“Tutino’s careful reconstruction of the varied, sometimes contradictory responses of the city’s oligarchs—the greatest stakeholders in New Spain’s colonial order—to silver bonanzas, devastating droughts, rural revolts, imperial wars, and fiscal crises is illuminating.”—Erika Pani, American Historical Review
“A valuable and timely contribution that helps the reader to consider the subject anew and go beyond a nationalism anchored in the nineteenth century.”—Antonio Ibarra, Journal of Latin American Studies
“Tutino meticulously reconstructs the class and economic factions that built and maintained the ‘Silver Metropolis’ (Mexico City) during the eighteenth century to set the stage for the tumultuous events of 1808.”—Jesse Zarley, Latin American Research Review
“Mexico City, 1808 provocatively reorients the history of the international order by placing Mexico’s silver economy at the center of the global economic order of the eighteenth century. Tutino brings the social and economic forces of Mexico City into the narrative of the political crisis of the Spanish monarchy in 1808 that ultimately destroyed the Spanish empire and the transatlantic networks centered on Mexico’s silver economy.”—Michael T. Ducey, author of A Nation of Villages: Riot and Rebellion in the Mexican Huasteca, 1750–1850
