Paul Gillingham: evaluation

Transcript context

…How does he get the money? What accounts for the change? What accounts for change is, first of all, the final achievement of independence. Formally, in the history books, 1821: The Spanish leave, Mexico’s independent, a new stage starts. That’s not actually true. Just in terms of the Spanish leaving, well, they don’t. They maintain a garrison on the key fortress in the main port, controlling the entrance to Mexico from the Atlantic, the port of Veracruz. The Spanish stay there until 1829, controlling it. They don’t really leave. Within two years of them finally leaving, you have a French invasion, a failed one, grand, but still an invasion, still that instability. Then you get obviously American invasions. Then you get a civil war. I’m sure we’ll go into this in a minute—my point is that it’s not until 1867 when the Mexican independence forces take a European-imposed emperor and shoot him, which is not done. You don’t shoot emperors in global history. The Mexicans do. This is a clear declaration of independence. It’s an end to other empires’ pretensions. It’s the beginning of stabilization led by a brilliantly gifted, and this is a word I would almost never use, but a brilliantly gifted politician, Porfirio Díaz, who benefits from this being a time of a global boom when the rest of the world, the industrial world, craves Mexican resources. Díaz is very savvy to ride that into a new era where Mexico becomes the epitome of a successful, what used to be called, developing nation, and it’s with that you get the infrastructure. You have Díaz, you have Juarez, the other very important 19th-century leader, and they’re both from the state of Oaxaca. Is that coincidence, it’s only two data points, or does that tell us something?…

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