The recent flurry of scholarship on the history of global capitalism has provided new perspectives on issues as wide-ranging as economic ideas, slavery, race and gender, and markets and financial institutions. But even while understanding global capitalism as a single space defined by the transnational flows of people, goods, and ideas, many scholars still treat developing countries as ancillary to the histories of the United States and Europe and largely fail to decipher the local dynamics of global economic integration. With its extensive local research, Casey Lurtz's From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico provides fresh insights into the construction of export economies and the integration of global markets.

Drawing from an impressive selection of sources regarding legal and financial transactions, surveys and maps, and labor and land disputes, Lurtz follows local actors as they built an export economy in the Soconusco, a remote coastal region in the borderlands between Mexico and Guatemala that by the 1920s had become the heart of Mexico's coffee economy. According to the author, the Soconusco defied the archetype of exploitative plantation agriculture that both elites and later scholars emphasized. By tracing what she calls the two halves to the story—the role of political elites and large landowners, and the role of smallholders, village leaders, and labor—Lurtz deftly explores an emergent export economy that took its form from a matrix of liberal ideas, national legislation, and local conditions and norms that local actors drew on to negotiate their insertion into the global coffee economy. Their actions critically shaped new legal and commercial institutions that underpinned state consolidation and global economic integration. Local actors may have slowed economic development, but they ensured popular participation in the export economy and preserved a semblance of local autonomy.

The book's innovative structure makes it particularly valuable for historians of global capitalism, export agriculture, and Latin American development. For historians of Mexico, its bold stake in the debate around obstacles to growth makes it essential. The first chapter traces the rich history of the Soconusco to lay the groundwork for understanding the region's obstacles to economic development. Each subsequent chapter explores how elites as well as local smallholders and labor navigated complex factors that hindered development, including borderlands insecurity, informal or absent institutions, weak property rights, insufficient labor, and limits on the circulation of goods and commerce. With their deep regional roots, these obstacles would require local solutions if the Soconusco were to become a coffee exporter.

A prerequisite to growth was establishing the international boundary between Guatemala and Mexico. After decades of threats and negotiation, it was finally settled in an 1882 treaty that secured the Soconusco enough to build confidence in the property titles needed to encourage coffee cultivation, while fulfilling local demands for a fluid border that allowed the movement of goods and people. Ongoing political conflicts, however, prevented the establishment of institutions needed to secure titles. Through force and compromise, the Porfirian government gradually converted local political bosses into caciques who offered loyalty and social peace in return for local autonomy. But while elites engaged in political struggles, Lurtz argues that local smallholders simply skirted politics, instead pursuing bureaucratic solutions to problems with land titles. In the process, they converted administrative institutions into vehicles for bureaucratic consolidation and the expansion of new and predictable commercial norms and institutions. The author thus shows how administrative capacity-building during the centralizing period of the late nineteenth century extended not just from federal imposition, but also from the regular use of bureaucracy by local actors. Rather than crony capitalism that takes center stage in so many studies of economic development of the period, the forging of the administrative and legal mechanisms to support an export economy took place because an array of local actors built the bureaucratic mechanisms for security, despite, not because of, local elites.

In one of the most groundbreaking chapters, Lurtz reconstructs the messy process of land privatization in the region. Local research reveals not the top-down process of privatization that stripped villages of communal lands to build large holdings and which dominates histories of the period. Instead, villagers and smallholders used privatization laws to convert communal lands into small private holdings owned by community residents and engaged in export production. They in turn limited plantation agriculture and formalized regional property institutions in a way that respected historical practice and local norms. Surveying companies and large landowners also used federal laws to pursue land. But the Soconusco's export boom, and the spaces where export agriculture flourished, rested on the success of community members in preserving their access to land, local autonomy, and trade opportunities. Similarly, Lurtz brilliantly analyzes how a scarce labor force slowed efforts to replicate the coercive labor relations that dominated in other export sectors. By dismantling the monolith of debt peonage, she demonstrates the importance of local research in showing the diverse labor forms that constituted global capitalism. The author concludes with a detailed examination of local trade and finance, showing how both local social networks along with liberal civil and commercial codes built credit markets and durable financial and commercial institutions. Everyday forms of credit predominated because they responded in flexible ways to local needs while adhering to international commercial norms. Liberal ideas about contract law and private property, therefore, were not imposed from without, but were enshrined in local practice by local merchants and smallholders.

From the Grounds Up provides compelling new perspectives on the multidirectional dynamics of global economic integration, as well as on nation-state formation. Clear and eloquent, the only quibble is that this eloquence comes occasionally at the expense of specificity, though extensive footnotes make up for this. Regardless, by showing how “frontiers of production slowly turned toward global markets,” Lurtz demonstrates how the broader forms of the Atlantic economy were determined by local actors in distant lands such as the Soconusco (p. 43).