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John M. Hart

Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution First Edition

by John Mason Hart (Author)

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This acclaimed reinterpretation of the Mexican Revolution, based on new evidence obtained in Mexican and American archives and on the historical literature of recent years, is available here in the tenth anniversary edition, complete with a new Preface by the author.

ISBN-10

0520059956
ISBN-13

978-0520059955
Edition

First Edition
Publisher

University of California Press
Publication date

November 11, 1987
Language

English
Dimensions

6.25 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
Print length

478 pages
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Brad Rockwell

Best book on Mexican revolution?

Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2017

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Excellent book on the Mexican Revolution and the influence of Texaco and William F. Buckley's father on Mexican counter-revolution.

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The relationship between U.S. businessmen and the political groups of Mexican Revolution.

Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2019

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Really very insighting. A must read.

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irma dickinson

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2015

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iT MAKES YOU UNDERSTAND HOW THE rEVOLUTION CAME ABOUT IN AN IMPARTIAL WAY. IRMA DICKINSON

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R. Albin

Very Interesting With Defects; 3.5 Stars

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2008

This interesting book is a structural analysis of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. In Hart's analysis, the Mexican Revolution was a crisis of modernization, or perhaps more precisely, a crisis of uneven modernization. The proximate outbreak of the Revolution was widespread dissatisfaction with the regime of Porfirio Diaz that dominated Mexico for the prior 35 years. The Diaz regime pursued policies of aggressive economic modernization by opening Mexico to foreign capital investment, particularly American investment, and increasing centralization of political power. The greatest share of benefits from these policies fell primarily to a relatively narrow sector of Mexicans associated with the Diaz regime. The Diaz era policies eroded the political and economic power of regional elites, impoverished traditional artisans, accelerated the destruction of traditional peasant/communal landholidings, expanded an impoverished and politically repressed industrial proleteriat, and alienated a growing Mexican middle class who were excluded from economic and political opportunities. Up to 1900, there was sufficient economic growth that dissent never reached a critical mass. After 1900, the social dislocations were magnified by Mexico's greatly increased involvement in the turbulent international economic environment of the early 20th century. A series of international and domestic economic crises provoked widespread unrest and ultimately destroyed the legitimacy of the regime.

The ensuing Revolution, like most revolutions, became a civil war between shifting coalitions of the major groups - regional elites, industrial workers, rebellious peasant communities, and the emerging middle class - that overthrew the Diaz regime. Hart has a good analysis of the course of Revolution and how each of these groups attempted to achieve their objectives. Hart also deals with other important aspects of Revolution, such as the importance of ethnicity, particulary the role of Indian communities, and the pervasive effect of nationalism provoked by large scale American economic penetration of Mexico.

Hart is particularly concerned with exposing the important role of American investment and the US government in both the outbreak and course of the Revolution. He devotes an impressive number of pages to detailed description and analysis of American investment and exploitation of Mexico. A great deal of this investment came from Texans who were powers in the American Democratic Party, including Woodrow Wilson's important advisor, EM House. The actions of American financial interests and the US government are described as crucial determinants of the outcome of the Revolutionary Civil War with Americans acting essentially a covert kingmakers by selective provision of armaments and financial support. Hart's assessment is supported by a great deal of original archival research.

Hart has also an interesting chapter in which he places Mexico in international perspective, comparing the events of the Revolution with approximately concurrent events in Iran, Russia, and China. He makes a reasonable case for important similarities, particularly attempted revolutions provoked by expanding international capitalism.

In Hart's view, the Revolution ended with the gradual re-imposition of central government authority, defeat of the peasant insurgencies, domestication of industrial workers, reassurance of foreign investors, and an opening up of political and economic opportunities to a broader spectrum of Mexicans. This occured in the framework of an authoritarian state that carefully circumscribed political liberties, provided a great deal of patronage, and largely suppressed more radical currents in Mexican socieity.

There are significant defects in this book. A major one is the writing and organization of the book. It is rather repetitive. With better organization, this book could have been about 2/3s the length of the present book. Hart is a competent, as opposed to good writer. Probably because he unearthed some much interesting material related to American involvement in Mexico, his discussion of this (very important) issue sometimes overpowers other aspects of the book. For example, I would like to know more about how the forces of Obregon coopted Mexican industrial workers into their attacks on the peasant movements. Hart claims that industrial workers provided crucial manpower for Obrego's armies. At the crucial battle of Celaya, however, it is generally believed that Yaqui Indians from Obregon's native Sonora formed the core of his troops. Is this true? Hart suffers also from a typical historian's preoccupation with telling instead of showing. Instead of page after page of descriptions of how Americans owned huge chunks of Mexico, a few good charts or tables would have told the story. Hart made a strong effort to link the events of the Revolution with a broad swath of preceding Mexican history. Some of this seems reasonable, particularly the part dealing with peasant resistance to commercialization of agriculture. But some seems strained, not every attack on Mexican governments of the preceding 2 centuries can be linked to the phenomena that gave rise to the Revolution. Hart is sometimes sloppy in this terminology. It really doesn't seem to make much sense to speak of rural and urban working classes when the former and the latter have rather different world views.

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good overview but scope too narrow

Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2006

Professor Hart's book was written in 1989, which isn't that long ago, but the book is showing its age in that it only looks at political actors and does not spend much time analyzing the underlying economic background to the revolution.

He does have an intriguing chapter which shows the parallel revolutionary activity around the turn of the 20th century in Iran, China and Russia, as well as Mexico. Essentially, all these countries suffered from foreign control over capital availablity and resource extraction, facilitated by a complicit native oligarchy who maintained power through the rents obtained from selling off the resources to the highest bidders. That rent was then used to finance opulence instead of on the development of import substitution industries and agricultural and manufacturing sectors which would have provided jobs to the large underclasses.

Coupled with a lack of democratic safeguards by which to manifest their discontent, the bourgeois classes united with the working classes to foment revolutionary violence in all these countries.

Unfortunately, Hart spends too much time scapegoating US and European capitalists for making such inroads into Mexico's economy, instead of looking at how and why they were able to do so without much difficulty. Hart seems to follow the dependency theorist school, in which the late-industrializing countries are at the mercy of those which developed first, i.e. Britain, USA and France. This is not an incorrect assessment, but as more current research has shown in the work of such people as Doug North and Stephen Haber, this is not the whole story.

Hart also updated this work in 2002 with a new volume entitled "Empire and Revolution," which generally goes over the same territory, but looks even deeper at the damned gringos who were behind all of Mexico's misery. While I am not in complete disagreement with such an assessment, it is an oversimplification of Mexico's revolution and it is why I think that Hart's books on the subject are not aging well.

9 people found this helpful

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Ethan Barbee

Hart has a very skewed view of Mexico and it's revolution

Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2014

There was much more to the Mexican revolution that classic Marxist class struggle. But Hart refuses to see it or write about it in any other way.

I pity his unsuspecting students. Unlike me, they can't just throw the book away.

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