In Search of Instability’s Roots in Mexico
A Review of Donald Steven’s Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico.” (1991)
Donald F. Stevens, Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pgs. 177.
During the Age of Revolutions, European direct imperial control over the American continent was shattered. The American, Haitian, and various Latin American Revolutions broke European power and led to the development of various nation states across the American hemisphere. Scholars of the nineteenth century have long been intrigued by subsequent state formations following these revolutions and have sought to understand how these states evolved in comparison with one another.
Scholars of nineteenth century Mexico have sought to explain why the Mexican state struggled to produce a strong and stable government in the decades following independence. Unlike the United States, Mexico was plagued by political instability, internal revolt, and high political turnover. This instability has long been laid at the feet of the “caudillos” or unscrupulous men who seized power to advance their own economic agendas that fed directly into their own pocketbooks. The “caudillo thesis” is not unique to Mexico, but it had particular longevity in Mexican historiography as scholars saw men such as Presidente Antonio de Lopez de Santa Anna to be representative of Mexican national history. Donald Stevens challenges the caudillo thesis and shifts the narrative from a biography centered approach to a larger quantitative history of Mexican political instability.
Donald Stevens, who earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1984 and currently is a professor of Latin American history at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, builds his work on the idea that a quantitative history can remove some of the more speculative and less fact based claims as to what led nineteenth century Mexico to go from one of the strongest colonies in the Spanish Empire to a weak and fractured nation state. Stevens suggests that rather than caudillismo, or the continual cycle of self-interested strong men seizing control of the Mexican state, that instability in Mexico was the result of deep ideological divisions between conservatives, moderates, and radical liberals over how to organize the new nation and exercise state power in developing the state. Rather than being strong men who relied on the economy to remain in power, Stevens suggests that Mexican leaders held deep political ideologies that influenced how they reacted to the world around them. These deeply held beliefs, influenced by a leader’s origins (birth place), political experience, and political position prior to taking power, all connect to a leader’s ideology and longevity as a head of state.
Stevens did a tremendous job in locating, analyzing, and crunching the data for countless political figures in Early Republican Mexico. Stevens notes that the caudillo thesis had such strong appeal in part because of the frequent turnover in the national government. In a period of over thirty years, more than forty different officials held executive power in Mexico, to say nothing of the near constant turnover in cabinet level positions. Stevens data does indicate that the broad categories of conservative, moderate, and radical liberal are effective place holders in describing the various political ideologies employed by Mexican elites in the early nineteenth century. Importantly, Steven’s data enables scholars to see how coalitions could form based on the ideological roots of the various factions. For example, conservatives, who often hailed from Spanish imperial centers and fought as royalists during the War of Mexican Independence, were deeply committed to a stronger central state that intervened in the economy to protect the Catholic Church and maintain the social elites. Radical Liberals also desired a strong central state that intervened in the nation, however, their end goals were not the promotion of an elite hierarchy, but rather liberty and equality and a breakdown of the Catholic Church’s power. Moderates, as suggested by their name, occupied a central zone between the two extremes, pushing for a weaker state which relied on property rights and moral suasion in order to achieve stability and prosperity. Ultimately, while each group had a range of views, Stevens suggests that these broad camps were essential to creating instability as they battled to create their own vision of a free Mexico.
While Stevens is particularly strong in showing the “hard evidence,” it felt like Steven’s hard break from biography deprived the narrative of human agency. While it was fascinating to see the regional backgrounds of various leaders, frequently Stevens reminded his readers that there was plenty of variation in the data to suggest that not all conservatives came from Mexico City or Veracruz, or that not all liberals were from the North and South extremities of Mexico. This is where biographical information is key. Often, by zooming so far out in a historical narrative, the complexity of personal ideological decision making can be obscured by the broad categories of origins, class, or other identifiers. These meta-narratives are unable to explain why some rural elites became conservative while others embraced radical liberalism. Thus, while Steven’s work provides ample data, correlation does not mean causation. Furthermore, the development of ideas over time, be they political, religious, cultural, or economic, are missing. Ultimately, change over time was neglected in favor of the broad categories of conservative, radical liberal, and moderate, with little variation shown over the forty or so year period covered in the book.
Another shortcoming in Steven’s work is the hyper-national focus of the book. As Atlantic world or globalist scholars will quickly point out, very few places in the globe operated in a vacuum in the nineteenth century. Missing from Steven’s explanation is the international context. How did events in Europe, Africa, the United States, and other Latin American nations impact the political changes occurring in Mexico? While trade is dismissed as a causal factor in the instability of Mexican politics, I wonder if by looking beyond trade to other international connections Steven’s could have better explained some of the instability in the Mexican state. By hardly connecting to the broader world around Mexico, Steven’s work traps his work within a nation-state’s boundaries, a division that does not reflect the realities of the more broadly connected world that existed in the nineteenth century.
While there are areas of weakness, Steven’s work is important in doing some of the hard work of putting quantitative structure to what had largely been based on singular examples. He does persuasive work in demonstrating that political ideals, rather than blind caudillo self interest, drove many politicians. Steven’s work suggests that deeper, more profound issues than economics and strongmen are at the heart of why instability plagued Mexico from the 1820s through the 1860s. It will be for future generations of scholars to connect the international context and the personal narratives to Stephen’s largely number driven and impersonal narrative.
Robert Swanson