Spanish American silver was the primary money/capital driving early commercial capitalism, with New Spain (now Mexico) the primary source in the eighteenth century. Silver was produced in diverse regional societies, everywhere sustained by families making maize. They fed themselves, urban centers, and mines that funded global trades. Popular producers sustained global capitalism while negotiating ways to maintain viable families and communities.

After 1750, England and France pressed wars aiming to access New Spain's silver. When Napoleon captured Madrid in 1808, political fractures in times of social predations led New Spain to a decade of revolution that began in 1810, cut Asian trades by 1812, broke Spain's empire after 1820--and entrenched families on the land as Mexico became a nation. A long century of change followed, different in different regions, always linked to changing ways of global capitalism. To engage scholars of Mexico and the Americas in global capitalism:

John Tutino compares historic Mesoamerican communities surrounding Mexico City with the more Hispanic Afro-indigenous peoples of the Bajío--both sustaining silver mining. Predations assaulting estate-dependent families in the Bajío led in 1810 to a revolution that broke mining and Spanish power while restoring family production on the land. while Mexico struggled to become a nation. Silver mining revived and industry began after 1830, sustained by family growers in a new silver-industrial capitalism that thrived past mid-century--until US imposition of a gold standard broke silver as capital after 1873. Capital dependency mixed with liberal assaults on family production set of a second revolution in 1910, leading to a national-industrial capitalism fed by family growers--until globalization made national industries and family cultivation impossible after 1950.

Fernando Pérez-Montesinos explores Purépecha communities in highlands west of Mexico City and south of the Bajío. The held back from the conflicts of 1810-1820, retrenched on the land during post-revolutiionary reconstructions, negotiated liberal attempts to privatize community lands through the 1870s, preserving maize-based ecologies and limiting capital accumulation. After 1890, the highlands faced a new timber capitalism tied to building a national rail network. Industrial loggers cut communal forests as accumulations soared nationwide--until the 1910 revolution halted railway construction, relieving prerssures on Purépecha communities. The threat of industrial capitalism gone, communities negotiated state intrusions in the 1920s and welcomed land distributions in the 1930s while grappling with enduring divisions rooted in pre-revolutionary times.

Louise Walker examies the lives of women and men in Mexico City through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The capital was pivotal to governance, finance, and trade. Its people, hundreds of thousands in the nineteenth century, rising millions in the twentieth, supported powers integrating national and global ways of capitalism. While rural families long kept autonomies of sustenance that grounded negotiations with the powerful, urban people faced commercial dependencies shaped by markets and paid work. Seeking limited gains, in the nineteenth century they took on debts they did not repay, in the twentieth the wrote checks they could not cover--negotiating endlessly and in diverse ways to sustain lives of commercial dependency.