Books by Eric Van Young

In this engaging work, 2002 Bolton-Jonhson Prize Winner Eric Van Young captures the crucial hundred years of Mexico's remarkable transition from a Spanish colony to a modernized, independent nation.

This book argues that in addition to being a war of national liberation, Mexico's movement toward independence from Spain was also an internal war pitting classes and ethnic groups against each other, an intensely localized struggle by rural people, especially Indians, for the preservation of their communities.

Explores 150 years of Mexico's economic and rural development, a period when one of history's great empires was trying to extract more resources from its most important colony, and when an arguably capitalist economy was both expanding and taking deeper root.

Written over a 25-year span, these essays explore the ways in which the rural, regional, political, and cultural history of colonial and nineteenth-century Mexico has been approached by scholars.