Mexico: A History

by Paul Gillingham

This sweeping new history of Mexico spans 500 dramatic years of conquest, innovation and revolution


'Magisterial... This fine account does well to remind that the best history is about fact, not fiction' - Peter Frankopan, The Telegraph
It begins in 1511 with the shipwreck of two Spanish sailors in Yucatán. Only ten years later, an army of European adventurers and indigenous rebels seized the island city of Tenochtitlán, seat of one of the world’s great empires. It would become Mexico City, and marked the collision of two radically different worlds. Spaniards discovered tomatoes, chocolate and the most sophisticated city they had ever seen. For Mexicans the encounter brought horses, wheels, but also lethal germs – sparking a cataclysmic century of disease that would kill a majority of the indigenous population.

Paul Gillingham’s superb history chronicles how this convulsion led to a startling recombination of cultures. He shows how the industrial mining of Mexico’s silver transformed the wealth and trade of the world, making it the centre of the first truly global economy. We then see how independence from Spain went on to bring calamitous wars with the United States and France. One of the world’s great social revolutions then remade Mexico and ushered in a one-party state that, whatever its shortcomings, brought peace throughout many of the global horrors of the twentieth century – before the country collapsed into violence in the drug wars of the 2000s.

A History uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often Mexico has been one of the world’s great innovators; a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs.

727 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 13, 2025

Reviews

[History Today]

‘The history of any country is full of caveats and unknowns, and Mexico’s are unusually full of history.’ Thus concludes one of the best recent area studies of Mexico, covering half a millennium, from Aztec domination via three centuries of Spanish imperialism to revolution and independence. Paul Gillingham writes as engagingly as the celebrated Mexican columnist Armando Fuentes Aguirre (‘Catón’), but with the rigour of Hugh Thomas’ Cuba or John Lynch’s Bolívar. By contrast, eschewing conventional chronology, Pablo Piccato focuses on Mexico’s 20th century, finding violence ‘everywhere’. He sees Mexican history through a binary of oppressor/oppressed, and offers insights informed by sociology, criminology, and political science.

Both books are written with anglophone readers in mind. Comparisons are frequently drawn to the United States (and sometimes to Britain), and both prologue the contemporary ‘black legend’ view of Mexico as a source of narco violence. Both historians stress Mexico’s unequal relationship with its northern neighbour, with good reason. As the vice president of a US thinktank commented in a foreword to a book on American ambassadors to Mexico in 2013: ‘Few relationships, if any, matter more to the United States than Mexico … although it is a relationship fraught with historical conflict, significant economic disparities, and a persistent cultural divide.’ The varying paternalism and abuse handed down by Washington has, in turn, been meted out by the Mexican elites towards the country’s people. As Piccato put it in a recent interview: ‘The [Mexican] state has never had the legitimate monopoly on the use of force. Violence can be used by many actors, non-state ones, with a certain degree of legitimacy.’ Thus Mexico has been uniquely prone to polycratic and regionalised power structures which have both oppressed and emancipated populations themselves divided by caste and class. Despite this, the country has developed a powerful and internationally recognisable national culture.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Mark Lawrence is a Senior Lecturer in Military History at the University of Kent and the author of British Relations with Mexico since the Colonial Era (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

[Nicholas Bates · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book enlightening on the history of Mexico, but I thought it was rather patchy in the style of writing. I am trying to work out if the subject at times did not hold my attention or whether the writer had good days and off days when writing the book. His portraits of the outstanding characters such as Porfirio Diaz were compelling but then,at times, he digressed to give us an overlong account of matters whose impact on Mexican history were slight. The last chapter on drugs was an example of such a digression with as much emphasis on drugs in the United States as in Mexico. In fact the chapter on drugs could well be the basis of a book in itself especially bearing in mind the current policies of the American administration.
I would not wish to put anyone off reading the book as the subject matter is fascinating especially to readers like me whose knowledge of the subject was minimal before reading the book.

[Chelsea Knowles]

DNF at 29%. I tried this from 08/09/2025 to 18/09/2025. This has a lot of information but I just lost interest in this and wasn’t really following it. I kept zoning out and it’s just not the right time to read this.