprise system” (p. 181) that shaped modern Mexico. This is not an entirely novel argument, as Wasserman acknowledges, but this book effectively presents it in concise, accessible form.
The substantive chapters of the book present the main actors of this system in turn, beginning with Mexican entrepreneurs (chapter 2) and then turning to foreign business in the form of railroads (chapter 3), landowners (chapters 4 and 5), and mining corporations (chapters 6 and 7). Through these chapters, Wasserman pursues several important threads that run against views still widely accepted by historians. For example, the book argues that the Mexican state exercised considerable autonomy in its ability to control (or at least shape) the environment for foreign business (illustrated here by a nice account of the railroad consolidation), that the behaviors of Mexican and foreign businessmen and corporations differed relatively little from each other, and that foreign investment was not typically profitable, nor necessarily pernicious to Mexican interests, including (even) those of laborers. These points will not get a sympathetic hearing from some readers, but are supported by the recent work of others, and are compelling in the context of the evidence presented here.
In short, this book offers a fine overview of the now common understanding of the political economy of Mexico through this decisive long period—arguably, the formative period for modern Mexico. However, a reader using this book as a first entry into the issues should be aware of several caveats. First, the core of this argument has been long accepted by most historians, whether under the guise of Porfirian politics, científico camarillas, crony capitalism, or vertical political integration. There are some important and subtle distinctions between the ways in which historians have characterized the interrelationship of business and politics, but the core assertion has remained relatively constant. In other words, this book builds on a foundation of well-established secondary literature, fleshed out with significant new material to illustrate the components of the system.
Second, despite arguing that the book traces the elite-foreign enterprise system to local and regional as well as national levels, it focuses overwhelmingly on the biggest players in the nation, and especially in the north. The federal state, railroad corporations, a handful of landowners who controlled millions of hectares, mining companies that rivaled the largest anywhere in the Western Hemisphere—these are the exemplars for the central arguments of the book. The caveat, of course, is first that these are exactly the cases one would expect to best illustrate the interrelations between business and the state, and second that the scale of these enterprises made them outliers (as Wasserman admits). On one hand, the book argues—rightly—that this small set of gargantuan and influential enterprises were less monolithic and more complex in their impact on business, politics, and society than most historians have asserted. On the other hand, we get no glimpse here of the broad world of mid-sized and small enterprises that either long existed or were newly emerging in the fertile, if highly contested, environment of the pre- and post-revolutionary eras.
Third, it is not entirely clear whether the central argument here concerning the relationship of business and politics makes Mexico “Mexico”—that is, unique or distinct—or whether it differs only in degree or in its outward presentation from the nature of business and politics in cities, regions, and countries around the globe. After all, the institutional bases for business—the rules of the game, both formal and informal—are the product of political processes and contestations everywhere, and by definition, “elites,” both domestic and foreign, wield outsized influence in both arenas (indeed, “both” is misleading nearly everywhere, given the difficulty of identifying something “business” that is isolated from politics, or vice versa).
Fourth and finally, this is more a book about Chihuahua and Northern Mexico than about the entire country. The author knows Chihuahua and the north like no other scholar north of the border, and the archival work on which the chapters are build is drawn almost entirely from Chihuahua and the north. Some of central interpretive arguments drawn here from the northern experience are generalizable to the “Mexico” of the book’s title, but we get no direct view of the other three-quarters of Mexico.
This book will be most useful for two groups: those relatively unfamiliar with Mexico who want a clear exposition of business and politics during this era, and historians of Mexico’s dynamic north looking for more empirical detail on the business ventures pursued by both Mexicans and foreigners there.
